The Decades-long Fight to Dismantle Affirmative Action

A professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In a historic commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson laid out the intellectual and moral basis for affirmative action. Speaking less than a year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and two months before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, he invoked a metaphor that remains resonant nearly 60 years later: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Heeding Johnson’s call and responding to the demands of the civil rights movement for racial justice, many selective colleges and universities altered their admissions policies with the express intent of increasing the number of Black students.

The need for change was undeniable: As late as 1960, just 15 students (0.5 percent) of the combined entering classes at Harvard, Yale and Princeton were Black. At the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine, which, like other University

of California institutions, followed an official policy of colorblindness, not a single Black person was among the 764 students who received M.D.S from 1955 to 1968. Among people in the legal profession as a whole, including graduates of the five historically Black law schools, fewer than 1 percent were Black in 1968.

Affirmative action offered a way to take into account far-reaching differences in personal circumstances and to begin to right a historic wrong.

After a brief honeymoon of public support, affirmative action was met with a powerful backlash, and the policy has been under attack ever since. Decades of lawsuits and legislation have chipped away at the use of racial preferences. And now, in a 6-to-3 decision, the Supreme Court has consigned them to the grave. The intensity and duration of the attack is sad confirmation that many Americans remain unwilling to reckon with the barbarity of our racial history.

In response to Reconstruction, Southern white people developed an entirely new and mythical history of slavery, the Civil War and ultimately Reconstruction. More than a century later, this insistence on denying history lives on. Witness the laws in a growing number of conservative states that prohibit teaching the truth about racial oppression, with dismissal and possibly even jail for teachers who dare to defy them.

Affirmative action was at best a modest form of recompense for centuries of exploitation and exclusion — far short of the reparations favored by more than three in four Black Americans. But it produced important gains: greater Black representation in elite colleges and professional schools, a growing African American middle class and more members of minorities in positions of leadership in key institutions.

Affirmative action based on economic class is likely to enjoy broader public support than race-conscious affirmative action; according to a recent Washington Post poll, 62 percent of Americans believe that students from low-income families have an unfair disadvantage in getting into a good college.

But affirmative action on its own, whether based on race or economic class, is far too limited a tool to realize the dream of the great civil rights movement of the 1960s for full racial equality. As we confront a world without race-conscious affirmative action, we would do well to remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition that to produce real equality, “the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society.”

From early on, race-based admissions to colleges have provoked strong opposition.