Though he was hardly free of racial prejudice, Harry Truman gets his due in this history, both for the content of his character and for his exceptional political courage in desegregating the armed forces and the federal government (and provoking Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat revolt from the Democratic Party in 1948, a campaign still recalled fondly by certain prominent Southerners). Still, progress was glacial, even measured by the very slowest glaciers on the globe: Though the federal government had hired African-American employees and soldiers in unprecedented numbers (by 1962 African-Americans were 13 percent of the federal workforce, 20 percent of the post office and a third of the General Services Administration), and though the Supreme Court had delivered its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, most of the country was still partying like it was 1899. In 1963, Ebony magazine noted, "two of 3,500 apprentices in all trades in Newark are Negro and in Chicago, where a quarter of the population is Negro, the apprentice figure is less than 1 percent." In 1964, in Holly Bluff, Mississippi, school officials spent $190 for every white student and $1.26 (note the decimal point) for every black one. As Anderson sums up, the pace of black hiring in the 1950s meant that "minorities could not expect jobs proportionate to their percentage of the population...among business managers and owners until 2730." As Satchel Paige might have said, don't look back--some glacier might be gaining on you.

That was the world in which the 1964 Civil Rights Act intervened; that was the world changed by JFK's creation of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, Congress's passage of the Voting Rights Act and LBJ's executive order 11246, which dictated that "the contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." Up to this point, affirmative action is simply a matter of chipping away at the ossified and obsessive American version of apartheid. "But then," Anderson writes, "the next question: If the government had outlawed discrimination against African Americans, how could it encourage, even demand, that employers begin hiring a race that traditionally had suffered discrimination?"

From that question, Anderson takes us on what is by now a familiar bumpy ride, past Nixon's "goals and timetables" and the controversial "Philadelphia Plan" to integrate trade unions and the municipal civil services. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) establishes the principle of "disparate impact" under Title VII; minority "set-asides" are created by the Nixon-era US Small Business Administration Section 8(a). These are followed by the mid-1970s backlash, the era of Nathan Glazer's Affirmative Discrimination and the American Federation of Teachers and B'nai B'rith amicus briefs for Allan Bakke. Meanwhile, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission grows teeth, issues new regulations for the hiring of women and wins back pay for race and gender discrimination at AT&T and Bethlehem Steel. In 1981 Reagan takes office with an all-white Cabinet save for Samuel Pierce, the black Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, whom the President often fails to recognize and who rarely shows up for his job; the EEOC entertains a handful of preposterous cases, filed by genuine troublemakers and incompetents; minority set-asides are abused by front organizations, Cuban émigrés, wealthy immigrants and well-connected white women. Then comes the first wave of affirmative action layoffs, as white civil servants with twenty years' seniority are canned while recently hired blacks and Latinos are spared; by 1989, Griggs--and the principle of "disparate impact"--is overturned by the Supreme Court, and in 1991 Congress passes a new Civil Rights Act and the Senate confirms Justice Clarence Thomas. Four years later Bill Clinton says, "mend it, don't end it" after conducting an extensive review of all federal programs, and set-asides are eliminated by Adarand v. Peña. California and Washington pass state referendums abolishing affirmative action, students and conservative organizations file suits against the Universities of Texas and Michigan, and finally we reach the present, still trying to understand what remains of the righteous social crusade launched sixty years ago.

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