Affirmative Action. The term “affirmative action” first appeared in a legislative context in the 1935
National Labor Relations Act and was later written into state laws prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. But the phrase, implying simply that government agencies should try to prevent discrimination against
African Americans, initially attracted little notice. Prior to the 1960s, virtually no one saw affirmative action as a way of giving minorities preferential treatment in hiring, promotions, and admissions.
More than anything else, the
civil rights movement helped change the meaning of affirmative action. In 1964, after years of black protest, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which among other things created new agencies run by officials eager to bring minorities into the mainstream of American life. By 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the legal barriers to integration began to crumble and government and civil rights leaders began to confront a new, more difficult issue: how to give underprivileged minorities a fair shot at economic and social equality.
One answer was affirmative action. In 1965 President Lyndon B.
Johnson issued an executive order establishing the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, began requiring companies for the first time to set numerical racial hiring goals. The trend toward quotas, goals, and timetables continued into the late sixties, as the Richard M.
Nixon administration supported this new, more radical interpretation of affirmative action.
The nation's major institutions, under pressure from consumers, employees, students, and federal bureaucrats, and aware of recent U.S.
Supreme Court decisions supporting race and gender preferences, quickly began devising their own affirmative action programs. By 1978, when the Supreme Court ruled in
Bakke v. University of California that universities could use race as a plus factor in admissions, affirmative action had become deeply entrenched in American society.
By the late twentieth century, affirmative action had become a source of great controversy. Opponents tended to see racial preferences as unjust—an unfair government program that exacerbated an already large racial divide, harming whites while stigmatizing blacks as needing preferential treatment. Opponents also contended that affirmative action mainly aided more privileged African Americans and did little to help poor blacks.
In the 1990s,
Republican party politicians and activists lobbied hard against affirmative action, helping pass Proposition 209, a 1996 California initiative to abolish racial and gender preferences, and backing the Regents of the University of California who in 1995 voted to end affirmative action in hiring and admissions. That same year, President Bill
Clinton tried to stake out a middle ground on the issue, arguing that affirmative action was a flawed though necessary response to centuries of discrimination against women, blacks, and other groups.
Many in the civil rights community went further in their defense of affirmative action, arguing that white males still held a disproportionate number of powerful positions in society, and that laws and programs mandating preferences were one way to combat that imbalance. These supporters also argued that
racism and sexism were still rampant, and that affirmative action was a small but just part of national social policy.
The Supreme Court addressed the issue in two important 2003 cases involving the University of Michigan, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. On one hand, the high court by a 5–4 vote upheld the Michigan law school's admissions policy, which took race and ethnicity into consideration without using hard‐and‐fast quotas. On the other hand, the justices, 6–3, found that Michigan's undergraduate‐admissions system, favoring African‐Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians through an automatic point system, violated the equal‐protection clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment. The
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hailed the rulings as “a strong endorsement of the constitutionality of affirmative action with the proviso that institutions have to … structure these programs the right way.”
See also
Civil Rights Legislation;
Post–Cold War Era;
Sixties, The.
Bibliography
Hugh Davis Graham , The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972, 1990.
Steven M. Cahn, ed., The Affirmative Action Debate, 1995.
Matthew Dallek
; Updated by
Paul S. Boyer
