One, on the unknown history of affirmative action for White people, was written by Leslie T. Fenwick, the author of the award-winning and best-selling book “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip” and a finalist for the position of U.S. education secretary in the Biden administration. She is dean emerita and professor of education policy at Howard University, and a former Harvard University visiting fellow and visiting scholar.
The second, which follows hers, is about Black exemplars in the affirmative action story and written by H. Patrick Swygert, a professor of law at the Howard University School of Law and president emeritus of Howard University and the State University of New York at Albany. Fenwick and Swygert are married.
The scholarly, media and everyday narrative about affirmative action focuses on the debate around leveling the playing field for Black people in an attempt to remedy institutional racism and historical prohibitions against them from educational and employment opportunities in the United States. However, this narrative hides an untold history that illuminates another reality.
In the 1954 groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education decision, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools. Before 1954 (and even nearly 25 years after, due to massive resistance to the new law), state statutes and citizens’ public tax dollars supported racial segregation, not only in public K-12 schools, but also in public colleges’ and universities’ undergraduate and graduate programs, and in professional school programs including in law, medicine and dentistry.
Seventeen border and southern states (as far north as Delaware, down the rest of the East Coast and as far west as Texas) had state laws prohibiting qualified Black people from attending public and private colleges and universities with White students — even when those colleges and universities were public and supported by Black and White citizens’ tax dollars.
This racial apartheid practice denied Black Americans their rights under the 14th Amendment, which granted legal and civil rights previously denied to Black and enslaved people. Though the 17 border and southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia) operated racially segregated education systems by state law, other states such as California and Ohio operated racially segregated schools, too, via locally crafted municipal codes and customs. In all, 33 states had laws or customs that prevented White and Black students from being educated together.
As I document in my book “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip,” states recorded in their statutes, laws and budgets their commitment to racial segregation and their outlawing of qualified Black people from attending public colleges and universities. The language of these statutes was common. To this end, state legislatures created “Negro tuition scholarships” in an attempt to skirt the 14th Amendment rights of Black people and maintain their segregationist hold on public colleges and universities.
These “Negro tuition scholarships” were a segregationist tool. They were designed to maintain the states’ mandatory exclusion of Black students from undergraduate and graduate programs in public colleges and universities. This was able to happen because racial discrimination in state laws, violence and intimidation resulted in few Black people being registered to vote in border and southern states. With Black citizens denied their most basic right in a democracy — the right to vote — White people maintained control over all state and local elected and appointed offices, policy formulations and implementation, and state budget allocations and expenditures.
Many states used the exact same wording in the laws that codified the “Negro scholarships.” Maryland and Texas are one example of this. In 1938, Maryland’s state statute stated that the “Negro tuition scholarship provide scholarships for Negroes otherwise qualified for admission to the University of Maryland.” That was the exact language of the state law “Negroes otherwise qualified.” Similarly, in 1939, in House Bill No. 255, titled “Appropriations for Institutions of Higher Learning,” the Texas legislature allocated $25,000 for “scholarship aid to qualified Negro students.” To put this figure in context, from Aug. 31, 1940, to Aug. 31, 1941, Texas allocated almost five times the amount of money ($119,668) for maintenance and equipment at the University of Texas than it did for “Negro tuition scholarships.”
The commissions and task forces in the various states that controlled award of the “Negro tuition scholarships” were usually all White and occasionally had one nonvoting historically Black college/university (HBCU) faculty member, dean or president.
So, what did Black people locked out of taxpayer-funded public colleges and universities do? They established and attended public and private HBCUs. These institutions have never had racially exclusive admission policies. Black residents desiring to attend graduate or professional school could only attend HBCUs. But few HBCUs had graduate and professional school programs, most notably Howard University, Atlanta University, Fisk University and Meharry Medical College. If the HBCUs did not have their field of study, Black students were forced to leave their state of residence to attend an integrated university, usually those located in one of the northeastern or Midwestern states. “Negro tuition scholarships” were allocated for this purpose, essentially booting citizens out of their home state rather than using state funds to integrate colleges and universities.
Generations of Black citizens (seeking PhD, MD, DDS, JD and other graduate and professional degrees) played by the rules — convoluted, imposing and insulting as they were — and trekked to the Northeast, Midwest and even far West to earn master’s and doctoral degrees. As my book discusses, Black teachers and principals (in the border and southern states) seeking master’s and doctoral degrees primarily earned them at these nationally preeminent institutions: New York University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, Harvard University, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University and Iowa State University. Between 1930 and 1960, Columbia University alone awarded 144 doctorates to Black graduates of HBCUs.
The trek by Black educators was an academic migration and did not result in an exodus from the border and southern states. They returned to their home states and continued serving as principals and teachers in segregated all-Black public schools. As part of their community leadership (before and after their academic migration), these educators led voting rights campaigns and established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapters. Despite their superior academic credentials, exceptional leadership as principals and teachers, and civic activism, 100,000 Black principals and teachers were summarily fired, dismissed and demoted between 1952 and the late 1970s as backlash to Brown.
This is the contemporary origin of the underrepresentation of Black educators in the workforce. Before Brown, in the 17 dual-system states, 35-50 percent of teachers were Black. Today, no state approaches these percentages. In fact, less than 7 percent of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers, 11 percent of our 93,000 principals and less than 3 percent of nearly 14,000 superintendents are Black, even though Black educators are the nation’s most academically credentialed.
The purposeful annihilation of Black principals and teachers was so serious that a series of U.S. Senate hearings was held in 1971 to address the problem. One central finding of those Senate hearings: On a near one-to-one basis and in every one of the 17 dual-system states, Black people were replaced by White people who were far less academically credentialed and professionally experienced.
Our nation is not only living with the ongoing trauma of having lost generations of Black principals and teachers due to massive resistance to Brown. We also lost an exceptional cadre of federal employees when President Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal government in the early 20th century, causing thousands of Black government employees to be fired because of their race and, again, replaced by less-qualified White employees.
In the few instances when they were not fired, Black civil-service employees who scored higher on civil-service exams were appointed into lower-paying roles over White employees who had failing scores on exams. Noted scholar W.E.B. Du Bois (the father of American sociology) found in his 1914 study that the person who had the best civil-service examination record in the United States was an African American man, William Humphries, who had passed 21 exams with a 100 percent on each test. Humphries was not an exception, but more the rule for African American federal employees of his era.
Do the justices who wrote the recent Supreme Court decision know or care about this history and its infliction of continuing trauma on African American citizens’ aspirations and delay toward our nation’s highest ideals of egalitarianism and equal treatment under the law? Do they know or care that in at least 17 states, the state wielded the hand prohibiting qualified Black people from admission to undergraduate programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 171 years of its 234 years of existence.
Black people have been permitted admission to the university for a mere 63 years! Of course, UNC Chapel Hill is not alone in this roster of state flagships (and private colleges and universities) with this history. My own alma mater, the University of Virginia (a public university), admitted its first Black undergraduate student in 1955 and did not fully integrate until 1960. Also a mere 63 years ago. This was the case for all the White-reserved taxpayer supported public colleges and universities in the 17 dual system states. The years that they each prohibited qualified Black students from admissions far outnumber the years admission has been anemically opened to Black people.
What is lacking from the leveling-the-playing-field narrative about affirmative-action policies? The long, documented history of Black people competitively outperforming White people (on academic, intellectual and other standardized measures required for entrance into universities and employment). Still, the historical and contemporary records show us that merit has yet to triumph racism.
Today, many of us and especially young people are upset, disappointed and despairing the recent spate of Supreme Court rulings limiting educational opportunity, denying woman their constitutional right to control their bodies and seek medical care, and giving license to those who would discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community. The majority opinions of the court coupled with the rise in antisemitism, voter suppression and attacks against university and corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are more than enough reason to be angry and even despondent. But, we must not let either cloud or lessen our resolve to seek a more perfect union. Here is where an understanding of history and its leaders matter to our nation’s progress. Remembering, honoring and following those exemplars of leadership can provide us inspiration and strategy.
Let us note the historical record and a few of these exemplars. Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Weaver and William Henry Hastie, who, while serving as members of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s so called “Black Cabinet,” pressed for and succeeded in using the core principles of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (commonly called the Wagner Act) and its reference to affirmative action as a method for expanding opportunity for African American workers and their right to union membership and representation.
In 1946, President Harry S. Truman established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and issued Executive Order 9981 ending segregation in the military. The Truman commission included, among others, Sadie T. Alexander, Dorothy Rogers Tilly and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. Continuing with the Eisenhower administration, E. Frederic Morrow became the first African American to hold an executive position in the White House and worked to move the Eisenhower administration forward while being, as he said, “between a rock and a hard place.”
Hobart Taylor, Constance Baker Motley and Patricia Roberts Harris followed with President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Arthur Fletcher, “the father of affirmative action,” continued with President Richard M. Nixon. Fletcher, the author of the Philadelphia Plan, also pushed for fair representation and minority participation in federal contracting.
All of these exemplars were aided by Black and White allies, Christians and Jews, Democrats and Republicans. These exemplars and their supporters were well aware that the success they brought about through executive and congressional action was part of a journey whose destination was yet to be reached. They knew that resistance to inequality would need to be unrelenting. They knew that resistance would masquerade under quaint talk about “color blindness,” fairness for all without preferences, and would not account for the nation’s history of racism, Jim Crow laws, de facto and de jure discrimination, and racial segregation.
And, let us not forget those exemplars who sought to move corporate America: Rev. Leon Sullivan and Abe Venable. Sullivan was the first African American board member of a major U.S. corporation, General Motors. At his first board meeting in 1971, Sullivan (standing virtually alone) made a motion calling upon GM to cease doing business in South Africa as a protest to its apartheid regime. The motion received less than 2 percent of the stockholders’ votes, but in 1977 the Sullivan Principles were adopted by GM, IBM and a number of other major American corporations. Sullivan went on to establish the Opportunities Industrialization Centers to train citizens for industry and public service.
Abe Venable was hired by GM in 1971 as head of its newly created Office of Minority Affairs. Venable described his challenge this way: “To make certain the resources of the corporation are distributed on an equal basis to all persons regardless of race, color or national origin.”
However framed, resistance to full equality (in spirit and in reality) had and has as its aim the fulfillment of what I call “The 1850 Project,” a return to a time when African Americans and all women would be outside the space occupied, controlled and determined by White men — where African Americans and women knew “their place” and stayed in it. Today’s voter-suppression initiatives in various states, surges in antisemitism and canceling of women’s right to choose medical care are consistent with the goals of this project.
We are stronger today than we were in 1971 when Sullivan and Venable tackled resistance to injustice and succeeded in moving corporate America to greater awareness of and response to the inequality in America. They well understood the forces of resistance that The 1850 Project folks (in ways overt and subtle) sought and still seek to stymie America’s progress. Many African American university and corporate leaders and board members (yes, we are at the table, but not nearly enough) are pressed to speak to the value, indeed necessity of DEI. They are there to give heart to those who might permit despair to overtake resolve.
We know “The 1850 Project” and we know our successes and setbacks in confronting it. We also know our resolve will not lessen. Our awareness of the continuing challenges before the nation is not diminished nor ending but continues building upon the successes of those exemplars who advanced federal executive action, corporate America and civil society.
To combat and prevail over sentiments and rulings that constrict rather than expand the American experiment, we can build upon the exemplars’ courage, foresight and determination to create a nation free, open and welcoming to all. All of our citizens of whatever hue and ethnicity, religion or place of origin have a right to contribute to this nation’s quest for greatness. Such participation will expand our humanity and standing in the world.
Valerie Strauss
Source link