¶ … fighting racial discrimination, suffering through state-sanctioned violence -- seeing hundreds of Southern black places of worship set fire to as well as scores of citizens murdered or beaten for daring to contest American apartheid -- the achievements of the civil rights movement encountered a climactic and decisive success. When President at the time, Lyndon Baines Johnson signed and put into effect, the Voting Rights Act (08/06/1965 it showed the United States and the world that equality could be achieved. It was the result of a brilliant moment in the morality of man, professed the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Within two short years, the United States did more to progress equal rights for minorities versus the time when former President Abraham Lincoln signed the now famous Emancipation Proclamation. Black Americans have endured so much in order to have some semblance of equality. Ira Katznelson discusses this struggle and the time when white Americans were given programs that were similar to affirmative action for black Americans today. With the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the South's segregation laws were struck down. This meant employment discrimination became outlawed. Discrimination in federal programs was also forbidden. For black Americans that lived in the South, voting rights law at last protected their right to the ballot box. President Johnson started a far-reaching new government policy named affirmative action. The policy's purpose was to balance and overcome at least a portion of the accrued human damage produced by three and a half centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, as well as ensure further advancement toward equality. Affirmative action now is used to generate this balance.

Benefiting from that "shining moment" in the 1960's, a black middle class has prospered and grown rapidly. Yet millions of African-Americans remain mired in poverty in a nation bitterly divided over whether special help to minorities should continue. Affirmative action programs have long been under siege, vigorously attacked in Congress and the federal courts and criticized for "discriminating" against...

With conservatives dominating the federal government, civil rights groups and other liberal organizations have waged a mostly defensive battle to protect the gains of the 1960's. Fresh ideas and effective leadership to advance the American ideals of equality and social justice have been in short supply. Affirmative action was one of those fresh ideas that is losing ground.
Ira Katznelson is a Ruggles professor specializing in history and political science at Columbia University. He enters this quarrel with a stimulating book, When Affirmative Action Was White, which seeks to deliver readers an extensive historical rationalization for continuing the well-known affirmative action programs. Although today's request for removal of affirmative action programs goes against Katznelson's book, it may be vital for these kinds of programs to remain. Katznelson's main focus is on the vast social programs of the New Deal made by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman's own Fair Deal that existed in the 1930's and 1940's. The author argues that those programs discriminated against blacks. They also actually added to broadening the gap among black and white Americans. Judged in relation to attainment of higher income, educational achievement and quality of jobs and housing. Contending for the requirement of affirmative action now, Katznelson vies that policy makers as well as the judiciary earlier failed to contemplate just how unlawfully blacks were treated in the three decades prior to the 1960's civil rights movement by the federal government. Blacks are still treated unlawfully now with a large percentage of the prison population black.

This history has been recounted several times before. However, Katznelson provides an all-pervading new examination, supported by vivid statistics and examples. He scrutinizes closely how federal government discrimination against black citizens prevailed as it generated and directed the sweeping social programs that delivered the vital structure for a secure and vibrant American middle class. Thought of as radical in the period, the new legislation encompassed…