This ‘father of affirmative action’ was a Kansan who lived in Junction City and Topeka

Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum and a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission.

The Supreme Court will take up the issue of affirmative action in a pair of student admission cases asking the court to overturn its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the University of Michigan’s practice of considering race in its undergraduate admissions process to diversify its student body.

The Harvard case questions whether the university has violated the Civil Rights Act by capping Asian American student admissions. Considering that we may remember this court as one of the most hostile ever to African American civil rights, affirmative action is likely on its last leg.

That’s sad, considering that the man a national newspaper called the “father of affirmative action,” Arthur Fletcher, grew up here in Kansas. Many of his struggles remain struggles for Black Americans, long after his lifetime of work to make things better.

I first learned about Fletcher from my mentor, the famed Wichita architect Charles McAfee. I eventually wrote a column about his life and that column appears in my 2017 book, “Some Were Paupers, Some Were Kings,” published by Blue Cedar Press.

Fletcher devised a plan forcing Philadelphia construction companies working under federal contracts to establish minority hiring goals and to make good-faith progress on those goals or face substantial penalties as the assistant labor secretary in the 1960s.

People pilloried the plan, criticizing its reliance on counting and quotas, but it became a model for similar programs nationwide.

“We have no problem counting who’s on welfare, we have no problem counting who’s in jail, we have no problem counting who’s on (Aid to Families with Dependent Children),” Fletcher, a trailblazing Black Republican, once told The Wichita Eagle. “What’s wrong with counting success?”

Indeed.

Success in that case meant a fairer distribution of access and opportunity, something that these admission policies under scrutiny by the high court mean to address.

U.S. House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott of Virginia recently filed a brief along with 64 other House Democrats urging the Supreme Court to uphold a college or university’s ability to factor race into college admission processes.

“Even with the use of a race-conscious admissions program, the University of North Carolina (UNC) ‘continues to face challenges admitting and enrolling underrepresented minorities, particularly African American males, Hispanics, and Native Americans,’ ” the group wrote.

That underrepresentation isn’t accidental. It is the direct result of centuries of policy and custom. No fewer than 12 generations of Black people endured state-sanctioned and state-sponsored discrimination and terror.

These terrors — physical, financial and psychological — are the offspring of our racial caste system, and they persist today. Our wealth gaps, our health disparities, our school achievement gaps and the continuous spate of extra-judicial killings of unarmed Black people by police fit neatly inside our racial caste system.

Fletcher eventually advised four U.S. presidents: Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He served as the deputy assistant for urban affairs and as the chairman of the Civil Rights Commission.

But years earlier, when he played football, three teams in the Big Six Conference wouldn’t play a team with a Black athlete.

He couldn’t teach here in Kansas, despite a degree, because that could mean possibly instructing white girls. He attended Washburn University on the G.I. Bill but couldn’t live in on-campus G.I. housing.

He graduated and played pro football, but no white employer would hire him, so he got a job delivering ice.

“I’m a college graduate ice man, and the joke of the town,” he once said in a Wichita Eagle interview.

Cases such as the one the court will hear soon emerge in an existence undisturbed by the kind of ugliness Fletcher and other Black people experienced and continue to confront. People plan to stand in front of the high court and with a straight face claim race no longer matters in this society.

In a statement reported last week by Kansas Reflector, Scott said it well: “Narrowly tailored admissions policies that recognize race as one criterion — out of many criteria for evaluating prospective students — are a key tool to realize diverse learning environments and address continued educational inequity.”

Interestingly, Fletcher is credited with coining the phrase, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” for the United Negro College Fund. His life taught him much about opportunities and success. He was right. We should be able to count successes as well as challenges.

It only seems fair that universities be allowed to use race as one factor in their decision-making.

Especially when police, voter suppressors, prosecutors, juries, bank loan officers and many others already regularly do this in their dealings with Black people.

Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.