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3. The Career of Affirmative Action in Employment
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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39 Chapter Three Q The Career of Affirmative Action in Employment Prologue The antidiscrimination ferment of the 1950s and 1960s sparked a radical shift in national policy, for which the modern civil rights movement deserves a lion’s share of credit. During the nineteenth century, American blacks generally refrained from organized civil resistance, preferring to cultivate various strategies of accommodation with the white majority. An example is Booker T. Washington’s “self-help” regimen through vocational education and entrepreneurship.1 The modern movement began early in the twentieth century with a period of interracial lobbying, litigation, and public advocacy. The flagship of this phase was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed in 1910 to combat Jim Crow. Its Legal Defense Fund scored notable antisegregation victories in the 1930s and 1940s, then planned and won the legendary antisegregation Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.2 This period also witnessed the beginnings of presidential antidiscrimination politics conducted through executive order. To avert threatened black demonstrations during the labor crisis of World War II, President Roosevelt proclaimed a new policy of nondiscrimination in federal employment and defense contracting, to be administered by a Fair Employment Practice Commission (FEPC).3 Black protests over military segregation and exclusion from the phenomenal post-World War II boom drove President Truman to desegregate the armed forces in 1948, and brought about the creation of numerous state and local FEPCs.4 The African-American civil rights movement became part of the Washington “Beltway” establishment in 1949 with the formation of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a permanent, Washington-based coalition of 40 Affirmative Action in Antidiscrimination Law and Policy civil rights and labor activists.5 These were the “little acorns” of modern civil rights reform. The second phase of this civil rights movement was outright black insurgency , waged as Gandhiesque nonviolent civil disobedience. This was a war of protest against the iron grip of Jim Crow in the South. After the celebrated 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the tactics in this war ranged from “freedom rides,” voter registration drives, and “sit-ins” to massive public demonstrations in the South’s major cities. Often, these were met with savage attacks by some local police, countless arrests and jail sentences, church burnings, assassinations, and race riots in the North as well as in the South. By design, or otherwise, these protests dramatized the absurdity and inhumanity of racial discrimination, and the imperative need for federal intervention . In 1963, they culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s bloody confrontation with the Birmingham, Alabama, police, followed by his storied march on Washington and “I Have a Dream” oration.6 The Shift in National Policy In March, 1961, President Kennedy issued an Executive Order directing federal contractors to refrain from discrimination, and to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated . . . without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”7 In June, 1963, in the wake of King’s Birmingham march, Kennedy filed a bill to prohibit racial discrimination in public accommodations, education, voting, federally funded programs, and to establish a Community Relations Service for the purpose of mediating racial disputes. During hearings in the House, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights secured insertion of a ban on employment discrimination.8 At that point, the campaign for equal employment opportunity legislation became the focus of the drive for civil rights reform.9 Congressional hearings on the bill lasted for more than a year, the longest such period in our history. On July 2, 1964, under President Johnson, it was enacted as the Civil Rights Act of 196410 (CRA 1964) effective July 2, 1965, its Title VII provisions regarding equal employment opportunity to be administered by a newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).11 This was our first comprehensive legislative attack on the scourge of racism in the twentieth century.12 By August, 1965, the pace of reform accelerated dramatically. In that month, following on the effective date of the new 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress enacted a Voting Rights Act (VRA) that LBJ had filed only five months earlier. The Act13 prohibited race or color-based denial of voting rights, and invalidated literacy, character, or educational tests, particularly in the South as preconditions for voting—an early example of remedial affirmative [44.192.247.185] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:31 GMT) The Career of Affirmative Action in Employment 41 action meant...