Category: Black health Week

Two-time alumna Dr. Leslie Black says her time at Troy University helped to lay the foundation for her career success, and now, she wants to provide those same opportunities for future TROY students.

Dr. Black has endowed the Dr. Leslie S. Black Endowed Scholarship, which will assist students from Cordova High School, her alma mater, pursuing a degree within TROY’s College of Health and Human Services or the Sorrell College of Business on the Troy Campus. Should no applicants meet this criterion, second preference will be given to African American applicants within the two colleges.

Dr. Black, who now serves as a Sales Effectiveness Manager for Pfizer Inc., came to TROY after receiving the George C. Wallace Leadership Scholarship and knows the impact scholarship funds can have for students who might not otherwise be able to attend college.

“Once I hit a stride in my career financially, I knew that I wanted to leave a legacy, a mark,” she said. “One of the ways I felt I could build that legacy was through an endowment and something that would live in perpetuity. I’ve always been an advocate for the athletic training scholarship at TROY and was a consistent donor to it. I always talked to my family about having a scholarship in my name or a building with my name on it at TROY. When the opportunity finally presented itself, I was very proud to be able to put my name on a scholarship at TROY.”

Specifying Cordova High School as a first qualifier for the scholarship was important to Dr. Black because of the lack of resources students in the area generally face.

“It is a very small town and was devastated by the tornadoes that came through the Birmingham and Tuscaloosa areas several years ago. Those smaller towns tend to get left out,” Dr. Black said. “Getting the George C. Wallace Scholarship was significant in me being able to go to college, so I wanted to be able to do the same. I think about how I was as a little girl and what would have helped me, so I wanted to do that same thing. That is why I put those layers into the scholarship.”

Dr. Black credits her late grandfather and her mother for always stressing the importance of receiving an education.

“My late grandfather, William Mitchell, instilled in me and my siblings that education was the way out of poverty, and I knew that was the way I was going to be successful in life,” she said. “My mother, Sheron Mitchell, being a single parent and raising four children by herself, one of the things she always impressed upon us was to get an education so that we could have a better life than she had. We were all able to do that. I must give my mother accolades and praise because what she was able to do as an administrative assistant to help to push all her children through college and to have successful careers was amazing and that was my foundation.”

As for her decision to attend TROY, it was the influence of family that made that decision easier as well.

“I have two older sisters and a younger brother that went to TROY. My oldest sister, Tia Green, went to TROY but finished up at Mississippi State. The rest of us graduated from TROY,” she said. “I have an older sister, Patricia Muhammad , who graduated with a degree in English and History and is a teacher in Montgomery. My brother, Aaron Mitchell, graduated with a degree in marine biology and is working at a Naval base in Japan. We have kept TROY in the family.”

Arriving at TROY, Dr. Black wanted to study physical therapy, but an influential faculty member helped to change the course of her education.

“Once I met Doc Anderson, I switched over to the athletic training program and never looked back. Doc was just an iconic figure at TROY and beyond,” she said. “The one thing I loved about TROY was that I felt like an individual. Classes were small. I wanted individualization, so that if there was a case that I wasn’t getting something, the professor would know who I was and I could reach out. If I had to do it over again, I would still go that route because it was a very familial atmosphere.”

During her time at TROY, Dr. Black formed many long-lasting relationships and became what she calls a “well-rounded student.”

“I joined a sorority, so I went through the Mu Alpha chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha while I was there. I was in the Gospel Choir. I was a student athletic trainer, so I went to practices, I traveled with teams,” she recalled. “I was the student athletic trainer for women’s basketball. I worked football part of my senior year as well. That kept me very busy. I was a very well-rounded student.”

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in athletic training in 1996, Dr. Black entered graduate school, serving as a graduate assistant in athletic training until the first opportunity of her professional career came knocking.

“I took a job as the head athletic trainer at Tuskegee University. Got my athletic training degree in 1996. Then I went to Tuskegee for two years and worked, and then I went to Albany, Ga. where I worked at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital where I was a staff athletic trainer,” she said.

At Phoebe, she provided services for the local junior college and taught a sports injury and prevention class, as well as working with the local high school and providing outpatient physical therapy for patients with orthopedic injuries and Marines at the Marine Corps Logistics Base.

It was during her time in Albany that the door opened to continue her graduate studies.

“That kept me very busy for five years, and while I was there, the hospital had a cohort program with TROY where they wanted their managers to get master’s degrees in management,” Dr. Black said. “They opened it up to any colleagues that worked at the hospital, and I was interested, so I jumped in the class. The professors came to us every other weekend for a year. We went to class after 5 on Friday until about 10 p.m., and then all day on Saturday and Sunday. I finished with my master’s in management with a health care concentration in 2002.”

From there, it was another TROY alumnus who recruited Dr. Black to come to work for Pfizer.

“A TROY graduate recruited me to Pfizer. Rickie Williams and his wife, Tina, both graduated from TROY, and it just so happened that I was his wife’s student athletic trainer when she ran track,” she said. “I ran into them at homecoming one year and found out they lived in Tallahassee, and we just kept in touch. He was up for a promotion, and he said, ‘Hey, I think this would be a good fit. You work with orthopedic surgeons and this product is an anti-inflammatory and we talk with orthopedic surgeons all day.’ I put my name in the hat, interviewed and the rest is history.”

In Tallahassee, Dr. Black served as a sales representative in internal medicine, promoting neuroscience, pain, and pulmonary medications.

“I had several different roles while I was there. I was in the field there for almost 12 years, and then I put in for a promotion to move to Atlanta,” Dr. Black said. “Since 2014, I’ve been here in Atlanta in oncology, specifically hematology, calling on hematology oncologists for our leukemia products. Then I transitioned out of the field into training. I trained the U.S. field force for hematology for three years and then last year I transitioned into the current role, which is a sales effectiveness manager. I am on the Enablement Team so I’m on the leadership team for Hematology Oncology and I work closely with the national sales director. So, I’m kind of a jack of all trades. I do a little bit of everything, but I really love it.”

Dr. Black believes that the foundation she received at TROY has helped lead her to success within her career.

“Being in athletic training laid the foundation for any success that I’ve had,” she said. “I feel it instilled in me the ability to look at situations differently, to be calm under pressure and to have a methodical process to let all your training and education come into play when you must make decisions. I’m calm under pressure, and I feel like that has helped me in my career. Being a lover of sports and being athletic, I’m very competitive, so in a sales environment that connects to being very successful.”

In addition to her education, she believes the atmosphere and opportunities she had at TROY has played a key role in her life.

“My college experience at TROY was so well rounded that I feel like I had the best of both worlds. I had a social life, as well as having a great academic structure, and I feel like I could go toe-to-toe with students from any Ivy League school or anywhere,” she said. “I feel like TROY doesn’t always get the credit it deserves for the talent that comes out of the University. There are top-notch students that come out of TROY and hopefully I am representing them well.”

In addition to the endowed scholarship, Dr. Black is giving back to TROY in other ways as well. She was recently selected to serve on the Advisory Council for the College of Health and Human Services.

“I’m proud to be doing a lot for TROY because of all TROY did for me,” Black said. “It is my hope to be able to eventually fund this scholarship in the amount that one day it could be a full-tuition scholarship. That will take a significant amount of money, but I’m willing to do the work to get it there.”

Illinois became the first state in the United States to pass legislation to end book bans. Signed by Governor JB Pritzker June 12, House Bill 2789 takes effect January 1, 2024.

Introduced by Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who serves at the State Librarian, the bill received significant support both in the House and Senate. The signing by Pritzker is no surprise, but it is a welcome one and makes Illinois a leader in addressing the ongoing rise of book bans.

“Here in Illinois, we don’t hide from the truth, we embrace it,” said Governor JB Pritzker in a press release. “Young people shouldn’t be kept from learning about the realities of our world; I want them to become critical thinkers, exposed to ideas that they disagree with, proud of what our nation has overcome, and thoughtful about what comes next. Everyone deserves to see themselves reflected in the books they read, the art they see, the history they learn. In Illinois, we are showing the nation what it really looks like to stand up for liberty.”

HB 2789 is unique in that it ties state funding for libraries to a written library bill of rights. This could come in the form of ALA’s already-established guidelines or come through what may be developed in a collaboration between State Librarian and State Library.

“I initiated this legislation to stand up and fight for libraries, librarians, and the freedom of speech – especially at this perilous time for our democracy,” said Giannoulias. “The concept of banning books contradicts the very essence of what our country stands for. It also defies what education is all about: teaching our children to think for themselves. This landmark legislation is a triumph for our democracy, a win for First Amendment Rights, and a great victory for future generations.”

This isn’t the only pro-education, pro-library, and pro-literacy bill signed by Pritzker this year. In addition to ensuring equal access to books at public libraries, he sent a letter to the College Board’s CEO demanding that the decision to remove certain parts of the Advanced Placement in African American Studies be returned to the text. The letter came in response to the organization choosing to remove passages deemed inappropriate by Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis and his state’s slate of censorship laws. Just this week, Pritzker joined several other state governors in demanding that textbook publishers not censor materials in the wake of Republican pressure to do so. Among the publishers who received the letter are Association of American Publishers, Cengage Learning, Goodheart-Willcox, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill Education, Pearson, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, Savvas Learning Co., Scholastic, and Teachers Curriculum Institute.

Pritzker’s budget for fiscal year 2024 also includes $1.6 million dollars to build Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library as a state-wide program. This would ensure all children from birth to 5 would receive high-quality books mailed to them at no cost, no matter their income. Research has shown that books in a child’s home increases their vocabulary, academic achievement, and more.

“This announcement today is important for our democracy because it protects access, and as a former educator, I have seen firsthand what the lack of access means for our communities – access to voting rights, access to gender rights, access to health care, and access to fully funded schools,” said Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. “We cannot continue turning the clock back on children who have already experienced decades of disinvestment, so I applaud this legislation, and stand in full support of this movement to continue providing access to the rich and dynamic cultures that our students and educators represent.”

Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, who was present at Chicago’s Herold Washington Library alongside Pritzker, Giannoulias, lawmakers, activists, educators, and more, emphasized that such a signature signals the state’s commitment to accepting, embracing, and encouraging all people to be who they are.

“I’m proud that our administration is standing in the gap for literary justice and equity by becoming the first state in the nation to prevent book banning, so that our children and communities can be represented, and have access to reading material that celebrates our diversity and uniqueness. Now more than ever, efforts to censor educational and social reading materials are on the rise, and we cannot let extreme views harm LGBTQ+ communities or BIPOC authors and readers, simply because of who they are or who they love.”

In their original form, affirmative action programs in the 1960s sought to give Black workers access to trade unions. Photo: Higgins/Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center. Temple University Libraries. Philadelphia, PA.

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Arthur Fletcher had already been a Baltimore Colts lineman and an administrator for the state highway department when he started applying for jobs as a football coach in Kansas. It was 1957, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed de jure racial segregation in schools with Brown v. Board of Education. Fletcher lived in Topeka with his wife and five children, and he had $15,000 in debt from an ill-fated side career as a concert promoter. He was building tires for Goodyear to make ends meet, but his odds at landing a coaching job looked promising. He was, after all, the first Black player on the Colts.

But if Brown meant progress for millions of students, it meant little for Fletcher’s job prospects. “I presented myself to school board after school board after school board in the state of Kansas, and the answer was, ‘You are ready, but we’re not,’” he said, according to A Terrible Thing to Waste, historian David Hamilton Golland’s biography of him.

Fletcher never asked for special treatment. His stepfather was a buffalo soldier. Self-reliance was the gospel in his childhood home. But everywhere Fletcher looked, bigotry and discrimination were freezing Black Americans out of an equal shot at American prosperity.

Fletcher left Kansas and took his chances in the West Coast–based defense industries, while immersing himself in the world of Republican political organizing. In 1968, he ran for lieutenant governor of Washington and lost. He was nursing his wounds that autumn when the president-elect offered him a job. Richard Nixon had barely won his own race that year. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had recently been killed, and America’s streets were smoldering. Neutralizing riots was top of mind for the “law and order” candidate. The solution he chose was “Black capitalism.”

“Instead of government jobs, and government housing, and government welfare,” Nixon said at the 1968 Republican National Convention, “let government use its tax and credit policies to enlist in this battle the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man — American private enterprise.” His reasoning was that government aid in Black neighborhoods created waste and dependency. To promote equality and quell unrest, Black ghetto-dwellers needed pride of ownership through entrepreneurialism — more Black businesses and Black banks in Black neighborhoods.

The pitch was a natural draw for Fletcher. If Nixon had any doubts about whether he would support his civil-rights agenda, they were swiftly put to rest. “I don’t believe in jumping to welfare when there’s so much work out there,” Fletcher said when Nixon mentioned one of his welfare initiatives.

After he took office in 1969, Nixon appointed Fletcher to be his assistant secretary of Labor, making him one of the country’s highest-ranking Black government officials. At six-foot-four with dark skin and close-cropped hair, Fletcher was a fly in Nixon’s proverbial buttermilk — an administration of slick-haired white guys known by critics as “Uncle Strom’s Cabin,” according to Mehrsa Baradaran, a UC Irvine law professor whose book The Color of Money sheds light on this era.

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.

If all goes as anticipated, this ruling would be the latest anti-civil-rights salvo from a right-wing Supreme Court majority that has already overturned Roe v. Wade. Several turns have led us to this crossroads. The Court has played a crucial role, narrowing the scope of affirmative action to the point that its original aim — redressing the material deprivation facing Black people and other minorities — has been supplanted by anodyne gestures toward diversity. But there’s also a deeper and more familiar betrayal at work. Affirmative action emerged at a time in American history when Black civil-rights advocates were calling for a comprehensive rewrite of the social contract. The pillars of their agenda included full voting rights, equal access to education, robust anti-discrimination laws with strong enforcement, universal health care, and a full-employment economy.

In the decades since, we’ve seen those pillars falter and crumble. The Supreme Court has invited the de facto resegregation of American primary schools and gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Black communities are beset by police violence and mass incarceration. Black families are afflicted by deadly health ailments and unemployment rates that are singular on the national landscape.

Now we’re heading toward the death of America’s last surviving race-based redistributive program. The controversies surrounding affirmative action have revolved around education — in other words, the legacy of the Harvard Plan — a narrow debate that has foreclosed the possibilities of what affirmative action could have been.

Arthur Fletcher’s Philadelphia Plan is a reminder that even the less ambitious civil-rights advocates once had more expansive dreams than improving diversity in ivory towers and the C-suite. It was ultimately doomed by several overlapping factors: the GOP’s wholesale turn against Black communities, the white working class’s betrayal of their Black peers, and the government’s terror of sparking a backlash from white voters. Alongside the Harvard Plan, it represented the other half of the affirmative-action equation: the idea that the government could help build a Black middle class the same way the labor movement made a white middle class, by creating good-paying jobs for low-skilled workers without a lot of education. And it never had a chance.

The first-ever federal agency for investigating claims of racial discrimination in hiring, known as the Fair Employment Practices Committee, was created in 1941. Black workers were being denied jobs en masse despite a boom in the defense industry, and Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a 100,000-strong March on Washington if he did not take executive action. The FEPC managed to head off Randolph’s protest, but otherwise turned out to be functionally useless at stopping discrimination. It was defunct by 1946.

The more forceful equal-opportunity policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were a response to the pressure of the civil-rights movement. Kennedy gave an executive order barring employers from discriminating on the basis of race and required federal contractors to provide equal employment opportunities — meaning not intentionally keeping non-white workers out of a job. Johnson introduced permanent contract bans for scofflaw firms, while the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he signed into law, made discrimination across a host of categories — race, sex, religion, national origin — illegal in areas including jobs.

But by the time Nixon was sworn in, every major effort by the federal government to make sure employers weren’t freezing Black people out of the job market had fallen short, giving rise to the ominous possibility of Black revolt. Nixon’s first term coincided with the age of Black power, an evolution of the civil-rights movement that was more militant. Its insurrectionary edge was expressed through uprisings in the nation’s Black ghettos, and its intellectual and political sympathies were wrapped up in the revolutionary movements spanning the Global South, especially Africa. These movements were anti-imperialist, and many were Marxist. The specter of a homegrown anti-capitalist insurrection, however small, during the height of the Cold War spooked Nixon, and he responded with a deadly counterintelligence program — COINTELPRO — dedicated to neutralizing groups like the Black Panthers. Publicly, however, Nixon adopted a less combative approach to the problem of Black dissatisfaction, which was focused as much on economic inequality as political inequality.

Arthur Fletcher, now known as the “father of affirmative action,” was the face of Richard Nixon’s civil-rights agenda. Photo: Bob Daugherty/ASSOCIATED PRESS

This was where Black capitalism came in. Fletcher sympathized with the anger in the ghetto, but thought that revolution was preposterous. “He was an unabashed capitalist, he was an anti-communist, and he saw fitting into the system as the best way forward for equality between the races,” said Golland, Fletcher’s biographer.

So when contractors started agreeing to the Philadelphia Plan’s terms and setting goals for how they would integrate, Fletcher felt vindicated. He set off on a victory tour with stops in Atlanta, New York, Phoenix, Chicago, and Baltimore, and made syndicated television appearances trumpeting the Nixon administration’s affirmative-action program, which was more aggressive than his Democratic predecessors’. The plan began to spread to other cities.

But with hindsight, it is easy to see his efforts were doomed. His work on Nixon’s behalf did not win him more influence. He’d almost single-handedly made the administration’s civil-rights agenda look sincere, but the president was still courting Jim Crow nostalgists. “A cabinet-level position for a Black man at that time would have undermined the Southern Strategy,” Golland writes, referring to the GOP’s growing dependence on white votes from former Confederate states. Plus, Fletcher’s success was making lots of people mad. “This thing is about as popular as a crab in a whorehouse,” said Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate minority leader. The Philadelphia Plan was even more poisonous to white labor leaders and rank-and-file tradesmen, whose resistance to integration made them ripe targets for the coalition the GOP was trying to build even as it tried to placate the civil-rights community.

In the spring of 1970, hundreds of pro-war construction workers converged on lower Manhattan and attacked student demonstrators who were protesting the recent killings of four university students at Kent State. These workers were joined a few days later by local longshoremen, white-collar workers, and union leaders in a series of protests against the NYPD’s nonresponse to the student protests. Tens of thousands surrounded City Hall on May 20. Peter J. Brennan, a Nixon supporter who headed the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, followed up with a visit to the White House, where he presented the president with a ceremonial hard hat. Nixon’s embrace of the so-called “Hard Hat Rioters” enraged civil-rights leaders, but the president was starting to see the future of the GOP in these workers.

Brennan was an innovator in ducking Fletcher’s affirmative-action initiatives. He devised an alternative policy in New York that allowed local construction firms to exempt themselves from the Philadelphia Plan by coming up with their own more flexible integration goals. These so-called “Hometown Plans” were a sham, but they were good news for Nixon — if labor leaders complained to him about Fletcher being overzealous, he could point to this workaround as an alternative.

Still, firms that had failed to uphold their own integration plans were having their contracts terminated. To them, even the most modest requirements — one union was asked to increase its Black membership from six out of 800 — were an intolerable threat to the bottom line. Eventually, white labor leaders turned against Fletcher in force and made Nixon choose between them. “This fellow Fletcher, this appointee of yours, I’m sure you’re not responsible for what he’s doing right now,” said Brennan at a 1971 meeting with Nixon. “People are trying to do the right thing and being harassed.” For his part, Nixon saw Black people as ingrates for not rewarding him with more votes. “We’ve done more than anybody else,” he complained, “and they don’t … appreciate it.”

Fletcher was transferred out of the Labor Department in 1971 and stripped of his enforcement authority. “Fletcher had served his purpose,” writes Golland of how Nixon abandoned him. Meanwhile, the president’s relationship with Brennan was only getting stronger. Nixon agreed to withdraw his support for the Philadelphia Plan if the Labor leader agreed not to endorse his Democratic opponent in the 1972 election. At the time, this was practically unheard of. Democrats were the party of trade unions and could reliably count on the vocal support of Brennan and other white union leaders. But the Democratic Party’s association with civil rights under Kennedy and Johnson had caused a rift with the unions, which were now becoming more reactionary thanks, in part, to the Philadelphia Plan. Nixon made a devil’s bargain: Sacrifice Black equality to bring the white working class into the GOP’s tent. As agreed, Brennan declined to endorse George McGovern. He was rewarded by being named Nixon’s new secretary of Labor.

Brennan’s rise effectively killed proactive federal enforcement of affirmative action in the early 1970s. Fletcher stuck around after Nixon’s impeachment to help Gerald Ford, and eventually stumped for the former vice-president during his successful 1976 Republican primary campaign against Ronald Reagan. But Fletcher spent most of his next chapter in the private sector, capitalizing on his GOP connections and association with the Philadelphia Plan to become a prized diversity consultant for Fortune 500 companies seeking to hire more minorities.

Historians see the migration of white working-class voters to the GOP that Nixon brokered as crucial to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election. Its consequences include the most committedly right-wing Supreme Court majority in a generation — a cohort that makes no apologies for operating less as dispassionate jurists than as agents of the conservative movement. That Nixon’s Southern Strategy was hastened by an affirmative-action policy that he himself championed shows the deft and cynical way he played on both sides of the racial divide.

The idea that affirmative action would have a major economic component, that a nudge from the government would make Black capitalism an instrument of equality, had failed. And it was not just a Republican failure — as the parties underwent a realignment and Democrats became more fully the party of civil rights, they, too, abandoned the idea of labor-based affirmative action. From then on, affirmative action would increasingly be associated with education, on the assumption that a rite of passage through college would foment a robust Black middle class.

The deprivation that Black Americans faced in the post-Nixon years was relentless. In 1980, the Washington Post sent reporters to check on how Fletcher’s Philadelphia Plan was faring 11 years after its debut. They found a local welder named Ephraim Oakley, who had invested $15,000 in equipment under the impression that the federal government would ensure he could get work. But when he tried obtaining a union card with the local steamfitters, he was turned away. “Because those damned people won’t let me into their union, I’m losing thousands of dollars in work,” he said. “I’m being penalized for being a nigger.” The plan had made some of the trade unions more racially mixed — it was implemented in more than 30 cities — but federal enforcement had fallen by the wayside. “It absolutely failed,” said Golland.

Here was the main problem with “Black capitalism”: There wasn’t enough capital in Black communities to sustain it, ensuring that any asset-holders who set up shop were immediately underwater. Nixon never wanted to fund his initiative, either, making it little more than a politically expedient cover. “Black capitalism was a decoy,” said Mehrsa Baradaran, the Irvine law professor.

Ronald Reagan’s election was accelerating the white working-class migration to the GOP, a theme of which was the perceived overreach of the civil-rights movement. Cries of reverse discrimination against white Americans echoed across the country, fueled by the metamorphosis in large segments of the economy from blue-collar to white. The middle class was shrinking, the pathways into it narrowing. “In the context of diminishing rewards for the white majority facing a more and more tenuous grasp on the middle class, what is predictable is animosity,” said Touré Reed, who is co-director of the African American Studies Program at Illinois State University.

Meanwhile, other forms of affirmative action were also coming under assault. The first major challenge to affirmative action in higher education came in 1977, when the case of Allan Bakke reached the Supreme Court. Bakke was a white medical-school applicant in California who claimed he had been rejected from UC Davis because of a racial quota. Arguing that “reverse discrimination is as wrong as the primary variety it seeks to correct,” Bakke sought to eliminate the consideration of race in school admissions entirely. In an attempt to appeal to the Court’s conservatives, the lawyer for the school, Archibald Cox, reframed the legal basis for affirmative action by saying it served the interests of schools to allow them to curate a diverse environment. In the summer of 1978, Lewis Powell, the swing vote appointed by Nixon, split the difference: Davis’s quota system had to go, he ruled, but schools could still consider race in admissions as long as promoting diversity was their only objective.

The decision is credited with saving affirmative action in higher education. But it also narrowed its scope, such that its original rationales — redress for past discrimination and the end of material deprivation — were legally invalid and de-emphasized in the public consciousness. And it gave legal heft to trends that were already smothering the redistributive ambitions of the 1960s: a growing consensus that America did not owe anything to Black people.

In 1989, the Supreme Court delivered a decisive blow against affirmative action in the building trades when it ruled against the capital of Virginia’s policy of setting aside a percentage of contracts for minority-run firms. The GOP had effectively rebranded such policies as a quota system for unqualified Black people — or “affirmative Black-tion,” as Reed put it, quoting the derisive nickname used by Edward Norton’s neo-Nazi character in American History X.

In Texas in 1992, a Republican congressional candidate named Edward Blum lost an election. He responded to his defeat by blaming an unfairly drawn district, which made it too easy, in his opinion, for a minority candidate to triumph, and brought his case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996. The Court ruled in his favor, citing an illegal racial gerrymander — the first of many legal victories for the conservative activist, who made it his life’s mission to eradicate the consideration of race in any aspect of the law or education.

The national mood was in his favor: California voters passed Proposition 209 the same year as Blum’s first Supreme Court victory, outlawing affirmative action in any state or government institution. According to a 2020 study by researchers at UC Berkeley, Prop 209 led to a “cascade” of Black and Hispanic UC applicants into “lower-quality” public and private schools, resulting in steep long-term declines in their degree-completion rates and wage earnings.

This was all happening amid an influx of Asian immigrants in the 1990s, who were generally wealthier, more highly educated, and more attractive to white-collar employers than their predecessors in the post-1965 wave. White people seeking to justify America’s racial inequities had long pointed to this cohort — people with East or South Asian ancestry, often glossing over the more downtrodden Southeasterners and Pacific Islanders — as evidence that racism’s grip had loosened, or to argue that Black people were pathological and so deserved whatever grim fate befell them. But as Asian Americans established themselves in greater numbers, and in some cases started outpacing whites in income and educational achievement, many began to wonder why their successes had not earned them a proportional spot among the country’s elite.

The concerns of these Asian American activists dovetailed with decades of white conservative demagoguery, resulting in an almost absurd amount of quibbling over which of the highest-achieving students in the country deserved access to its most exclusive schools. “That’s one of the things I’ve always found personally disturbing about this,” said Reed. “I don’t think that most of the differences between these applicants are actually meaningful.”

Blum helped bring the case of a rejected University of Texas applicant named Abigail Fisher that ended up before the Supreme Court in 2016. Fisher’s lawyers argued that she was rejected in favor of less qualified minorities, and her defeat, amid revelations that her grades were less than sterling, was met with glee — hashtags like #StayMadAbby and pejorative nicknames like “Becky With the Bad Grades” took over social media. But Blum was already preparing his encore. He has since partnered with the ideological descendants of those 1990s Asian American activists, organizing them under the name Students for Fair Admissions, to argue that Harvard has a quota for keeping Asian applicants out. (In its less famous sister case, SFFA has claimed that the University of North Carolina’s recruitment of first-generation and low-income students discriminates against other applicants.)

If Blum’s challenges are successful, the effects would be devastating. Everywhere that such programs have been eliminated, their modest benefits have revealed them as far preferable to their absence: more minorities in jobs and in schools, and with greater access to the trappings of a middle-class life. It would also be a fitting, if grim, end to a policy that has been assailed and chipped away at from its very inception.

By the mid-1990s, Arthur Fletcher, fresh off a position as George H.W. Bush’s chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, found himself a lonely defender of the policy he helped create. “I would have been content to remain a footnote in history had the Republican Party, to which I have been loyal for more than fifty years, decided not to use affirmative action as a wedge issue in 1996,” he wrote. “Even my old friend Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, who strongly supported affirmative action over the years, has turned against it in his drive to win the GOP nomination for president.”

Fletcher decided to throw his own hat in the ring as the only pro-affirmative-action Republican presidential candidate. But there was no appetite for what he was offering, 25 years after a GOP administration had made his affirmative-action program a centerpiece of its Black agenda. He technically ran in the 1996 election, but his campaign was doing so poorly that he had to bow out in 1995.

Fletcher died in 2005. His biographer told me his effects included newspaper clippings from almost every single story about Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court case that extended Powell’s decision to preserve affirmative action in higher education. “He wasn’t involved in the case at all, but it mattered to him,” Golland said. He’d also never changed his party affiliation, despite the reality that being a pro-affirmative-action Republican had become an oxymoron. Change from the inside was still possible, Fletcher believed. “From 1976 to 1995, that’s slightly less than 20 years,” Golland said. “Fletcher thought that if the party can change that quickly in such a short period of time, it can also change back.”

It has not changed back. Almost 20 years have passed since Fletcher’s death, and his beloved GOP has migrated even further away from his ideal. For all his misplaced faith in his party, the Kansan knew that Black people faced too many obstacles to become full participants in the economy without help. Today, you can barely find a Republican who’ll acknowledge the problem, let alone be affirmative about solving it.

A big reason why Fletcher’s affirmative-action idea was palatable to Nixon, and why Cox’s diversity rationale appealed to Justice Powell, was because both were a rebuke to the idea that a racially egalitarian America could be achieved through a mix of generous welfare programs and aggressive enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. Black capitalism’s central promise was that simply giving Black people access to the free market could allow them to rise up economically, but even that proved too much for white America. Black capitalism has now been replaced with an even hollower promise of diversity. “The main purpose of ‘diversity’ is to give white people a more diverse experience rather than to give non-white people an equal opportunity,” said Golland, Fletcher’s biographer.

Today, affirmative action gets treated even by Democrats like a child they’re mildly ashamed of. President Joe Biden supports it, and in 2021 his administration urged the Supreme Court not to hear the Harvard case. But while few in the party disparage it, they don’t embrace it, either, likely because of the mixed messages provided by polling. And they certainly haven’t adopted anything resembling an affirmative-action policy for the labor force. Even the most obvious solution to the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action, a renewed push for universal programs like in President Johnson’s Great Society, is complicated by the prospect of a familiar backlash against programs that are often coded as helping Black people.

When the Bakke arguments were heard in 1977, there was still much to be optimistic about: the major legislative victories of the civil-rights movement were just a decade old, and the new social order it birthed was still taking shape. People camped outside the courthouse to see how America’s most powerful institutions would respond to one of its first major challenges, and Powell’s ruling was greeted with relief. We live in a different world now. The anti-civil-rights backlash that followed has since calcified into a dominant theme of our politics. Betrayal of the movement is becoming more complete by the day — losses that we swallow more frequently now than before, but no less bitterly. “I’m assuming a bloodbath is coming,” said Reed. “But we’ll see. I hope not.”

Two summers ago, a teenager who had jumped off the diving board started struggling in the deep end, her arms flailing. It took only a few seconds for lifeguard Makenna John to notice the girl’s distress. She grabbed her rescue tube, jumped in, and helped the girl to safety.

This summer is Makenna’s third lifeguarding at the public pool in Roxana, Illinois, a village in the St. Louis area. Although dramatic rescues are relatively rare, she estimates that up to a quarter of the roughly 50 people she keeps a watchful eye on during a shift can’t swim. Then there are the daredevils and children whose parents think they’re better swimmers than they are.

“It’s stressful because you’re responsible for ensuring the safety of all the people at the pool,” said Makenna, 17.

Lifeguarding may look like a cushy job. What’s not to like about lounging in a chair by the pool all day? But the job carries a load of responsibility.

Drowning is the No. 1 cause of death for children ages 1 to 4, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of those deaths occur in swimming pools. For kids 5-14, drowning is the second-most common type of unintentional injury death, behind motor vehicle deaths.

As schools let out and warm summer days draw people to pools and beaches around the country, many cities and towns are scrambling to hire enough lifeguards to safely oversee swimmers. If they can’t meet their targets, they may cut back pool hours or opt not to open some pools at all. While a shuttered pool on a hot summer day is a letdown for many residents, it can be a particularly big blow for low-income families who don’t have a lot of affordable summer fun options.

Up to 90% of Des Moines kids qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch, said Ben Page, director of Des Moines Parks and Recreation in Iowa. “People can’t afford to go to the movies for air conditioning,” he said.

When local officials make decisions about where to close pools or cut back hours, they do so knowing that swimming has a fraught history of racial inequities.

Racial disparities play a significant role in drowning deaths. Overall, the drowning death rate for Black people in the U.S. is 1.5 times that of white people. The difference is starkest for swimming pool deaths, in which Black children ages 10 to 14 drown at a rate 7.6 times that of their white peers, according to the CDC.

Research conducted in 2017 by the USA Swimming Foundation found that two-thirds of Black children have minimal swimming ability or can’t swim at all. Forty-five percent of Hispanic children are nonswimmers, as are 40% of white kids. (Hispanic people can be of any race or combination of races.) The same study found that 79% of kids in families with incomes less than $50,000 are unable to swim.

When Cullen Jones, the first Black American to hold a world record in swimming, was 5, he nearly drowned at a water park near his home in Irvington, New Jersey. At the time, he didn’t know how to swim, and lifeguards saved his life.

“Most people expect that if you have a near drowning, you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing, you were horseplaying or someone pushed you,” said Cullen, a four-time Olympic medalist.

Now 39, Jones travels the country as an ambassador for the USA Swimming Foundation, talking to kids about the importance of learning to swim.

It’s not hard to see the thread connecting lack of swimming ability and higher drowning rates among Blacks with the expansion of swimming pools in the United States. As cities embarked on a municipal pool building boom in the 1920s and ’30s, Black Americans were generally excluded from them, either explicitly because they were white-only pools, or by threats and violence, according to an exhibit at Philadelphia’s Fairmount Water Works titled “Pool: A Social History of Segregation.”

When desegregation was mandated after World War II, many towns closed or relocated their pools to secluded white neighborhoods rather than allow Black people to use them.

Funds also weren’t provided to support pools in majority-Black communities, said Kevin Dawson, an associate professor of history at the University of California-Merced, who has written on the topic. “They might not fill them all the time or not have lifeguards, so people couldn’t use them.”

As cities and towns today make decisions about which pools to open, many are doing so with a clear intention that they be accessible to poor or minority kids as well as those in less diverse or wealthier neighborhoods.

In Baltimore, where the public pools are free to all, city officials carefully selected which 12 of its 23 pools would open this year.

“We picked our pools so that it will be equitable and there would be locations on bus lines so that everyone will have access,” said Nikki Cobbs, chief of aquatics at the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks.

Recreational experts who’ve canvassed jurisdictions say they expect fewer closed pools this year than last.

“Things are a little bit better than they were,” said Kevin Roth, vice president for research, evaluation, and technology at the National Recreation and Park Association, an advocacy organization for people working in the parks and recreation field. “The open times may still be compressed, but there were communities that didn’t open half their pools last year, and we’re not hearing that this year.”

Still, lifeguard staffing shortages continue to put pressure on pool availability. In recent years, it’s become increasingly hard to fill seasonal lifeguard positions with teenagers, the backbone of the workforce.

That’s largely because employment patterns have changed.

Until 2000, about half of teenagers worked at least part of the summer, on average, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. But by 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the employment rate for teens had dropped to about 30%. Many local parks and recreation staffers are well aware of this new reality.

“The opportunities for young people have increased, and many travel and do internships; they do sports and camp. We’re competing with a lot of things,” said April Chappell, aquatics director for the Cincinnati Recreation Commission.

“There’s been a bit of a cultural shift,” Roth said.

The tight labor market has also given teens better-paying employment options — such as fast-food, retail, or office jobs — that don’t require them to carve out time to get certified in swimming, CPR, and rescue operations by the Red Cross or another group.

Many cities and towns are now taking steps to compete, including boosting lifeguards’ hourly rates, promising bonuses, and offering to pay for lifeguard certification classes. Some are reaching out to retirees and nontraditional workers to fill their ranks.

Des Moines has hired 151 lifeguards to date, far more than the 125 minimum needed to staff its five pools, said Ian Knutsen, who supervises the city’s aquatics program.

Before recruitment got underway, they surveyed former lifeguards about what would make them want to sign up for a stint this year.

“Money was the biggest deciding factor,” Page said.

Des Moines lifeguards start at $15 an hour, compared with $13 last year. That makes the city jobs competitive with other local employers. Lifeguards get an additional $5 per hour for working on holidays. Those who stay through July can get a $200 bonus, which grows by $25 each year they come back, capping at $300.

Cincinnati raised lifeguard wages to $16 an hour, from $11.53 last year, and offered $500 bonuses to returning lifeguards. Despite that, lifeguard shortages persist and mean the city may be able to open only 13 of its 23 pools, said Chappell.

Kids often want to lifeguard at their neighborhood pool, Chappell said. But in some neighborhoods, there may not be enough kids who are swimmers to fill the spots. The city has programs to help increase those numbers.

Last winter, Cincinnati funded a lifeguard academy for people 14-24. The program pays for swimming lessons if they need them and pays for their lifeguard training, as well. About 150 applied, and over 60 became lifeguards, Chappell said.

It’s not only the number of lifeguards that determines pool availability. In Phoenix, lifeguard recruitment has been going great, said Adam Waltz, a spokesperson for the city’s parks and recreation division. Still, the city plans to open only 18 of its 29 pools for the summer, with some on staggered schedules. The sticking point: pool managers.

“In order to open 29 pools, you need to have 29 pool managers, and we couldn’t get that this year,” he said. “We can’t have a first-summer lifeguard calling the shots during a water emergency.”

A few weeks ago, Bloomberg profiled Bryan Johnson, the 45-year-old tech entrepreneur who harvests his 17-year-old son’s blood in a medically dubious anti-aging treatment known as “plasma-swapping.” He calls it Project Blueprint. Others have compared it to the “blood boy” arc from Silicon Valley. In any case, his goal is simple: to look 18 again.

Johnson shares this fixation on eternal youth with some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their methods differ, from hyperbaric oxygen chambers, to off-label use of the diabetes drug Ozempic, to actual hibernation. But the obsession motivating them is the same: to slow down the aging process, if only because it’s not yet possible to defy it altogether.

This effort to pursue technological and pharmaceutical “solutions” to aging may seem like a frivolous oddity for the ultra-wealthy, but it has real consequences. These self-appointed “masters of the universe” are investing their resources in experimental anti-aging treatments while half the world’s population still can’t access basic health care.

The myopic push for artificial youth sets unrealistic expectations for the public. Not only are many of these anti-aging treatments expensive and inaccessible, some are also dangerous and irreversible. The rising trend of buccal fat removal helps chisel the cheeks and jaw, but can leave patients looking gaunt before their time. And many so-called anti-aging specialists are prescribing hormone therapy without sufficient training and licensure.

Off-label use of human growth hormone can change patients’ body composition from fat to muscle, but can also cause a litany of other health issues, including cancer. Meanwhile, kids who actually need growth hormone can’t get it: There’s a shortage of the drug Norditropin, which could be caused by the sudden Ozempic craze. (The two drugs are made by the same company, and are administered with the same injector pen.)

And then there’s social media. AI-powered filters can make your nose smaller, your waist thinner, your eyelashes longer, your lips fuller, your skin clearer, your teeth whiter, and your eyes brighter. And—surprise—that’s having a serious effect on users’ mental health. “Young women who spent just 10 minutes taking, editing and posting selfies to social media reported feeling more anxious, less confident and less physically attractive afterwards,” according to Phillippa Diedrichs, a psychologist and researcher with the Dove Self-Esteem Project.

TikTok’s “Bold Glamour” filter is almost indistinguishable from a real-life facelift and professional makeup job, making the Kardashian fantasy accessible to everyone. And increasingly, users are trying to make those fantasies a reality: a staggering 79 percent of facial plastic surgeons have patients who cite “selfie awareness” as a reason for wanting reconstructive surgery.

The quest for eternal youth is, ironically, thousands of years old. Long before Juan Ponce de León went searching for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in 1513, Herodotus was writing about such a wellspring in the fifth century BCE. For as long as humans have gotten older, we have tried to prevent it—and the goal is as quixotic now as it was back then.

One of the most vocal longevity experts, Dr. Peter Attia, has some reasonable advice for living longer: For a more fulfilling final decade of life, exercise well and eat with an eye toward staying mobile. But he also spent years refusing to eat cookies baked by his children, and insists that his deli meat be microtomed—that is, precision-cut to exact specifications.

While the wealthiest and weirdest people in the world are trying to become centenarians, life expectancy is declining. In the United States, life expectancy is the lowest it’s been since 1996. The focus on anti-aging solutions is misplaced. Instead, we need to commit more resources to aging solutions.

Take health care, for one. Medicare is credited with lengthening the average American life since it was passed in 1965, and Medicare for All would likely drive those numbers even higher. Or take gun control. On average, gun violence decreases life expectancy for white Americans by 2.23 years. For Black Americans, it’s 4.4 years—and young Black people are at even greater risk.

The rich and powerful cannot live forever. But they do continue to live nearly a decade longer than their poorer counterparts. We should be closing that gap, not widening it. What’s more, many of those long-lived elites are current holders of elected office. If they insist on clinging to power rather than enjoying retirement, the least they can do is use that power to help Americans age with health and grace.

With a reallocation of government resources into research on aging, not fighting against it, they could make the reality of time’s endless march a little gentler for everyone.