Jul 26, 2024 by Steve Brigham

In 2005, Ira Katznelson published a provocative book, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. It told the unvarnished truth about a period in America—from the New Deal in the 1930s to the G.I. Bill in the 1950s—when federal politics and policy dictated that Whites would comprehensively accrue benefits while Blacks would essentially sit on the sidelines.

The book was an eye-opener for me during my four years of research writing It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field. It simply hadn’t occurred to me how strategic and methodical White leaders had been throughout our history to preserve White advantage intentionally.

It goes without saying how Whites’ wholesale enslaving of Black people for the first 75+ years of our nation’s history (not to mention the even more extended period of slavery that accompanied the British colonization of the 13 colonies starting in 1619) was the foundation of White advantage.

It is also obvious—hopefully to all—that the century-long period of Jim Crow (1865-1964) also purposefully and comprehensively preserved Whites’ perch atop the American racial caste system. Yes, in the South and the North right after the Civil War ended. But also in the Midwest, the Mountain States, and the Far West, in which the U.S. had steadily captured and seized land across much of what is now the U.S. by 1865.

Much of that came from the spoils of the Mexican-American War when Mexico was forced to give up territory that became California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. These additions extended the reach of White domination over Blacks and people of all other races.

By 1964, America had added 15 more states into the fold, and needless to say, all conformed to and embraced Jim Crow and other pervasive systems of White advantage.

Katznelson’s book reminds us just how malicious, oppressive, and discriminatory these White-innovated systems were.  

Even if you isolated each major incident, it most often conferred great new wealth for Whites while keeping Blacks from accruing any new wealth at all. Yet, these were not isolated incidents. They were sequential and compounding.

Here’s a quick accounting of eighteen from the 1860s to the 1960s.

1. The Homestead Act – enacted during the Civil War- provided any adult citizen to claim 160 acres of land with the simple obligation to build a dwelling and cultivate the land. More than 1.6 million White families benefited and, as a result of owning the land, could build capital, accumulate wealth, and pass the wealth on to successive generations. Approximately 46 million people are adult descendants of those original families. Only a few Black families received land from this, and the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 (for poorer quality land in the South) received land estimated at less than 10,000 over many decades. The Act was in force for 100 years, and its ripple effects persist.
2. Compromise of 1877—This ended the brief era of Reconstruction and relegated Blacks, already under intense conflict across the South, to lose any protections for their civil, economic, and political rights that Reconstruction briefly provided in southern states.
3. Black Codes and Jim Crow laws – the legal framework to ensure Blacks stayed at the bottom of the racial, economic, and social caste for another century, preventing access to higher quality amenities (schools, hospitals, parks, other investments) for decades.
4. Plessy vs. Ferguson -an 1896 Supreme Court ruling that legalized racial segregation in public facilities, schools, and transportation, creating barriers that relegated Blacks to 2^nd-class citizenship for an additional 68 years.
5. Convict Leasing – a form of neoslavery that consigned at least 800,000 Blacks (primarily men) to perform hard labor for free for large companies, small businesses, farmers, and county and state governments. African Americans were most often jailed and sentenced to brutal labor camps for trivial offenses (think vagrancy, loitering, being out after dark) for a half-century. All these White-owned or White-led entities—not to mention White executives, managers, and employees—benefited significantly from this free labor from the 1880s until the 1930s.
6.  Sharecropping—effectively a form of indentured servitude with Black families “renting” small plots of land to cultivate from White landowners. By 1900, 85% of Black farmers were sharecroppers in Mississippi, with similar percentages in other southern states. The “rent” they paid placed them in a perpetual cycle of debt to the White landlord as Black farmers had no access to credit for supplies or equipment. White landowners profited handsomely; Blacks were unable to create any wealth. Sharecropping ran from the end of the Civil War until, in some places, the 1960s, but the practice became less prominent during the Great Depression and World War II.
7. Creation of the Black Ghetto – throughout the entire Great Migration (1910-1970), White leaders in every major to minor city intentionally restricted where Blacks could live, effectively creating hundreds of urban ghettos throughout the U.S. during this time. Ghettos featured lower-quality housing, few common amenities, and minimal-to-no public investment. As Black migration increased to cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, White city leaders restricted any expansion of the boundaries where African Americans could live, intensifying the demands for already low-quality apartments and tenement houses, further concentrating poverty, and increasing levels of public and private disinvestment.
8. Redlining—a federal policy instituted in 1933 by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), which denoted neighborhoods for which it would (greenlined) and wouldn’t (redlined) invest. Areas where Black families lived were rated hazardous (and White areas, least risky). This led for the next many decades to high rates of homeownership in White neighborhoods and exceedingly low rates in Black neighborhoods. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), instituted a year later), provided federally-backed mortgage insurance to those buying homes. Redlining and federally backed mortgages led in the next 3.5 decades to “hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth creation for the White middle class.” ("Redlining Revisited," Maryland Matters, 10/14/24, link.) 
9. Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA, 1933-1942)—a federal employment program creating 20 million skilled and unskilled jobs in local and state government to develop facilities on public lands across the U.S. Whites received access to the higher-skilled and higher-paying jobs while Blacks were often excluded from the programs and when included, offered the least skilled jobs while getting paid beneath the officially stipulated wage.
10. Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1942)—a federal public work relief program for 3 million unemployed, unmarried men aged 17-28. Again, White men participated in huge numbers, were not excluded from any jobs, and were often provided opportunities to develop higher skills. In contrast, African American men participated, when allowed by local officials, in segregated camps for the most menial jobs.
11. The Social Security Act (1935) created the first “old-age” benefits for workers, unemployment insurance, and aid for dependent mothers and children, among other benefits. However, because of significant pushback from southern politicians, agricultural laborers and domestic servants, both of which were dominated by low-wage Black workers (and 60% of Black workers at that time), were excluded from the Act.
12.  The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 banned oppressive child labor and set a minimum hourly wage and maximum workweek. Again, due to Southern political pushback, the Act excluded domestic and agricultural workers. Thus, many Blacks were not allowed to make minimum wage or secure overtime pay for their work.
13. National Labor Relations Act of 1935—put in place to protect workers’ rights and encourage collective bargaining. Although the Act led to far more workers being protected and able to work in union environments, African American workers were often excluded from joining unions and, when they did, were subject to gross acts of discrimination in which their union participation was intentionally diminished. Their access to union jobs was relegated to the lowest-paid and lowest-skilled jobs from the 1930s through the 1970s. Thus, during those 40 years, tens of millions of Whites (primarily men) enjoyed unbridled access to higher-paying and higher-skilled jobs (and thus, significant wealth-building) while Blacks toiled in low-paying jobs with minimal prospects for generating new wealth.
14. The GI Bill (1944-1956)—was created to help World War II veterans with low-interest mortgages and free tuition in colleges and trade schools. White G.I.’s received the vast majority of the 4.3 million home loans issued (worth $33 billion). White G.I.’s were far more often placed into 4-year college programs leading to more high-paying careers. Black G.I.’s received only a tiny share of the 4.3 million home loans issued due to the G.I. bill.  A disproportionate percentage of black veterans were dishonorably discharged from the military and thus ineligible for benefits. Most Black veterans were forced into segregated and underfunded vocational training programs, and even there were provided inadequate equipment to train for trades like plumbing, electricity, and printing. The program continued with veterans of the Korean War (1950-1956), in which the program continued to discriminate against Black veterans.

Benefiting White People and Disadvantaging Black People: Key Federal Acts and A Supreme Court Decision (1949-1956)

15. The Housing Act of 1949—provided funds to cities to renovate blighted areas classified as slums or buildings deemed unsafe and uninhabitable. It also provided funding to build racially segregated public housing. This act cleared the way to start slum “removal,” or as James Baldwin named it, “negro removal.” It effectively destroyed parts of tight-knit Black neighborhoods where African American neighbors had no recourse to contest any decision made by White city leaders to conduct removal “projects.”
16. The 1954 Berman v. Parker U.S. Supreme Court decision. The Court ruled that a property could be condemned and taken by the federal government solely to beautify a community for the general public's benefit. Over the following several decades, White-led cities, small and large, used this decision to displace many Black residents and residents with limited incomes to the benefit of private interests.
17. The Housing Act of 1954 replaced policies focused on building public housing with ones focused primarily on commercially oriented urban renewal. In part, the Act sanctioned the adoption of code enforcements, relocated urban dwellers, and presumably prevented the further spread of “urban blight.” It also enticed developers to redevelop urban parcels by providing FHA-backed mortgages, which Blacks could rarely apply for. (The Housing Act of 1954: The Sea Change in National Urban Policy, Richard M. Flanagan, November 1, 1997.)  None of the actions taken in the follow-on to this Act benefited Black residents or Black neighborhoods once implemented.
18. Federal Highway Act of 1956—gave state and federal governments complete control over the construction of new highways for more than two decades. In and near cities, White leaders almost always routed them directly through urban (primarily Black) neighborhoods, isolating or destroying many. Ninety percent of the highway funding and the “slum clearance” was federal. “This resulted in a serious degradation of the tax bases of many cities, isolated entire neighborhoods, and meant that most commuters bypassed existing commercial districts.” Link

What was the net outcome of these four actions?

For Whites. As Whites moved to the suburbs, the new highways from downtown to outside the city enabled them to keep well-paying jobs in urban job centers. As White federal and local leaders built more public housing, whites were able to segregate the public housing for Blacks in segregated, essentially ghetto neighborhoods, preserving White people’s ability to maintain and increase their home values.

For Blacks. Across hundreds of cities, several million African Americans (and a much smaller number of Latinos) were displaced, with the vast majority failing to receive housing relocation funds. Many had to move into inner-city public housing, which quickly fell into decline. Many Black business owners had to close their businesses and could not reopen elsewhere. Most Blacks residents and business owners were forced to stay in segregated Black-only neighborhoods where public investment was sparing. White flight from cities caused most cities to fall into economic decline due to significantly reduced tax revenues, and thus, many inner-city neighborhoods fell further into physical disrepair.

Why am I telling you this?

Let’s return to the bugaboo that has been official affirmative action policies since its inception in the early 1960s..

When President John F. Kennedy Jr. issued the first affirmative action executive order in 1961, it instructed federal contractors to take affirmative action to treat all applicants equally, including based on race. In addition to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Presidents Johnson and Nixon issued numerous other executive and administrative orders to advance affirmative action in the hiring of minorities and the utilization of minority business enterprises. 

Implementing affirmative action and providing equal opportunity was another story altogether. Change came slowly. By the 1970s, in influential, powerful, white circles, affirmative action became synonymous with, of all things, reverse discrimination. White power brokers and many white citizens began to resent opportunities afforded to blacks and other citizens of color. By the late 1970s, affirmative action policies were being taken to court by those opposing programs that used quotas.

Even before these policies had a chance to begin to reverse the long history of wrongs, sins, and injustices, they became another chapter in our nation's struggle for equal opportunity and a central example of White resistance and pushback whenever evidence of African American progress emerged.

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At its essence, affirmative action favors one racial group—and individuals belonging to those groups—in policies and practices such as the allocation of resources, the hiring of workers, or the provision of loans for housing at the expense of other racial groups.  

Does this sound familiar to the above list of 18 government-sanctioned actions taken from the 1860s to the 1960s?

It should. The entire legal, political, and policy framework in the U.S., dating back to 1787, advantaged White people.

That’s right … our nation was founded and built upon affirmative action for Whites.

And, as you look at systems and structures still resident in our nation, you can see there is still widespread affirmative action for Whites. We will explore many of those in subsequent posts.

The final four images courtesy of ChatGPT.

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