When Affirmative Action Was White: Race, Policy, and Inequality

The Civil Rights Movement and the Promise of Equality

After fighting racial discrimination and suffering through state-sanctioned violence — witnessing hundreds of Southern Black places of worship set on fire, and scores of citizens murdered or beaten for daring to contest American apartheid — the achievements of the civil rights movement reached a climactic and decisive success. When President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, it demonstrated to the United States and the world that equality could be achieved. It was the result of a brilliant moment in the morality of man, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed. Within two short years, the United States did more to advance equal rights for minorities than in all the time since President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Black Americans had endured so much in order to attain some semblance of equality. Ira Katznelson examines this struggle and the era when white Americans were given programs that bear a striking resemblance to the affirmative action policies debated for Black Americans today.

With the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the South's segregation laws were struck down, outlawing employment discrimination and forbidding discrimination in federal programs. For Black Americans living in the South, voting rights law at last protected their right to the ballot box. President Johnson launched a far-reaching new government policy named affirmative action. The policy's purpose was to balance and overcome at least a portion of the accumulated human damage produced by three and a half centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, and to ensure further advancement toward equality. Affirmative action programs continue to serve that function today.

Katznelson's Argument for Affirmative Action

Benefiting from that defining moment of the 1960s, 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 assistance to minorities should continue. Affirmative action programs have long been under siege, vigorously attacked in Congress and the federal courts and criticized for allegedly discriminating against the white majority. 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 1960s. 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, and it is losing ground.

Ira Katznelson, a Ruggles Professor specializing in history and political science, enters this debate with a stimulating book, When Affirmative Action Was White, which seeks to provide readers with a thorough historical justification for continuing established affirmative action programs. Although contemporary calls for the removal of affirmative action run counter to Katznelson's argument, his case suggests it may be vital for these programs to remain. Katznelson's central focus is on the vast social programs of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal, which spanned the 1930s and 1940s. He argues that those programs discriminated against Black Americans and actually widened the gap between Black and white Americans — measured in terms of income, educational achievement, and quality of employment and housing. Contending for the necessity of affirmative action today, Katznelson maintains that policymakers and the judiciary previously failed to reckon with just how systematically Black Americans were mistreated by the federal government during the three decades prior to the 1960s civil rights movement. He also observes that Black Americans continue to face disproportionate harm, as evidenced by their overrepresentation in the prison population.

How New Deal Programs Excluded Black Americans

This history has been recounted before, but Katznelson provides a comprehensive new examination, supported by vivid statistics and examples. He scrutinizes closely how federal government discrimination against Black citizens persisted even as the government created and administered sweeping social programs that built the essential foundation for a secure and prosperous American middle class. Considered radical at the time, the new legislation encompassed the Social Security system, the minimum wage, unemployment compensation, protection of workers' rights to join labor unions, and the G.I. Bill of Rights. Affirmative action legislation would later be regarded as equally radical.

While Black Americans benefited to some degree from several of these programs, Katznelson demonstrates why and how they received far less support than white Americans did. He documents the political process by which powerful Southern Congressional leaders shaped the programs in discriminatory ways — as the price of their support. One striking example is a Black newspaper editorial that condemned President Roosevelt for excluding from the minimum wage law the Black women who labored long hours for as little as $4.50 per week at the resort he frequented in Warm Springs, Georgia. During this period, most Black workers were employed in agriculture or as domestic household workers. Key members of Congress from the Deep South insisted that those occupations be excluded from the minimum wage law, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and workers' compensation. After labor unions achieved early victories organizing Southern factory workers following World War II, Southern Congressional leaders sponsored legislation to undermine those efforts. Southerners' principal aim, Katznelson argues, was to defend and maintain the racist social and economic order known as the Southern "way of life." This impulse, he suggests, resonates in some contemporary opposition to affirmative action in the United States.

Works Cited

Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Print.