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Legal Concept of Affirmative Action

e University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund submitted a discussion of the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment. Arguments expressed on the floor of Congress during congressional debates, as well as in congressional testimony, demonstrate that Congress had in mind a series of race-conscious remedies for the wrongs prior to the Civil War when it drafted the Fourteenth Amendment. A number of social welfare programs enacted by Congress were done so expressly to benefit particular racial groups during the Reconstruction. Perhaps the most far-reaching of these programs was the 1866 Freedmen's Bureau Act, enacted a little more than a month after Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Freedmen's Bureau was established to provide land, buildings and funds for the education of the "freed peoples but provided no such assistance to white persons or war refugees. The same law specifically transferred disputed lands amounting to some 40,000 acres to "heads of families of African races." The law awarded federal charters to organizations created to support destitute black women and children and to serve as banks for "persons held in slavery" in the United States. No similar programs were set up for white refugees (Bakke, 1978, pp. 293294).

However, these programs were administered half-heartedly, if at all. Affirmative action was virtually strangled in infancy by the conservative judicial system immediately following the Civil War. Instead of promoting racial equality, the courts used the Fourteenth Amendment for decades following the war to defend property rights.

Whatever movement toward affirmative action that was achieved in the Reconstruction quickly came to an end with the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). In this historic case involving intrastate travel, the court ruled that the doctrine of "separate but equal" was valid. ...

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Legal Concept of Affirmative Action. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 12:19, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681368.html