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Research: The Affirmative Action Debate

The Affirmative Action Debate

By George E. Curry, Addison Wesley

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the full version of this research at Questia Online Library by clicking here

INTRODUCTION

A report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights provides the context for today's
contentious debate over affirmative action. It notes: "Historically, discrimination
against minorities and women was not only accepted, but was also governmentally
required. The doctrine of white supremacy, used to support the institution of
slavery, was so much part of American custom and policy that the Supreme Court
of the United States in 1857 [in the Dred Scott decision] approvingly concluded
that both the North and the South regarded slaves 'as beings of an inferior
order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social
or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect.'"

Women, like African-Americans and other racial minorities, were treated as
less than full citizens throughout much of American history, though to a different
degree. As Justice William J. Brennan observed, neither slaves nor women could
hold office, serve on juries, or bring suit in their own names, and married
women traditionally were denied the legal capacity to hold or convey property
or to serve as legal guardians of their own children.

Over the past three decades, the United States has struggled valiantly to overcome
that sordid legacy as it moves toward what Manning Marable, in the opening selection
in this book, calls "the ultimate elimination of race and gender inequality,
the uprooting of prejudice and discrimination, and the realization of a truly
democratic nation." Out of that struggle came the policy of affirmative
action.

Although the term "affirmative action" is relatively new, the concept
is not. The Civil Rights Commission defines the contemporary term as encompassing
any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, which permits
the consideration of race, national origin, sex, or disability, along with other
criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities to a class of qualified
individuals who have either historically or actually been denied those opportunities,
and to prevent the recurrence of discrimination in the future. But well over
a century ago, at the beginning of the Reconstruction era that followed the
Civil War, the Freedman's Bureau was established to assist newly freed slaves,
providing for AfricanAmericans to receive clothing, land, and education. More
recently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to avert a march on Washington planned
by A. Philip Randolph, president of the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, signed an executive order in 1941 forbidding federal contractors from
discriminating.

However, the pernicious problem of racism still existed two decades later in
1961 when John F. Kennedy, observing that the nation's top defense contractors
employed few blacks, signed Executive Order 10925. It invoked the term "affirmative
action" for the first time and established the Committee on Equal Employment
Opportunity. President Lyndon B. Johnson followed up in 1965 with Executive
Order 11246, which required federal contractors to take affirmative action to
provide equal opportunity without regard to a person's race, religion, or national
origin. Three years later, women were added to the protected groups. In 1969,
under President Richard M. Nixon, "goals and timetables" were added
as yet another component of affirmative action.

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Now, a quarter of a century later, affirmative action is more controversial
than ever. It has been credited by supporters with expanding the black middle
class and lowering barriers to equal opportunity, while its critics suggest
that this tool intended to eliminate discrimination is itself discriminatory.
The question has developed into a major wedge issue in the 1996 presidential
election. Affirmative action faces the prospect of being sharply curtailed,
if not eliminated, by Congress and by voters in California, our largest state.

This collection of twenty-nine essays, most of them published here for the
first time, is not likely to end this emotionladen debate. Nor would I want
it to do so. Rather, my goal from the outset has been to assemble some of the
sharpest minds in the country, provide a forum for them to express their personal
views on affirmative action, and hope that in the process we would expand our
knowledge of the issue and develop a deeper tolerance for views with which we
fervently disagree.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BEGINNING



In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that "the problem of the twentieth century
is the problem of the color line -- the relation of the darker to the lighter
races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."

Affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies were created to erase
the differences in rights and opportunities defined by that color line. In this
chapter, four essays trace how affirmative action has evolved in the twentieth
century. While all these authors favor affirmative action, their essays raise
important questions: What alternatives to affirmative action did our country's
political leaders see? Mat were their aims? How much can rules that prohibit
discrimination accomplish? Do affirmative action programs go far enough? In
context, we see that the debate over affirmative action is not a simple yes
or no issue.

First, Manning Marable, director of the Institute for Research in African-American
Studies at Columbia University and author of Beyond Black and White: Transforming
AfricanAmerican Politics (1995), contrasts the efforts to prohibit discrimination
in the 1940s and the triumphs of the civil rights era with the current political
atmosphere. He also places affirmative action in the context of a long debate
within the African-American community over the value of integration and inclusion.

More than sixty years after Du Bois wrote about the color line, President Lyndon
B. Johnson, a southerner, observed that it remained clearly visible: "In
far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom,
crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope." Reprinted
here is Johnson's commencement address at Howard University in 1965, which set
both the tone and the rationale for affirmative action in the 1960s. The Johnson
administration made affirmative action national policy to help open the doors
of hope for racial and ethnic minorities (later expanded to include women and
other disadvantaged groups).

Appointed in 1969 as the nation's first assistant secretary of labor for employment
standards, Arthur A. Fletcher has often been referred to as "the Father
of Affirmative Action." He is the author of the Philadelphia Plan to combat
racism in the construction industry. His essay is a behind-the-scenes account
of the earliest efforts to institutionalize affirmative action. Despite the
best intentions, however, the policy quickly became a political orphan, never
clearly codified in federal statutes and owing its shaky existence to the generosity
of the executive branch.

The chapter concludes with an essay by Dr. Cornel West, whom Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., of Harvard University, calls "the preeminent African-American intellectual
of our generation." Looking at affirmative action in the context of race
relations in the United States, he is surprised that the furor over it is so
intense. Affirmative action, he says, is a "weak response" to the
"legacy of white supremacy." It is interesting to consider what other
corrective measures our society might have tried.

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Staying on the Path to Racial Equality

Manning Marable

Instead of pleasant-sounding but simplistic defenses of "affirmative action
as it is," we need to do some hard thinking about the reasons why several
significant constituencies that have greatly benefited from affirmative action
have done relatively little to defend it. We need to recognize the critical
theoretical and strategic differences that separate liberals and progressives
on how to achieve a nonracist society. And we urgently need to reframe the context
of the political debate, taking the initiative away from the Right. The triumph
of "Newtonian Republicanism" is not a temporary aberration: it is
the culmination of a thirty-year ideological and political war against the logic
of the reforms of the 1960s. Advocates of affirmative action, civil rights,
and other policies reflecting left-of-center political values must recognize
how and why the context for progressive reform has fundamentally changed.

The first difficulty in developing a more effective progressive model for affirmative
action goes back to the concept's complex definition, history, and political
evolution. "Affirmative action" per se was never a law, or even a
coherently developed set of governmental policies designed to attack institutional
racism and societal discrimination. It was instead a series of presidential
executive orders, civil rights laws, and governmental programs regarding the
awarding of federal contracts and licenses, as well as the enforcement of fair
employment practices, with the goal of uprooting the practices of bigotry.

At its origins, it was designed to provide some degree of compensatory justice
to the victims of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and institutional racism. This
was at the heart of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which stated that "all
persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right
in every State and Territory, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties,
give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings
for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens. .
. ."

The fundamental idea of taking the proactive steps necessary to dismantle prejudice
has been around for more than a century.

During the Great Depression, the role of the federal government in protecting
the equal rights of black Americans was expanded again through the direct militancy
and agitation of black people. In 1941, socialist and trade union leader A.
Philip Randolph mobilized thousands of black workers to participate in the "Negro
March on Washington Movement," calling upon the administration of Franklin
D. Roosevelt to carry out a series of reforms favorable to civil rights. To
halt this mobilization, Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, which
outlawed segregationist hiring policies by defense-related industries that held
federal contracts. This executive order not only greatly increased the number
of African-Americans who were employed in wartime industries, but expanded the
political idea that government could not take a passive role in the dismantling
of institutional racism.

This position was reaffirmed in 1953 by President Harry S. Truman's Committee
on Government Contract Compliance, which urged the Bureau of Employment Security"to
act positively and affirmatively to implement the policy of nondiscrimination
in its functions of placement counseling, occupational analysis and industrial
services, labor market information, and community participation in employment
services." Thus, despite the fact that the actual phrase "affirmative
action" was not used by a chief executive until President John F. Kennedy's
Executive Order 10925 in 1961, the fundamental idea of taking the proactive
steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for more than a century.


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PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES AMONG CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS

What complicates the current discussion of affirmative action is that liberals
and progressives themselves were at odds historically over the guiding social
and cultural philosophy that should inform the implementation of policies on
racial discrimination. Progressives like W E. B. Du Bois were convinced that
the way to achieve a nonracist society was through the development of strong
black institutions and the preservation of African-American cultural identity.
Du Bois's strategy was reflected in his concept of "double consciousness,"
that black American identity was simultaneously African and American, and that
dismantling racism should not require the aesthetic and cultural assimilation
of blackness into white values and social norms.

The alternative to the Du Boisian position was expressed by integrationist
leaders and intellectuals like Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Baynard Rustin, and
Kenneth B. Clark. They too fought to destroy Jim Crow, but their cultural philosophy
for the Negro rested on inclusion rather than pluralism. They deeply believed
that the long-term existence of separate, allblack institutions was counterproductive
to the goal of a "color-blind" society, in which racial categories
would become socially insignificant or even irrelevant to the relations of power.
Rustin, for instance, personally looked forward to the day when Harlem would
cease to exist as a segregated, identifiably black neighborhood. Blacks should
be assimilated or culturally incorporated into the mainstream. My central criticism
of the desegregationist strategy of the inclusionists is that they consistently
confused "culture" with "race," underestimating the importance
of fostering black cultural identity as an essential component of the critique
of white supremacy. The existence of separate black institutions or a self-defined,
all-black community was not necessarily an impediment to interracial cooperation
and multicultural dialogue.

Despite the differences between Du Boisian progressives and inclusionist liberals,
both desegregationist positions from the 1930s onward were expressed by the
organizations and leadership of the civil rights movement. These divisions were
usually obscured by a common language of reform and a common social vision that
embraced color blindness as an ultimate goal. For example, both positions are
reflected in the main thrust of the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which declared that workplace discrimination should be outlawed on the basis
of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." However, the
inclusionist orientation of Wilkins, Rustin, and company is also apparent in
the act's assertion that it should not be interpreted as requiring employers
"to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group."

Five years later, after Richard M. Nixon's narrow victory for the presidency,
it was the Republicans' turn to interpret and implement civil rights policy.
The strategy of Nixon had a profound impact on the political culture of the
United States, which continues to have direct consequences within the debates
about affirmative action today. Through the Counterintelligence Program of the
FBI, the Nixon administration vigorously suppressed the radical wing of the
black movement. Second, it appealed to the racial anxieties and grievances of
George Wallace voters, recruiting segregationists like Jesse Helms and Strom
Thurmond into the ranks of the Republican Party.

On affirmative action and issues of equal opportunity, however, Nixon's goal
was to utilize a liberal reform for conservative objectives: the expansion of
the African-American middle class, which might benefit the Republican Party.
Under Nixon in 1969, the federal government authorized what became known as
the Philadelphia Plan, a program requiring federal contractors to set specific
goals for minority hiring. As a result, the portion of racial minorities in
the construction industry increased from 1% to 12%. The Nixon administration
supported provisions for minority set-asides to promote black and Hispanic entrepreneurship,
and it placed Federal Reserve funds in black-owned banks. Nixon himself publicly
praised the concept of "Black Power," carefully interpreting it as
"black capitalism."

It was under the moderate-conservative aegis of the Nixon and Ford administrations
of 1969-77 that the set of policies which we identify with "affirmative
action" was implemented nationally in both the public and the private sectors.
Even after the 1978 Bakke decision, in which the Supreme Court overturned the
admissions policy of the University of California at Davis which had set aside
sixteen out of one hundred medical school openings for racial minorities, the
political impetus for racial reform was not destroyed. What did occur, even
before the triumph of reaction under Reagan in the early 1980s, was that political
conservatives deliberately usurped the "colorblind" discourse of many
liberals from the desegregation movement.

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As conservatives retreated from the Nixonian strategy of utilizing affirmative
action tools to achieve conservative political goals, they began to appeal to
the latent racist sentiments within the white population. They cultivated the
racist mythology that affirmative action was nothing less than a rigid system
of inflexible quotas which rewarded the incompetent and the unqualified, who
happened to be nonwhite, at the expense of hardworking, taxpaying Americans,
who happened to be white. White conservatives were able to define "merit"
in a manner that would reinforce white male privilege, but in an inverted language
that would make the real victims of discrimination appear to be the racists.
It was, in retrospect, a brilliant political maneuver.

And the liberals were at a loss in fighting back effectively precisely because
they lacked a consensus internally about the means and goals for achieving genuine
equality. Traditional liberals like Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law
Center in Montgomery, Alabama, who favored an inclusionist, colorblind ideology
of reform, often ended up inside the camp of racial reactionaries, who cynically
learned to manipulate the discourse of fairness.

SUPPORT FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT DIFFERENT LEVELS

These shifts and realignments within American political culture about how to
achieve greater fairness and equality for those who have experienced discrimination
had profound consequences by the 1990s. In general, most white Americans have
made a clear break from the overtly racist, Jim Crow segregationist policies
of a generation ago. They want to be perceived as being "fair" toward
racial minorities and women, and they acknowledge that policies like affirmative
action are necessary to foster a more socially just society.

According to a USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll ( March 1719, 1995), when asked,
"Do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs?" 53% of whites
polled expressed support, compared to only 36% opposed. Not surprisingly, AfricanAmericans
expressed much stronger support, with 72% in favor of affirmative action programs
and only 21% against. Despite widespread rhetoric that the vast majority of
white males have supposedly lost jobs and opportunities due to affirmative action
policies, the poll indicated that only 15% of all white males believe that "they've
lost a job because of affirmative action policies."

However, there is severe erosion of white support for affirmative action when
one focuses more narrowly on specific steps or remedies for addressing discrimination.
For example, the USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll indicates that only 30% of whites
favor the establishment of gender and racial "quotas" in businesses,
with 68% opposed. In contrast, two-thirds of all African-Americans expressed
support for quotas in business employment, with only 30% opposed.

When asked whether quotas should be created "that require schools to admit
a certain number of minorities and women," 61% of the whites were opposed,
with 35% in favor. Nearly two-thirds of all whites would also reject policies
that "require private businesses to set up specific goals and timetables
for hiring women and minorities if there were not government programs that included
hiring quotas," whereas two-thirds of all African-Americans strongly favor
affirmative action programs with goals and timetables for private businesses.
On issues of implementing government-supported initiatives for social equality,
most black and white Americans still live in two distinct racial universes.

It is not surprising that "angry white men" form the core of those
who are against affirmative action. What is striking, however, is the general
orientation of white women on this issue. White women have been overwhelmingly
the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action: millions have gained access
to educational and employment opportunities through the implementation and enforcement
of such policies. But most of them clearly do not share the political perspectives
of AfricanAmericans and Hispanics on this issue, nor do they perceive their
own principal interests to be at risk if affirmative action programs are abandoned
by the federal government or outlawed by the courts. In the same USA Today/
CNN/Gallup poll, only 8% of all white women stated that their "colleagues
at work or school privately questioned" their qualifications because of
affirmative action, compared to 19% of black women and 28% of black men. Less
than one in five white women polled defined workplace discrimination as a "major
problem," compared to 41% of blacks and 38% of Latinos. Forty percent of
the white women polled described job discrimination as "not being a problem"
at all. These survey results may help to explain why middle class-oriented,
liberal feminist leaders and constituencies have been less vocal than African-Americans
in the mobilization to defend affirmative action.

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A quarter-century of affirmative action programs, goals, and timetables has
been clearly effective in transforming the status of white women in the labor
force. It is certainly true that white men still dominate the upper ranks of
senior management: while constituting 47% of the nation's total workforce, they
make up 95% of all senior managerial positions at the rank of vice president
or above. However, women of all races now constitute about 40% of the total
workforce overall. As of the 1990 census, white women held nearly 40% of all
middle management positions. While their median incomes lag behind those of
white men, over the past twenty years white women have gained far greater ground
in terms of real earnings than black or Hispanic men in the labor force. Black
professional women have also gained ground in recent decades, but blacks overall
still remain significantly behind white men in median incomes at all levels.
In this context, civil rights advocates and traditional defenders of affirmative
action must ask themselves whether the majority of white American women actually
perceive their material interests to be tied to the outcome of the battle for
income equity and affirmative action that most blacks and Latinos, women and
men alike, continue to fight.

We should also recognize that although all people of color suffer in varying
degrees from the stigma of racism and economic disadvantage within American
society, they do not have the same material interests or identify themselves
with the same politics as the vast majority of African-Americans. For example,
here are mean on-the-job earnings, according to the 1990 census:

All American adults $15,105

Blacks $10,912

Native Americans $11,949

Hispanics $11,219



It is crucial to disaggregate social categories like "Hispanics" and
"Asian-Americans" to gain a true picture of the real material and
social conditions of significant populations of color. About half of all Hispanics,
according to the Bureau of the Census, identify themselves as white, regardless
of their actual physical appearance. Puerto Ricans in New York City have lower
median incomes than African-Americans, while Argentines, a Hispanic group that
claims benefits from affirmative action programs, have mean on-the-job incomes
of $15,956 a year. The Hmong, immigrants from southeast Asia, have mean on-the-job
incomes of $3,194; by striking contrast, the Japanese have annual incomes higher
than those of whites.

None of these statistics negate the reality of racial domination and discrimination
in terms of social relations, access to employment opportunities, or job advancement.
But they do tell us part of the reason why no broad coalition of people of color
has coalesced behind the political demand for affirmative action. Various groups
interpret their interests narrowly and in divergent ways, looking out primarily
for themselves rather than addressing the structural inequalities within the
fabric of American society as a whole.

A DU BOISIAN STRATEGY TOWARD AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

So where do progressives and liberals go from here, given that the Right has
seized the political initiative in dismantling affirmative action, minority
economic set-asides, and the entire spectrum of civil rights reforms? We must
return to the theoretical perspectives of Du Bois to begin some honest dialogue
about why race relations have soured so profoundly in recent years.

Affirmative action was largely responsible for a significant increase in the
size of the black middle class; it opened many professional and managerial positions
to blacks, Latinos, and women for the first time. But in many other respects,
affirmative action can and should be criticized from the Left, not because it
was too liberal in its pursuit and implementation of measures to achieve equality,
but because it was too conservative. It sought to increase representative numbers
of minorities and women within the existing structure and arrangements of power,
rather than challenging or redefining the institutions of authority and privilege.
As implemented under a series of presidential administrations, liberal and conservative
alike, affirmative action was always more concerned with advancing remedies
for unequal racial outcomes than with uprooting racism as a system of white
power.

Rethinking progressive and liberal strategies on affirmative action would require
sympathetic whites to acknowledge that much of the anti-affirmative action rhetoric
is really a retreat from a meaningful engagement on issues of race, and that
the vast majority of Americans who have benefited materially from affirmative
action have not been black at all. A Du Boisian strategy toward affirmative
action would argue that despite the death of legal segregation a generation
ago, we have not yet reached the point where a color-blind society is possible,
especially in terms of the actual organization and structure of white power
and privilege. Institutional racism is real, and the central focus of affirmative
action must deal with the continuing burden of racial inequality and discrimination
in American life.

There are many ways to measure the powerful reality of contemporary racism.
For example, a 1994 study of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management found that
African-American federal employees are more than twice as likely to be dismissed
as their white counterparts. Blacks are especially likely to be fired at much
higher rates than whites in jobs where they constitute a significant share of
the labor force: for example, black clerk-typists are 4.7 times more likely
to be dismissed than whites, and black custodians 4.1 times more likely to be
fired.

Discrimination is also rampant in capital markets. Banks continue policies
of "redlining," denying loans in neighborhoods that are largely black
and Hispanic. In New York City in 1992, for instance, blacks were turned down
for mortgage applications by banks, savings and loans, and other financial institutions
about twice as often as whites. And even after years of affirmative action programs,
blacks and Latinos remain grossly underrepresented in a wide number of professions.

As Jesse Jackson observed in a speech before the National Press Club, while
native-born white males make up only 41% of the U.S. population, they are 80%
of all tenured professors, 92% of the Forbes 400 chief executive officers, and
97% of all school superintendents.

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If affirmative action should be criticized, it might be on the grounds that
it didn't go far enough in transforming the actual power relations between black
and white within our society. More evidence for this is addressed by the sociologists
Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro in Black Wealth/White Wealth (1995). The authors
point out that "the typical black family has eleven cents of wealth for
every dollar owned by the typical white family." Even middle-class African-Americans,
people who often benefited from affirmative action, are significantly poorer
than whites who earn identical incomes. If housing and vehicles owned are included
in the definition of "net wealth," the median middle-class African-American
family has only $8,300 in total assets, as against $56,000 for the comparable
white family.

Why are blacks at all income levels much poorer than whites in terms of wealth?
African-American families not only inherit much less wealth; they are hit daily
by institutional inequality and discrimination. For years, they were denied
life insurance policies by white firms. They are still denied home mortgages
at twice the rate of similarly qualified white applicants. African-Americans
have been less likely to receive government-backed home loans.

Given the statistical profile of racial inequality, liberals must reject the
temptation to move away from "race-conscious remedies" to "race-neutral"
reforms defined by income or class criteria. Affirmative action has always had
a distinct and separate function from antipoverty programs. Income and social
class inequality affect millions of whites, Asian-Americans, Latinos, and blacks
alike, and programs that expand employment, educational access, and social service
benefits based on economic criteria alone are absolutely essential. But the
impetus for racism is not narrowly economic in origin. Racial prejudice is still
a destructive force in the lives of upper middle-class, college-educated African-Americans
as well as poor blacks, and programs designed to address the discrimination
they feel and experience collectively every day must be grounded in the context
of race. However, affirmative action is legitimately related to class questions,
but in a different way. A truly integrated workplace, where people of divergent
racial backgrounds, languages, and cultural identities learn to interact and
respect each other, is an essential precondition for building a broadly pluralistic
movement for radical democracy. The expanded implementation of affirmative action,
despite its liberal limitations, would assist in creating the social conditions
essential for pluralistic coalitions to promote full employment and more progressive
social policies.

What is required among progressives is not a reflexive, uncritical defense
of affirmative action, but a recognition of its contradictory evolution and
conceptual limitations as well as its benefits and strengths. We need a thoughtful
and innovative approach in challenging discrimination which, like that of Du
Bois, reaffirms the centrality of the struggle against racism within the development
of affirmative action measures. We must build on the American majority's continued
support for affirmative action, linking the general public's commitment to social
fairness with creative measures that actually target the real patterns and processes
of discrimination that millions of Utinos and blacks experience every day. And
we must not be pressured into a false debate to choose between race and class
in the development and framing of public policies addressing discrimination.
Moving toward the long-term goal of a colorblind society, the deconstruction
of racism, does not mean that we become neutral about the continuing significance
of race in American life.

As the national debate concerning the possible elimination of affirmative action
comes to define the 1996 presidential campaign, black and progressive Americans
must reevaluate their strategies for reform. In recent years we have tended
to rely on elections, the legislative process, and the courts to achieve racial
equality. We should remember how the struggle to dismantle Jim Crow segregation
was won. We engaged in economic boycotts, civil disobedience, teach-ins, freedom
schools, and freedom rides; we formed community-based coalitions and united
fronts. There's a direct relationship between our ability to mobilize people
in communities to protest and the pressure we can exert on elected officials
to protect and enforce civil rights.

Voting is absolutely essential, but it isn't enough. We must channel the profound
discontent, the alienation and anger that currently exist in the black community
toward constructive, progressive forms of political intervention and resistance.
As we fight for affirmative action, let us understand that we are fighting for
a larger ideal: the ultimate elimination of race and gender inequality, the
uprooting of prejudice and discrimination, and the realization of a truly democratic
nation.



To Fulfill These Rights

Lyndon B. Johnson1

Our earth is the home of revolution.

In every corner of every continent men charged with hope contend with ancient
ways in the pursuit of justice. They reach for the newest of weapons to realize
the oldest of dreams; that each may walk in freedom and pride, stretching his
talents, enjoying the fruits of the earth.

Our enemies may occasionally seize the day of change. But it is the banner
of our revolution they take. And our own future is linked to this process of
swift and turbulent change in many lands in the world. But nothing in any country
touches us more profoundly, nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own
destiny, than the revolution of the Negro American.

In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of
freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.

In our time change has come to this nation too. The American Negro, acting
with impressive restraint, has peacefully protested and marched, entered the
courtrooms and the seats of government, demanding a justice that has long been
denied. The voice of the Negro was a call to action. But it is a tribute to
America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the President and most
of the people, have been the allies of progress.

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Thus we have seen the high court of the country declare that discrimination
based on race was repugnant to the Constitution, and therefore void. We have
seen in 1957, 1960, and again in 1964, the first civil rights legislation in
this nation in almost an entire century.

As majority leader of the United States Senate, I helped to guide two of these
bills through the Senate. As your President, I was proud to sign the third.
And now very soon we will have the fourth -- a new law guaranteeing every American
the right to vote.

No act of my entire administration will give me greater satisfaction than the
day when my signature makes this bill too the law of this land.

The Voting Rights Bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in
a long series of victories. But this victory -as Winston Churchill said of another
triumph for freedom -"is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the
end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

That beginning is freedom. And the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down.
Freedom is the right to share fully and equally in American society -- to vote,
to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to
be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and
promise to all others.

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying:
Now you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders
you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate
him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "You are
free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you
have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough to just open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens
must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We
seek not just freedom but opportunity -- not just legal equity but human ability
-- not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as
a result.

For the task is to give twenty million Negroes the same chance as every other
American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities
-- physical, mental, and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.

To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough. Men and women of
all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just
the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family you live
with, and the neighborhood you live in, by the school you go to and the poverty
or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen
forces playing upon the infant, the child, and the man.

We seek not just freedom but opportunity --

not just equality as a right and a theory,

but equality as a fact.

This graduating class of Howard University is witness to the indomitable determination
of the Negro American to win his way in American life.

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The number of Negroes in schools of higher learning has almost doubled in fifteen
years. The number of nonwhite professional workers has more than doubled in
ten years. The median income of Negro college women exceeds that of white college
women. And there are also the enormous accomplishments of distinguished individual
Negroes -- many of them graduates of this institution, and one of them the first
lady ambassador in the history of the United States.

These are proud and impressive achievements. But they tell only the story of
a growing middle class minority, steadily narrowing the gap between them and
their white counterparts.

But for the great majority of Negro Americans -- the poor, the unemployed,
the uprooted, and the dispossessed -- there is a much grimmer story. They still
are another nation. Despite the court orders and the laws, despite the legislative
victories and the speeches, for them the walls are rising and the gulf is widening.Here
are some of the facts of this American failure. Thirty-five years ago the rate
of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same. Today the Negro rate
is twice as high.

In 1948 the 8% unemployment rate for Negro teenage boys was actually less than
that of whites. By last year that rate had grown to 23%, as against 13% for
whites.

Between 1949 and 1959, the income of Negro men relative to white men declined
in every section of this country. From 1952 to 1963 the median income of Negro
families compared to white actually dropped from 57% to 53%.

In the years 1955 through 1957, 22% of experienced Negro workers were out of
work at some time during the year. In 1961 through 1963 that proportion had
soared to 29%.

Since 1947 the number of white families living in poverty has decreased 27%,
while the number of poor nonwhite families decreased only 3%.

The infant mortality of nonwhites in 1940 was 70% greater than whites. Twenty-two
years later it was 90% greater.

Moreover, the isolation of Negro from white communities is increasing, rather
than decreasing, as Negroes crowd into the central cities and become a city
within a city.

Of course Negro Americans as well as white Americans have shared in our rising
national abundance. But the harsh fact of the matter is that in the battle for
true equality too many are losing ground every day.

We are not completely sure why this is. The causes are complex and subtle.
But we do know the two broad basic reasons. And we do know that we have to act.

First, Negroes are trapped -- as many whites are trapped -- in inherited, gateless
poverty. They lack training and skills. They are shut in slums, without decent
medical care. Private and public poverty combine to cripple their capacities.

We are trying to attack these evils through our poverty program, through our
education program, through our medical care and our other health programs, and
a dozen more of the Great Society programs that are aimed at the root causes
of this poverty.

We will increase, and accelerate, and broaden this attack in years to come
until this most enduring of foes finally yields to our unyielding will. But
there is a second cause -- much more difficult to explain, more deeply grounded,
more desperate in its force. It is the devastating heritage of long years of
slavery; and of oppression, hatred, and injustice.

For Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its
cures are the same. But there are differences -deep, corrosive, obstinate differences
-- radiating painful roots into the community, the family, and the nature of
the individual.

These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the
consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They
are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression.
For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced
and dealt with and overcome, if we are ever to reach the time when the only
difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.

Nor can we find a complete answer in the experience of other American minorities.
They made a valiant and a largely successful effort to emerge from poverty and
prejudice. The Negro, like these others, will have to rely mostly on his own
efforts. But he just can not do it alone. For they did not have the heritage
of centuries to overcome. They did not have the cultural tradition which had
been twisted and battered by endless years of hatred and hopelessness. Nor were
they excluded because of race or color -- a feeling whose dark intensity is
matched by no other prejudice in society.

Nor can these differences be understood as isolated infirmities. They are a
seamless web. They cause each other. They result from each other. They reinforce
each other. Much of the Negro community is buried under a blanket of history
and circumstance. It is not a lasting solution to lift just one corner of that
blanket. We must stand on all sides and raise the entire cover if we are to
liberate our fellow citizens.

One of the differences is the increased concentration of Negroes in the cities.
More than 73% of all Negroes live in urban areas compared with less than 70%
of the whites. Most of the Negroes live in slums. Most of them live together
-- a separated people. Men are shaped by their world. When it is a world of
decay, ringed by an invisible wall -- when escape is arduous and uncertain,
and the saving pressures of a more hopeful society are unknown -- it can cripple
the youth and desolate the man.

There is also the burden that a dark skin can add to the search for a productive
place in society. Unemployment strikes most swiftly and broadly at the Negro.
This burden erodes hope. Blighted hope breeds despair. Despair brings indifference
to the learning which offers a way out. And despair, coupled with indifference,
is often the source of destructive rebellion against the fabric of society.

There is also lacerating hurt of early collision with white hatred or prejudice,
distaste, or condescension. Other groups have felt similar intolerance. But
success and achievement could wipe it away. They do not change the color of
a man's skin. I have seen this uncomprehending pain in the eyes of little Mexican-American
school children that I taught many years ago. It can be overcome. But for many,
the wounds are always open.

Perhaps most important -- its influence radiating to every part of life --
is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all, white
America must accept responsibility.



It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows
from long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity
and assaulted his ability to provide for his family.

This, too, is not pleasant to look upon. But it must be faced by those whose
serious intent is to improve the life of all Americans.

Only a minority -- less than half -- of all Negro children reach the age of
eighteen having lived all their lives with both of their parents. At this moment
little less than two-thirds are living with both of their parents. Probably
a majority of all Negro children receive federally aided public assistance sometime
during their childhood.

The family is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other force it
shapes the attitudes, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child.
When the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When
it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.

So unless we work to strengthen the family, to create conditions under which
most parents will stay together -- all the rest: schools and playgrounds, public
assistance and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle
of despair and deprivation.

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posted by Victor Lloyd Smith @ 5:32 PM