If you’re wondering if you should go to that party you were invited to, let me tell you a story:
In 1959, John F. Kennedy went to a party. As a candidate seeking the Democratic nomination for president, Kennedy knew he needed the support of Black voters in the South. During the annual gala for the United Negro College Fund, Kennedy begged the supporters of historically Black colleges to back him in the Democratic primaries.
They said no.
Kennedy's primary opponent, fellow Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, had already secured the support of UNCF president Hobart Taylor Sr. A fellow Texan and one of the few multimillionaires in America, Taylor and Johnson had been quietly working together for years. Together, they helped topple Texas’s all-white primary system and, at the 1944 Democratic Convention, Johnson appointed Taylor as the first Black delegate from the South. In exchange for Taylor’s support, Johnson promised to do more for HBCUs and their graduates if he were to become president.
Kennedy knew Johnson was making empty promises.
After the Civil War, institutions of higher learning dedicated to educating the formerly enslaved were founded across America. The Morrill Acts created land-grant HBCUs, while churches, civic organizations and communities founded Black colleges and universities. But the term “HBCUs” wasn’t a legal term. And when it came to their graduates, Kennedy knew a president couldn’t force private companies to hire Black people.
Despite Johnson’s finessing Black voters with empty promises, Kennedy ultimately won the Democratic nomination and selected LBJ as his running mate. When they won, LBJ sent inauguration party tickets to Taylor’s brilliant son, attorney Hobart Taylor Jr.
As the younger Taylor passed through the line to shake the VP’s hand, Johnson told his old friend’s son to come by the office and holla at him! Of course, Taylor Jr. dismissed it. He was just there because his wife wanted to go. He knew the White House could do something for HBCUs. As an attorney, he even knew how JFK could stop employers from discriminating. But he also knew LBJ was a politician, so he figured his daddy’s friend was just making small talk at the party …
Until he got a call the next morning.
What happened next comes directly from an interview with Hobart Taylor Jr.:
[Johnson] said, “I thought I said ‘come to see me.” And so I said, ‘’Well, all right, I’ll come tomorrow then.”
I came down, and then that’s when he handed me a draft of the order establishing the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, of which I knew nothing, and he asked me to look it over and see what I thought about it. He gave me about an hour, and he put me in the ceremonial office over there next to him.
I looked it over, and I said, “Gosh, I’d do a lot of things differently if I were doing it … And he said, ‘’Would you write it the way you want it?”
I said, ‘’Well, yes, I could do that. When will you need it?”
He said, “How about tomorrow morning?”
He got me a room down at the Willard Hotel, and I worked on it all that night. I rewrote the darned thing.… I was searching for something that would give a sense of positiveness to performance under that Executive Order. And that is in the phrase:
“The contractor shall take affirmative action to carry out his obligations of equal employment.” And I took “affirmative” because it was alliterative.
Interviewer: What did you have in mind yourself by “affirmative action?”
Hobart Taylor: I just told you. First of all, I wanted to carry out the idea that people should do something.
P.S.: Five years later, Johnson signed the Higher Education Act. The landmark legislation created millions for Title III, Part B schools. What did that mean? Well, according to the bill:
The term ‘‘part B institution’’ means any historically Black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of Black Americans.
And that’s how affirmative action was invented.
Today’s Reading List:
Government Study: School Is Racist by Michael Harriot
The Great Land Robbery by Vann R. Newkirk II
Even Preschoolers Face Racial Bias, Study Finds by Gabby Galvin
A National Divorce: A thread by Michael Harriot
Thank you Dr. Mary M. Marshall, Laurel Fairchild, A'Lelia Bundles, Joy, TJC, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
