In June of 1963, an executive order by President John F. Kennedy prohibited discrimination, and called for “affirmative action,” in government-contracted construction employment. This was the first time this term was used, but it was only vaguely defined. It would not be until 1969, with President Richard M. Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan, that those bidding on government contracts would have to submit “affirmative action plans” detailing goals and targets for “minority manpower utilization.”
The most controversial element of the plan, finalized in September 1969, established numerical targets, defined as a percentage range of minority workers to be employed from a particular trade on each contract. Employers were required to provide statistical evidence of their compliance. Noncompliance could lead to the loss of federal contracts or litigation and legal penalties under federal civil rights law.
Affirmative action is usually thought of solely as a top-down bureaucratic creation, part of a regulatory state that would use such language as “minority manpower utilization.” Sugrue argues that this remedy to institutional racism was government’s response to pressure from below. The grassroots demanded change, and affirmative action is what “emerged amid a great and unresolved contest over race, employment, and civil rights that played out in the streets, union halls, and workplaces of the urban North.”
Sugrue details how the gradualism of civil rights organizations in the 1950s in Northern cities like Philadelphia failed to end employment discrimination or desegregate unions. For instance, a 1953 effort to open department store jobs to Blacks cautiously “avoided all publicity” and consequently got nowhere. Brasher, more militant strategies like boycotts and picketing came with the 1960s. In fact, protests in Philadelphia in 1963 turned violent as “police officers, unionists, and demonstrators clashed.”
As in the South, violence is what got federal attention. That attention ultimately codified affirmative action. It was perhaps ironic that this happened under a Republican administration that also honed the “law and order” racial dog-whistle, encouraged construction workers to attack peace protesters, and then launched the “Southern Strategy” to move Southern white voters from the Democratic to Republican column.
In the more than half a century since the civil rights era, affirmative action has become that period’s “most fiercely contested legacy.” Affirmative action’s original point, to desegregate employment opportunities in the face of entrenched white supremacy, has been lost in the noise.