AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

Affirmative Action was created to obliterate the wrongs that white Americans had done to individuals because of color, race, religion, and gender, depriving them of the rights of equality guaranteed them under American constitutional law. The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, stated that all men are created equal and endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These tenets were embodied in the Constitution in 1787 and in the amendments that followed. But the equality was on paper only. At the time when the Declaration of Independence was written, there were 125,000 black slaves who were in no way considered equal to their white masters. Even after Lincoln's act of emancipation, the color of their skin denied them most of the rights enjoyed by many white Americans (Eastland & Bennett, 1979, p. 24). Thus, President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson sought the solution to bring equality to all and then brought about the remedyùAffirmative Action.

The plan, with its numerical quotas that forged a path into government offices, into business communities, and into

academic institutions, proposed to bring the minority victims of racial, religious, and gender prejudice into the state of equality promised by the Constitution. Therefore, Affirmative Action was defensible under Constitutional law. The specific steps Affirmat

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same phenomenon began to occur in academic institutions in the area of faculty, administration, and staff hiring. By the middle l970s, a university was required to determine the availability pools of labor qualified for each job, from janitor, electrician, and secretary to provost and professor. A university would have to compare by job category the number of minorities in its work forces with their estimated availability. Starting in the late 1960s, universities sympathetic to the educational state of minorities began to adopt admissions policies weighted in favor of minority applicants. Large numbers of minorities were admitted in spite of their qualifications and because of their race. Non-minorities who would have been admitted had conventional admission policies reigned were not admitted. At the graduate and professional level, this policy was disastrous. The decision as to who could become a doctor or a dentist and who would not was the result of satisfying a numerical quota (Eastland & Bennett, 1979, p. 137). This was the turnaround. Admission policies under Affirmative Action that adhered to numerical equality in order to bring minorities into the mainstream, namely the proposition under the Equal Protection cla
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Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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