he legacy of slavery and racism. Segregation, institutionalized in the Jim Crow policies authorized under Plessy v. Ferguson, was overturned only in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education. From 1954 to 1969, when the Nixon administration firmly established affirmative action as national policy, Blacks were largely confined to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder and to a great though somewhat lesser extent they still are. They remain severely under-represented in professions. Comparatively few Blacks owned or own businesses of any size. In higher education, Blacks do worse on the measures used by universities to assess applicants and so, before affirmative action, were largely excluded especially from the better programs in higher education. Color blind admissions would mean, for example, that Black enrollment at law schools would drop from between 60 percent to 80 percent. The most plausible explanation for these grim facts is historical and continuing racism, much of it governmentally authorized or sanctioned at least through the end of the 1960s. There is no reason to suppose that Blacks are innately less able than whites to excel in employment, business, or education. Blacks have also been disproportionately excluded from political representation. Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Blacks were effectively denied the right to vote in many states. Making voting districts, racial bloc voting, and winner-take all elections ensure that Blacks are still less able than whites to gain public office. The Grandfather clause was instituted in many of the Southern states in a response to the Fifteenth Amendment. This clause restricted anyone from voting if their grandfather had not voted. Since most of the Blacks' grandfathers were not allowed to vote, they in turn were not allowed to vote.Against this unhappy background, it was recognized early in the civil rights revolution that strict color-blind policies were inadequate to remedy the...
