1999 SPECIAL REPORT: "WHITE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION"

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected race-based affirmative action in college admissions in a 6-3 vote that rolled back decades of precedent and will force big changes in the way many of the nation’s private and public universities decide whom to accept into their programs. There was a lot of commentary after the decision was made public on June 29, much of it looking at the history of affirmative action and the ways in which schools may approach admissions in the future — but this post offers two different approaches to the discussion.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.Just how little U.S. students learn about African American history By Leslie Fenwick 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.

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