During the 1960s the Kennedy
administration devised a strategy to increase employment opportunities for
minorities they called affirmative action. Originally affirmative action
required contractors doing business with the federal government to take
positive steps to insure that employees were not discriminated against because
of race, creed, color, or national origin.
Later, President Johnson
argued that fairness demanded affirmative action to compensate for past racial
injustice and discrimination. His Executive Order 11246 signed in 1965
augmented the Civil Rights Act of 1964, committing the federal government to
seek not 'just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and
equality as a result.' Two years later, Johnson broadened his order to embrace
gender equality as well. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the public and
private sectors devised plans to increase the racial and gender diversity in
work places and classrooms to bring blacks into jobs and schools where they had
previously been denied admission.
By the late 1970s, the
concept of affirmative action in higher education was challenged in the Supreme
Court by Allan Bakke, a white student who had been denied admission to Davis
Medical School at the University of California. Bakke charged that he had been
the subject of 'reverse discrimination' because black students with lower
academic credentials had been admitted to the school. Advocates of affirmative
action pointed to the number of white students with academic records inferior
to Bakke's who had been admitted to the school under so-called legacy
admissions provided to the children of alumni. They argued that the university
often considered factors other than grades in its admissions decisions. The
Court ignored these arguments and ordered Bakke admitted. However, the Court
upheld the concept of affirmative action, ruling that race could be considered
in admissions in the interest of creating a racially diverse student body.
One year later the Court
ruled that labor unions and businesses could design special programs aimed at
helping blacks get jobs and promotions where it was shown that there had been
'manifest racial imbalance.' In 1980 the Court approved Congress's right to
impose goals for minority representation as a means for increasing the number
of minority and female contractors doing business with the federal government
and to counteract past discrimination.
In the more conservative
political atmosphere of the 1980s, the federal government shifted its stand on
affirmative action and the protection of civil rights won in the 1960s. Under
the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the Justice Department announced
in 1981 that it would no longer require federal contractors to maintain
affirmative action programs, nor would it enforce busing as a means of
correcting discrimination in public education.
The Supreme Court continued
to send mixed signals. In 1985 it declared that affirmative action programs
designed to bring more minorities and women into state employment were
constitutional. But, by the end of the decade, it had ruled against Richmond,
Virginia's 'set aside program' designed to reserve 30 percent of the city's
public work for minority contractors. It had not, however, specifically
outlawed affirmative action programs as a method to redress past racial
inequities.
Throughout the 1990s,
affirmative action remained one of the nation's most divisive racial issues.
Some people continued to see it as reverse discrimination and used the language
of the civil rights movement to condemn the use of racial or gender
preferences. California voters rejected the affirmative action programs that
had helped integrate the state's university system. The state of Washington
passed a similar initiative. Affirmative action plans in other states and in
private industry were also attacked severely.
In 2003 the administration
of President George W. Bush presented arguments before the Supreme Court in
support of lawsuits that sought to end affirmative action programs at the
University of Michigan. The Court, however, rejected the arguments and
reaffirmed the goal of racial diversity in higher education. In its first major
decision on affirmative action since the 1978 Bakke decision, the Court
upheld an affirmative action program at the University of Michigan Law School,
which considered race as one of many factors in selecting applicants. Although
the ruling restated the diversity principle, the Court’s majority opinion in Grutter
v. Bollinger also noted that a permanent justification for racial
preferences should not be enshrined. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the
opinion, called for a reevaluation of the need for affirmative action in 25 years.
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