Civil rights meeting. [LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto. #W425-34]

Retain Affirmative Action—Because It’s the Morally Right Thing to Do

Oct 09, 2012

By Aaron N. Taylor

[Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on October 8, 2012]

In his 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, President Lyndon B. Johnson lamented that even during the postwar boom, a period of unprecedented prosperity, black Americans were falling behind. This "widening gulf" was typified by unemployment rates that had gone from rough equivalence between blacks and whites just after the Second World War to almost double for blacks by 1965. The period also saw declining income, wealth, and health-care outcomes among blacks relative to whites. "Negroes," according to LBJ, were "trapped ... in inherited, gateless poverty." read more

Aaron N. Taylor is an assistant professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law.