Supreme Court decisions set to be handed down in June are expected to end affirmative action throughout the country. The activist group is headed by Edward Blum, a former stockbroker who ran unsuccessfully for Congress from Texas in 1990, and since then has devoted himself to ending affirmative action through the courts. īoth of the cases about to be decided were brought by a group calling itself Students for Fair Admissions-one case against Harvard University, the other against the University of North Carolina. Previously, the court has upheld affirmative action policies or made only minor tweaks in almost 30 cases, including the Bakke decision. Supreme Court decisions on two cases set to be handed down in June are expected to end or at least sharply curtail affirmative action throughout the country. Įdward Blum: Sworn Enemy of Affirmative Action At the time, that was the highest percentage in the history of the iconic university, which was founded in 1636.
As late as 1959 the entering class at Harvard University contained a mere 18 Black students, just 1.5 percent.
The situation, while subtler, wasn’t much better at other “elite” universities. Some-mainly in the South- prohibited Black students entirely until forced by the federal government to integrate, mostly in the 1950s and early 1960s. Universities in the United States had a long history of racial exclusion. In the landmark 1978 United States Supreme Court decision that would give Bakke his place in history, t he court’s plurality opinion held that race was a legitimate factor to consider in college admissions, as a way to promote diversity on campus-a goal that the court believed led to better education for all students.
Initially, the point of affirmative action was to address and move toward rectifying the inequities caused by long histories of racial discrimination, promoting a society based on equal opportunity. He’d been an engineering major at the University of Minnesota and in 1967, after his four years in the Marines, he took a job at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in the heart of the region that would soon be known as Silicon Valley.įive years later, Bakke would become the national face of white backlash against the policy of “affirmative action,” the practice of including race as a criterion in university admissions and employment hiring. Back in 1973, Allan Bakke was a 33-year-old former Marine, Vietnam vet and married father of two who had a burning desire for a career change.
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