DEI Sanctuary

Tag: affirmative-action

  • Fractality in Affirmative Action: A Report from Atlanta, Jan. 1963

    Archives released by the Kennedy Presidential Library in 2024 suggest that affirmative action has a fractal history or self-similarity which invites us us to sum up 64 years of history by reading one 23-page document. The document that we will introduce after a brief background discussion provides an early survey of the earliest federal attempt to advance affirmative action in private employment. The language of the report is haunted by ghosts that today ride triumphant in their spirit of backlash.

    Background to the occasion comes in the form of an Oct. 2024 announcement by the Kennedy Library of the opening of the James Joseph Kruse Personal Papers. Kruse was an important figure in the earliest days of affirmative action as an implementer of a program called Plans for Progress, that is described in the following words by the Kennedy Library announcement:

    The Plans for Progress program was developed as part of the  President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which was established in 1961. The same year, the Lockheed-Georgia Company received a number of complaints of discrimination that were processed through the Committee. This became the genesis of the Plans for Progress program, which was an approach to enlist the aid of industrial firms in attempting to find a solution to the problem of equal employment opportunity.

    The purpose of the program was to obtain voluntary agreements against pre- and post-employment discrimination entered into by private employers with the U.S. Government. On May 25, 1961 Lockheed Aircraft Corporation signed the first “Plan for Progress” at the White House and by July 12, 1961 an additional eight companies had signed on; the subcommittee was officially established in August 1961. A major portion of the program included statistical analysis and employment statistics by both industry and the federal government. By June of 1962 the program consisted of 85 participating firms which included an employment population of 4,400,000 persons, and by January of 1963 the program had grown to 104 participants. 

    With this overview of Plans for Progress in mind, we turn attention to a document archived as part of the John G. Feild Personal Papers which was released in digitized form in May 2024. This is the 23 page star of the show today.

    In January 1963 the Southern Regional Council (SRC) issued a Special Report that surveyed the impact that Plans for Progress were having on Black employment in the Atlanta area.

    Under the title “Plans for Progress: Atlanta Survey,” the SRC report began by recalling the history that brought the program into existence, beginning with President Kennedy signing Executive Order 10925 on March 6, 1961 that established the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO).

    As Kennesaw State University professor Randall Patton reports in his book Lockheed, Atlanta, and the Struggle for Racial Integration, there was a resistance movement brewing among Black employees of the Lockheed corporation’s operations in Georgia. The NAACP was supporting the worker’s complaints. And on March 28, 1961, “current and former black Lockheed employees formed the Observatory Council on Discrimination to launch “‘an all-out campaign to eliminate . . . unfair, discriminatory, and segregated practices’ at the Marietta location” (Patton 81).

    When the President’s Committee met for the first time on April 11, 1961, they immediately took up the Lockheed matter, with the chairman of the committee, LBJ, vowing to bring Lockheed into compliance with Executive Order 10925 (Patton 82).

    (To be continued)

  • John G. Feild

    He is listed as Executive Director of The President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO) in the first annual report that covered the committee’s actions through Jan. 15, 1962.

    In an oral interview conducted for the Kennedy presidential library, John G. Feild discusses the role that he played in drafting Executive Order 10925:

    There were two areas that I was very much involved in, one was the requirement for reporting. One of the great lacks that the previous experience had demonstrated was they had no factual information to know how many Negroes were working where, and I felt strongly that we had to have that, we had to have bench marks, and that was ultimately bled into it.

    Secondly, the concept of affirmative action, that we ought to be in a position to require, in the public interest, more performance of a government contractor than we would of a private employer, and that concept was built into it. I still regard those as two of the most important; the decision to do it, the decision upon its main lines was pretty much agreed to by Johnson, by Fortas. Fortas‟ great contribution, as I remember it, was they were going to give merit awards to all good guys. I‟m sure he made more than that.

    Johnson, of course, was Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s Vice President and the chairman of the PCEEO. Fortas was Abraham “Abe” Fortas, a Rhodes Scholar lawyer from Memphis, TN, who helped Johnson with legal issues in the 1948 Democratic primary, and was later appointed by Johnson to the US Supreme Court.

    Feild describes himself as part of the civil rights unit of the Kennedy team.

    After returning from World War II to his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, John G. Feild worked as a secretary for the American Veterans Committee and served on the Mayor’s Interracial Committee, working to pass city and state anti-discrimination laws. He soon went to work as the first director of the Michigan Fair Employment Practices Commission, and in 1960, helped with Senator John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. (Kennedy Library Blog)