The protest targeted the Supreme Court on the day it began hearing arguments in two cases challenging the University of Michigan’s admissions policy. The university uses race as one criterion in judging applicants. Participants in the march recognized the case as an attack on affirmative action gains.

"We can’t let them take away our rights," said Brenda Hollis from nearby Bowie State University. She was part of the nearly 2,000 students from historically Black universities and colleges throughout the southeast who had held a rally in support of affirmative action at Howard University the night before.

Red T-shirts made a large contingent from United Auto Workers Local 600 in Dearborn, Michigan, stand out in the crowd. "They’re trying to take back gains we fought for many years ago," said UAW member Shirley Hynes. A busload of the unionists had ridden all night.

The day-long protest action was organized by student groups on campuses across the country under the umbrella of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). It was endorsed by a wide range of prominent national organizations, among them the NAACP; National Organization for Women; United Auto Workers; United Food and Commercial Workers; Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees; League of United Latin American Citizens; and the National Black Law Students Association.

As the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Michigan cases, a new front opened up in the attack on affirmative action. The so-called Center for Equal Opportunity and the American Civil Rights Institute, two groups that back the legal challenges to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies, sent out letters to about 30 universities stating that provisions in their scholarship and academic awards programs discriminate against students who are white. Five universities have indicated they will weaken their affirmative action policies or cancel the programs.

This month, under pressure from its state attorney, the board of Virginia Polytechnic Institute decided to eliminate virtually all of its affirmative action programs. The decision was met with widespread and vociferous protests from students and faculty, forcing the board to reconsider.

The administration of President George Bush filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting the efforts to challenge the University of Michigan affirmative action policies. Bush made the announcement in a January 15 national television address, arguing that the school’s admission policies "amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race." Affirmative action quotas, he said, "create another wrong, and thus perpetuate our divisions." Bush made these statements in the wake of the firestorm resulting from the racist remarks by former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who had praised the 1948 segregationist presidential ticket headed by Strom Thurmond.

The current assault on affirmative action builds on the accelerated attacks on it throughout the 1990s, mostly during the eight years that Democrat William Jefferson Clinton was in the White House.  
 
Clinton’s ‘mend, not end’ policy
Cheryl Hopwood and other students filed a legal challenge against the affirmative action admissions policy at the University of Texas law school in 1992. The university prevailed in the lower courts but Hopwood, as the case came to be known, won on appeal in 1996. The Fifth Circuit court ruled that any consideration of race in admissions is unconstitutional.

In 1995, Clinton ordered a review of federal affirmative action programs. In a nationally televised address saying that his policy would be to "mend, not end" affirmative action, Clinton made it clear that the review would target policies that gave force to affirmative action, such as any kind of numerical quotas "in theory or practice."

Two years later, the federal appeals courts lifted an injunction by a lower court in California against a ballot initiative that banned the use of affirmative action in education and employment. Following the passage of Proposition 209 in November 1996, thousands of students had staged demonstrations, marches, and building occupations, forcing a lower court to impose the injunction against its implementation.  
 
Gains out of titanic civil rights battles
The initial gains in affirmative action developed out of the titanic civil rights battles of the 1950s and ‘60s that overturned the Jim Crow system of legal segregation in the South. The civil rights movement quickly challenged the broader racial discrimination faced by Blacks in every corner of the country and in all its forms, including higher education.

These battles forced President Lyndon Johnson, a Texas segregationist and a Democrat, to sign the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which includes Title II barring racial discrimination in "public accommodations," and Title VII, prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, or national origin. In 1965 Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, which banned discrimination in federal employment and hiring by federal contractors. In 1969, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, in an effort to quiet demands that affirmative action be given teeth, issued an order establishing "goals and timetables" for hiring Black workers by companies holding federal contracts.

These laws codified what was won on the ground through mass actions, and provided the legal basis for affirmative action drives led by oppressed nationalities and women. Thousands of lawsuits were filed to break down hiring barriers. Women continued to fight their way into basic industry, which meant higher wages and greater unionization. At the same time, however, these gains began to be challenged in the courts.

Allan Bakke, an applicant to the University of California Davis medical school, sued the university in 1974, claiming to be a victim of "reverse discrimination." Bakke argued that he was denied entrance to the medical school while "less qualified" applicants had been admitted under an affirmative action program that set aside 16 slots for students from oppressed nationalities.

In the face of protests across the country, often led by Black and Chicano student organizations, the court was deeply divided with four justices voting for Bakke and four against. The deciding opinion was handed down by Justice Lewis Powell. He wrote that because the state has a "compelling interest" in "diversity," race could be used as one factor among many in the university’s affirmative action program. But the decision also snatched the teeth out of the program by declaring that the affirmative action quota system at the university "discriminated" on the basis of race and was therefore illegal. The university was ordered to admit Bakke.

One of the most significant cases in defense of affirmative action in the labor movement was the Weber challenge.

In 1974 the employers in the basic steel industry signed a court-ordered consent decree to establish a plant-wide seniority system. That meant workers hired into departments with the worst pay and job conditions would bid into jobs in other departments without losing seniority. The agreement also set hiring goals for women, and skilled craft apprenticeship goals for women, Black, and Latinos.  
 
The Weber case
Kaiser Aluminum Corporation signed a contract with the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) in 1974 stipulating that one female worker or member of an oppressed nationality be hired into the training program for craft jobs for every white male admitted. Until then the company had only hired workers with prior craft experience. Blacks had long been excluded from those types of jobs. At the Gramercy, Louisiana, Kaiser plant, for example, Blacks held only five of the 273 craft jobs--1.8 percent--although they made up about 39 percent of the workforce.

The same year Brian Weber, a lab technician at the Gramercy plant, filed a lawsuit to overturn the affirmative action plan, claiming it constituted "reverse discrimination" giving unfair advantage to Black and women workers.

When a U.S. district court ruled in favor of Weber in a 1976 trial, the Kaiser bosses ended the training program for all workers. The Steelworkers and other major unions as well as the AFL-CIO put their weight behind the battle to overturn the Weber decision. This led to the Supreme Court overturning of the ruling in 1979.

The defeat of the Weber challenge strengthened the USWA and marked a big victory for all working people. But the establishment of plant-wide seniority by the consent decree did not address discrimination in layoffs.

During economic downturns affirmative action gains can be wiped out as women, Blacks, and other oppressed nationalities often become the "last hired, first fired." This is part of how affirmative action gains were undermined in the quarter century that followed.
 
 
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