Affirmative action has been a controversial issue in our country for a long time. Since President John F. Kennedy coined the term in 1961 women, African Americans and other minority groups have benefited from affirmative action initiatives and preferential treatment. As a result there has been an increase in minority representation in both lower and higher positions of the work force. However there has also been a decline in initiatives on the part of the government to maintain certain pressures on employers to maintain this diversity. Affirmative action legislation fluctuates depending on the external influences to politics (ex: Martin Luther King's assassination or the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings). It is the purpose of this timeline to provide the dates and summaries of affirmative action legislation, judicial verdicts, and other affirmative action related issues with respect to African Americans. The timeline format was chosen so that a sense of structure and temporal frame of reference could be established.
* 1961
In 1961 the phrase affirmative action was coined as President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10952 . This order was responsible for the formation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). It directed contractors on projects financed with federal funds to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees, are treated during their employment, without regard to race, creed, color or national origin."
President Kennedy urged Congress to do more for civil rights than barring discrimination. Robert Kennedy also played a strong role in civil rights. Working alongside Martin Luther King, they were able to set the stage for affirmative action. However, the proposed form of affirmative action was relatively weak due to the strong opposition towards civil rights.
* 1964
In 1964, after more than a century of debating the devastating effects of racism, Congress finally, broke the southern filibuster and passed a monumental civil rights enactment. This was due to the political pressure felt both internally and externally as Americans watched African American silently protesting and being brutally beaten. Finally through the growing awareness of minorities and the rise of influential leaders such as Martin Luther King, the U.S, government started to implement policies of reform. Under the direction of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . This piece of legislation enacted stronger laws and a more pro-active approach to the discrimination problem in America than the laws that Kennedy first proposed
* 1965
In the Presidential elections of 1964, blacks continued to have difficulty registering to vote in many areas. The U.S. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act 1965 in response to the violence and refuting of black voters in Selma, Louisiana. This act authorized the U.S. attorney general to send federal examiners to register black voters under certain circumstances. After the 1965 march in Alabama led by Martin Luther King Jr., President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a voting rights bill to Congress, which was quickly passed.
This was also monumental for affirmative action due to the fact that now African Americans had a voice, one that could effect politicians and political policies. The impact of the bill was immediate. The end of 1965 had registered a quarter of a million new black voters, one-third by federal examiners. That same year, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 , which placed primary responsibility for affirmative action enforcement with the Dept. of labor.
* 1967
President Johnson signs the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which protects workers between 40 and 65 from arbitrary bias. In addition "age becomes a protected category along with race, gender, national origin, color, and religion.
* 1968
One week after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee Congress passed the nation's first open housing law, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (also referred to as the Fair Housing Act 1968 ). This act was given as a consolation gift to African Americans due to King's assassination. It was passed after Congress stripped the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development to take legal action. HUD was forced to forward cases to the Department of Justice, which lacked the resources to prosecute more than a dozen cases a year. Thus the Dept of Justice made sure that the Fair Housing Act was acknowledged.
* 1970
Republican Richard M. Nixon was at first a strong advocate of affirmative action. It was his program of 1970, the Philadelphia Plan which delved more deeply than before into numerical goals and timetables. The Philadelphia Plan established the authority of the federal government to require companies doing business with the government to set up "goals and timetables" for the hiring and promotion of minority members. The plan set specific percentage "ranges" for blacks and other minority groups for craft-union jobs. For example, plumbers and pipe-fitters, of whom only twelve out of 2,335 in Philadelphia were black (0.5%), were given a hiring goal of five to eight percent in 1970, a range that would rise to 22 to 26 % by 1973. The goals-and-timetables mechanism was incorporated in 1970 into the regulations governing all federal procurement and contracting-affecting a universe of corporations that employed more than a third of the nation's work force.
* 1971
In 1971, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report, which concluded that, the various federal equal employment opportunity programs and agencies were failing at their task. Spurred by the report, Congress enacted the equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, which extended the EEOC's jurisdiction to employers with more than 15 employees, unions with at least 15 members and all governmental employees at all levels. It also gave greater emphasis to systematic discrimination, broadening the right to maintain class-action suits.
* 1977
In Barnes v. Costle, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled that sexual harassment constitutes sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . It is the first such ruling by a federal court.
* 1978
The Supreme court issued a preview of the coming era of conservative retreat from affirmative action, with the case of UC Regents v. Bakke . The medical school at the university of California at Davis set aside sixteen (of 100 total) places in each entering class for disadvantaged and minority students, who were considered in a separate admissions system. While the legitimacy of using race conscious remedies under some circumstances was upheld in Bakke, each justice's individual written opinion read like a debate on the underlying issues. In other words, the seeds of "white backlash" were beginning to grow and the various opinions reflected that.
The same year, in Steelworkers v. Weber , the Court upheld a voluntary affirmative action plan entered into between a private company and its union, even though there had been no governmental determination of past racism. One portion of Title VII says that the statute does not "require" employers and unions to use race-conscious remedies to correct racial imbalances without a court finding of discrimination. In Weber, the Court held that Congress could have excluded voluntary programs by stating that the law did not "require or permit" such plans. This posed a problem for affirmative action due to the lack of responsibility placed on the employer.
In addition the Pregnancy Discrimination Act 1978 (PDA) was signed that year. The PDA required companies employing 15 or more people to treat pregnant workers the same way they treat other workers who have medical disabilities and cannot work. The law prohibits job discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related disability.
* 1980
Ronald Reagan seized upon the Supreme Court's decision in Weber, and made opposition to affirmative action a centerpiece of his successful 1980 campaign. It was a message that reverberated with a large number of increasingly insecure middle class white voters during a period of great overall change in the employment sector.
* 1981
Soon after taking office in 1981, President Reagan made good on his promises. He appointed to key positions persons openly hostile to affirmative action - most notably, Clarence Thomas and Clarence Pendelton, Jr. to the EEOC, and Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court.
* 1981
Reagan's two terms in office had an enormous impact on the philosophy of the federal judiciary. He appointed a record number of judges under a careful screening process for conservatism. Reagan was able to maintain an aggressive campaign against civil rights without losing popularity in the polls. He cut the funding of the OFCCP and EEOC, rendering them "toothless tigers." He supported repeal of key sections of the Voting Rights Act 1965 and targeted affirmative action for constant attack, falsely labeling it as a program of "racial quotas" and "reverse discrimination."
* 1986
In Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, the Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment in the workplace is sex discrimination when it creates an offensive or hostile working environment. That same year the term "glass ceiling" was coined by the Wall Street Journal.
* 1989
By 1989, the Supreme Court and several of the federal appeals courts had issued numerous rulings calling into question long-settled issues in civil rights. Then two cases were announced by the high court that particularly outraged affirmative action advocates. In Wards Cove v. Atonio, the Supreme Court reversed 18 years of legal precedent under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when it moved the burden of proof in "discriminatory impact" cases from the employer to the complaining victim of discrimination. And in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, the Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 did not prohibit racial harassment on the job. As dissenting Justice Harry Blackmun wrote: "One wonders whether the majority still believes that discrimination is a problem in our society, or even remembers that it ever was." This mentality filtered into Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co. , where the local government was told that its affirmative action plan which benefited minority contractors was to be under "strict scrutiny". This meant that the standards for receiving benefits from affirmative action were higher. Now one had to do that much more to convince that an employer was practicing discrimination.
* 1990
The civil rights community reacted swiftly, proposing remedial legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1990. President Bush lobbied against the Act, which he mischaracterized as a "quota bill." He vetoed the legislation in October 1990.
That same year the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990 (ADA) was signed. The ADA's protection applies primarily but not exclusively, to "disabled" individuals. An individual is "disabled" if he or she meats at least one of the following tests:
* He or she has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of his/her major life activities;
* He or she has a record of such an impairment
* He or she is regarded as having such an impairment.
* 1991
The Senate had confirmed Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court associate justice, following the contentious Anita Hill hearings. Bush was surprised by the anger with which his prior year's civil rights veto was met. He was pressured into expressing support for a middle-of-the-road version of the corrective legislation, which Congress promptly passed.
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 did greatly help individual victims of discrimination who seek redress through the courts, although punitive damages available for non-race claims are now limited. But the legislative history of the Act demonstrates that Congress and the Bush Administration could not agree on the permissible scope of affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies for discrimination, leaving the issue to be decided case-by-case by an increasingly conservative federal judiciary. In an attempt to add credibility to his position, and in response to public pressure, President Bush and Congress created the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, a 21 member bipartisan body chaired by the Secretary of Labor.
* 1994
In the mid-term elections of 1994, only five weeks after the Senate confirmed Clinton's last major unfilled civil rights position (Gilbert Casellas as head of the EEOC), the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress. Crusading with their claimed mandate for a conservative "Contract With America," the GOP knocked the Clinton Administration into a defensive posture for the months to follow. The Clinton administration was unable to take the affirmative action initiatives it wanted to.
Sen. Phil Gramm, then also a hopeful GOP presidential candidate, said his opposition to race and gender "preferences" would be central to his campaign. As pressure grew in Congress for conservative legislation against affirmative action, President Clinton announced he would be conducting an "urgent review" of federal affirmative action programs by a task force that the Civil Rights Act of 1991 set up under Bush.
* 1995
In March 1995, the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission - established during the Bush administration, and headed by then Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole - issued its fact-finding report, Good For Business: Making Use of the Nation's Capital. Before Clinton's affirmative action review was concluded, an extremely conservative Supreme Court issued a 5/4 opinion in Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena. The decision restricted, but did not strike down, affirmative action in the granting of federal highway construction contracts. In an extension of the logic it had used against state and local governmental affirmative action programs in its 1989 decision in Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co. , the Court in Adarand held that federal government affirmative action programs would also be subject to "strict scrutiny."
Prior to Croson and Adarand, courts applied separate tests for judging governmental action which employed race as a criterion, depending on whether the use was "benign" (meant to include) or "invidious" (meant to exclude). If the use of race was invidious, a "strict scrutiny" standard applied, requiring that the government prove: (1) it was necessary to achieve a compelling government interest and, (2) it was narrowly tailored to accomplish this end. If the use of race was benign, an "intermediate scrutiny" standard only required that the government show the use of race was rationally related to accomplishing an important governmental goal.
By raising the standard used to review affirmative action, the Supreme Court erected yet another barrier to achieving a diverse work force. But the timing of the decision was politically fortuitous. Due to the fact that if a staunchly conservative Supreme Court upheld, but restricted, affirmative action, Congress didn't need to go further. In effect, it appeared the justices had taken up the President's line on affirmative action: "Mend it, don't end it."
A 1995 Harris poll found that while 68 % say they support "affirmative action," only 11 % responded positively to "preferences."
* 1996
Proposition 209, a California legislation was introduced and passed which bars affirmative action programs on a state level. The day after California voters passed Proposition 209 last fall, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a coalition of civil rights groups filed suit to block enforcement. U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson issued a preliminary injunction, ruling the ACLU was substantially likely to prevail on the merits.
* 1997
On April 9, 1997, a panel of three judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, ruling Proposition 209 was constitutional. The next day, the Clinton administration announced it would continue to challenge the state initiative.