Founded in 1970, the Unified Concerned Citizens of America was an umbrella organization for groups--including The Silent Majority and Save Our Schools--opposed to busing public school students as a desegregation measure. Although busing on a limited scale was implemented prior to 1970, the October 1971 rally advertised on this flyer seems likely to have been conceived in response the Supreme Court’ s March 1971 decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which demanded the more immediate enactment of measures such as busing by school districts that were required to desegregate.
Although most of the information in this flyer was typed, the occasional use of handwritten comments suggests a personal touch meant to invoke the idea that the UCCA was a grassroots movement. The combination of handwritten additions and multi-colored paper is evocative of a school child’s art project--a folksy presentation well-pitched to the imagined attendees of an anti-busing rally, and similar to the imagery utilized by groups promoting other school-related conservative causes.
