 March 2003
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement and Family Members of Murder Victims Tell the Supreme Court to Uphold Affirmative Action Veterans of the Southern Civil Rights Movement and survivors of murdered civil rights leaders and activists Martin Luther King, Jr., Vernon Dahmer, Herbert Lee, Louis Allen, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman are asking the Supreme Court to uphold affirmative action in higher education and are telling the Court, "Don't reverse the progress we fought and sacrificed for." So they say in a Friend of the Court brief filed Feb. 18 in the Michigan Law School affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger. The group warned the High Court of the "grave threat that the attack on affirmative action poses to the enormous (if imperfect) progress made as a result of the great freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s." The brief is being filed on behalf of more than 200 civil rights veterans, including Congressman John Lewis, Julian Bond, Ezell Blair, one of original four Greensboro 1960 lunch-counter sit-in participants, Mississippi activist Victoria Gray Adams, Freedom Rider Diane Nash, former SNCC chairman Chuck McDew, and scores of others The group includes "Freedom Riders who were bloodied and nearly killed when a segregationist mob attacked and burned an interstate bus in Anniston, Alabama; civil rights workers who were battered, beaten, and jailed when they tried to organize or demonstrate for voting rights; and individuals who lost their jobs, were evicted from their homes and farms, saw their children reviled in school, and suffered other hardship because they fought for the unimpeded exercise of rights that Federal Courts had said African American people possessed." The civil rights veterans "are among those who sacrificed so that our nation would progress toward becoming a fair, multiracial society." They told the court that without affirmative action, American might well go back toward the days when people of color were de facto excluded from higher education and from the legal profession. The group asked the Court "not to turn back from our commitment to remove bias and racial exclusion from American life." The civil rights veterans' amicus brief also argues that: "Bias continues to provide a comparative advantage to the white population as a whole in higher education admissions. The effects of bias take most minority children out of the running for higher education, thinning out the competitive field for white children....Societal bias makes young white students the beneficiaries of the de facto pro-white ‘affirmative action' of racial discrimination, past and present....In a society increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural, it would be intolerable for the legal profession to be virtually all white. Our multifarious American populace cannot be adequately served by attorneys and judges who are nearly all members of one racial group. It is imperative that the legal profession include individuals with insights and orientations that have been shaped by their life experiences as members of groups with different histories and values." Noting that West Point and Annapolis are committed to affirmative action, the civil rights veterans said: "The need for an effective, diverse body of lawyers and judges is as essential to the pursuit of justice and to the defense of the Constitution as a diverse set of officers is necessary to the defense of our nation's borders."
Expressly referring to Justice Clarence
Thomas, the civil rights veterans pointed out that the Supreme
Court has itself benefited from racial diversity in its membership.
"No one can seriously contend it was entirely a coincidence
that the second African American ever to sit on the Supreme Court
was selected to fill the vacancy created when the first African
American justice retired. How can it be proper for race to be
given weight--to be one factor among others--in selecting
the members of the highest court in the land, but not in the selection
of a class of law school students?"
LEGAL CONTACT: Mitchell Zimmerman
650-335-7228. For the full text of the Brief Amici Curiae of Veterans
of the Southern Civil Rights Movement and Family Members of Murdered
Civil Rights Activists: www.fenwick.com/grutteramicus 
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