The policy for which Fletcher is remembered, and that earned him the nickname “the father of affirmative action,” was introduced that June. It started as a modest tweak to the federal contracting process. The construction firms and tradesmen who were winning federal contracts at the time were almost all white, a reflection of how segregated local trade unions were. “We even found Italians with green cards who couldn’t speak English, let alone read or write a word, sentence, or paragraph — yet who were working on federal contracts,” Fletcher wrote. Meanwhile, the same contractors were claiming they couldn’t find qualified Black workers, an assertion that Fletcher decided to test by forcing them to integrate. He added a provision to federal contracts that required contractors to set “goals and timetables” for hiring more Black and non-white workers, expressed as percentages that were to be increased over four years.
The Revised Philadelphia Plan, as his initiative was called, is now considered the first example of “hard” affirmative action implemented by the federal government, a term that acknowledged that merely outlawing legal discrimination was insufficient redress for the wreckage wrought by two centuries of discrimination. Proactive, or “affirmative,” measures had to be taken, too.
“I consider that my little footnote in history,” Fletcher wrote of this fateful decision. “I went into that administration with the conviction that if we could change the role of Blacks in the economy, we’d do nothing short of changing the nation’s culture.”
Not long after, Harvard Law School debuted a parallel initiative known as the Harvard Plan, the core of which was a formula for evaluating applicants that considered their racial background. That plan was later adapted for the school’s undergraduate admissions, leading to explosive growth in the share of minority admits and establishing a pattern that has since been replicated across higher education.
Fifty-four years later, that period of growth is probably ending. In October, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, two cases that, when decided in June, are expected to outlaw the consideration of race in school admissions for good and, by extension, kill affirmative action across all sectors of American life.