American Social Science and the Invention of Affirmative Action, 1920s–1970s

Abstract

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the commencement address at Howard University, the federally sponsored historic black college. In the last decade, Americans had become increasingly aware of the civil rights movement in American politics and society, and of the injection of the issues revolving around civil rights for black Americans into the national public discourse. President Johnson took a new angle of attack to the problem of discimination against black Americans. Instead of focusing on the political and legal aspects of Jim Crow legislation, or the constitutional struggles for civil rights in education and voting, or the plight of black Americans in the South, he spoke – with great passion – about the social and economic circumstances of African Americans throughout the nation, including those trapped in the large urban ghettos in the Northeast, the Middle West, and the West. “In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope,” he argued.