Part 1: Transformation

Fact Sheet

Transcript

WARD CONNERLY:
This is a key moment in American life. We have grappled with this issue of race for decades, for generations. And one has to ask: What kind of society do we want? Affirmative action is an idea that's outlived its time.

Narrator: In the 21st century, affirmative action is still a hot-button issue. Ballot measures ending affirmative action have passed in California and Washington state, with devastating consequences.

ERIC BROOKS:
In my year, I was the only African American in my class. The same numbers could be said for Latino and Chicano students.

Narrator: In 1999, Florida Governor Jeb Bush ended affirmative action in the state with an executive order. In the past few years, half a dozen other states have introduced similar measures.

JENNIFER GRATZ WITH CONSTITUENTS: We have to make sure that people know a 'yes' vote ends these policies.

Narrator: And this November, an initiative to end affirmative action will appear on the Michigan ballot.

ANDREA GUERRERO:
It would end affirmative action, it would end the opportunities that many students of color have to attend the universities. It would not end the system of privileges that is in place for the wealthy and the white.

Narrator: The assault on affirmative action is spreading. But many Americans fail to understand its original intent, or the ways affirmative action has changed the nation-for the better. In the mid 1960s, it was clear that the time had come for America to address its legacy of racial exclusion.

Martin Luther King Jr.: There's nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it, who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have stake in their society protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.

Narrator: Though the 1964 Civil Rights Act ended legalized racism, persistent inequalities in jobs and education demanded stronger remedies. During a speech at Howard University, President Lyndon Johnson acknowledged that it would take more than his signature on a piece of paper to make equality a fact of everyday life.

President Johnson: Freedom is not enough. You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

CHRISTOPHER EDLEY:
Forward-thinking leaders were asking themselves what kind of measures would it take to create genuine opportunity and to truly dismantle Jim Crow. America was coming out of a period of hundreds of years of entrenched racial hierarchy, and changing the habits of individuals in their hearts and in their work places was going to take more than simply saying 'thou shalt not discriminate.' It's going to take affirmative action to get people to open up opportunities, to get people to counteract the old habits of thought and behavior.

Narrator: The idea was to find ways to identify talented and qualified women and minorities. Affirmative action would give them access to the institutions from which they ha d long been excluded. Jobs, trades, public contracts, and entire professions that had excluded women and people of color were open to them for the first time. But it was on the nation's college and university campuses that affirmative action had the most immediate impact.

ANDREA GUERRERO:
The institutions of higher education were almost entirely white...so you had classes of...white men learning in a context that was devoid of any kind of significant levels of diversity.

PAT HAYASHI:
When I started in Berkeley in 1963, in all the classes I was in, I was the only Asian, and there were no Blacks and no Hispanics in any of the classes I took until I graduated, and so it was white...and that was what Berkeley looked like, which was at the time probably the largest and most prestigious public university in the country.

ANGELA HARRIS:
The old story would always be 'oh, we'd love to have more students of color, but we just can't find them.'...Affirmative action was a way of saying, 'ok, you will find them, and you will find this many, or you're going to be in serious trouble'. And so it was a way of enforcing the anti-discrimination principles that were already in place.

Narrator: By the 1970s, universities across the country were being transformed.

PAT HAYASHI:
When I was appointed associate vice chancellor for admissions...that year the entering class was 33 percent Black and Hispanic and American Indian, and another probably 15 percent Asian. So we were at that time between 40 and 50 percent people of color... That's the kind of change that took place in 20 years, 25 years. It was remarkable.

Narrator: For the first time, America's public universities began to look like America itself.

WALTER ALLEN:
Now they had women in sizeable percentage, now they had color in terms of Blacks, Chicanos, Latinos, Asians, in the graduating classes.

PATRICK HAYASHI:
I looked at the quality of students that we admitted, and we found from top to bottom that the class we admitted when we had affirmative action was better qualified in standard academic terms than the class we admitted before there was affirmative action. By any standard-academic, social, educational-it a was a resounding success.

ANGELA HARRIS:
As women, as people of color started to finally make it through the gates into higher education, they started looking around realizing that the curricula, the readings, the faculty, nothing looked like them, nothing reflected the lives that they knew and their experiences... It became really a mission not just to include these formerly excluded people into a curriculum that was set, but really to enrich and change the conversation. So it was really a transformative moment intellectually.

PAT HAYASHI:
The whole curriculum went through a renaissance...In women's studies, in Asian American studies, and what we called at the time Black Studies and Chicano studies and Native American studies...'Renaissance' was a little bit too tame, it was really an upheaval.

NATIVE AMERICAN TEACHER IN CLASSROOM: This is really, like I say, that minority faculty get all of the time and majority faculty rarely get. And it's a question of the insider vs the outsider perspective..."

WALTER ALLEN:
It produced this healthy, overdue debate about what a university in the modern world should look like. What should it teach, who should be involved in it?

NATIVE AMERICAN PROFESSOR: I as an American Indian teaching about American Indians, I'm giving you an inside perspective, OK? Someone from the history department teaching about Indian history is giving you an outside perspective.

WALTER ALLEN:
Affirmative action was in its full bloom. It was having its full effect on universities across the country. And I cannot sufficiently articulate the excitement I felt when I came into the classrooms at UCLA and saw this rainbow of students.

Narrator: Even at its height, affirmative action was often misunderstood. Many Americans thought it was an advantage offered to minority students, when in truth, it was a way to offset other preferences that advantaged whites.

PAT HAYASHI:
The largest number of preferences not based on academic qualifications went to white students...and sometimes I would get in extended conversations with students about preferences, and they would say, 'people should be judged on strict academic merit.' And I said, 'well, I have bad news for you: you weren't admitted because of your grades and test scores...you were admitted because you were from a rural school, or you were admitted because...you were a Division 1 athlete.' And they say, 'oh.' But it's odd-it wouldn't change their mind. People tend to think that preferences are attached to someone else.

Narrator: As people of color entered jobs, professions, and academic institutions that had long been closed to them, resentment grew among a number of white Americans.

ANGRY WHITE MAN: I'm sorry that people had to go to the back of the bus, but I was not here when it happened. I don't feel that I owe a Black a thing for what happened in the past. Why should I be discriminated against because I'm white?

Narrator: By the mid-1970s, the backlash against affirmative action came to a head. Opponents had found an argument and a buzzword that would resonate for years to come: reverse discrimination.

ABC NEWSCAST/HARRY REASONER: Good evening. One major story dominates the news today: the Supreme Court decision concerning this man, Allan Bakke, and his charge of reverse discrimination.

Narrator: Allan Bakke had been denied admission to over a dozen medical schools, including the one at the University of California at Davis. He sued Davis, arguing that affirmative action offered minorities an unfair advantage in admissions. Dr. Toni Chavis was admitted to the UC Davis Medical School in 1973, the same year Allan Bakke was rejected.

TONI CHAVIS:
I came as well qualified or more qualified. Statistics have never come out to show how many white counterparts in my class had grade point averages far below Bakke's, which in fact was a large percentage...and that grades, medical examination scores have never and never will be the sole indicator getting into med school.

ABC NEWSCAST/SAM DONALDSON: Allan Bakke won his reverse discrimination case today, but affirmative action programs to help minority students won also. For the first time...

Narrator: In June 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that Bakke had been discriminated against because of his race. But the court also allowed affirmative action to continue as long as there was no rigid quota system. But by introducing language like'reverse discrimination' and 'racial preferences', the Bakke case lay the foundation for those who would challenge affirmative action over the next three decades.