This month, the United States Supreme Court reconvenes to answer important legal questions, including a series of affirmative action cases. One case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, seeks to redefine the role of race in college admissions by establishing a colorblind, or race-neutral, application process. Racial colorblindness involves eliminating categories of race in order to prevent discrimination. Yet, this racial ideology has a long, complex history as it relates to college admissions, the Black intellectual tradition, and today’s assault on affirmative action and race-conscious policies.
In 1935, the all-white University of Maryland rejected Donald Murray’s application to the law school because of his race. Due to the Plessy (1896) decision’s “separate but equal” standard, the university could legally discriminate against Murray as a Black applicant. The case stemmed from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) efforts to desegregate historically white universities in the early stages of the civil rights movement. Two lawyers, Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, spearheaded the trial on Murray’s behalf through a colorblind legal strategy. When questioning University of Maryland President Raymond Pearson, Houston posed a simple question: if a student were to leave their race off of an application, would they be admitted to the university? According to Pearson, all qualified students would be admitted to the university through a race-neutral application process. In order to subvert a system of race-conscious segregation, the NAACP recognized the value of colorblind policies and procedures.
The colorblind legal strategy in Murray is important because it opened admissions in other states, such as Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, and Oklahoma. This collection of cases eventually produced the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board (1954), a decision that eliminated segregation in education throughout the US. A decade after Brown, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reinforced colorblindness by outlawing racial discrimination, though it did not provide redress for the history of segregation and Black Americans’ experiences. The Brown decision and passage of the Civil Rights Act were monumental moments in American history, and the early higher education desegregation cases now constitute part of “the long civil rights movement”—an expanded conceptualization and chronology of the mid-century racial justice struggle.