Summary

One of the most controversial political issues of the past three decades has been the question of affirmative action. The phrase was first used in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which called on government-funded contractors to take affirmative action to ensure that applicants were employed without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin. Affirmative action is still an important and emotionally charged political issue in American society today.

Affirmative Action serves as the ideal starting point for research on this hotly contested topic. Offering a dispassionate, even-handed overview, this book provides the latest summary of the issue's legal, political, and social aspects, offering students and researchers an unbiased look at the subject.

Coverage includes:

• The history of legalized inequality in the United States, from the Civil War to the present
• Various positions on the issue of affirmative action
• Information on major arenas in which affirmative action plays a role, such as voting rights, college admissions, and employment
• Key court cases, legislation, executive orders, and referendums on affirmative action
• Brief biographies of key individuals involved in affirmative action, including activists, politicians, and legal scholars
• A glossary of related political, legal, and other terms
• A listing of organizations and agencies related to affirmative action
• Detailed appendixes, including excerpts from key court cases.

Specifications

Index. Appendix. Bibliography. Glossary. Chronology.

About the Author(s)

Rachel Kranz is the coauthor of the Gay Rights volume in the Library in a Book series (November 2000) and the author of the Reproductive Rights and Technology volume (Spring 2002), as well as the author of numerous books about race, class, and prejudice. Her work includes Facts On File’s The Biographical Dictionary of Black Americans and Straight Talk About Prejudice, in addition to a dozen other books in the Straight Talk series.

Kranz has also produced documentary videos on welfare (Forced Work: A Day in the Life of 3 Women on Welfare) and race (You Can Use Your Own Words; New Seed), which have been shown on local public television, on national cable, and at several prestigious documentary festivals. As an award-winning print and radio journalist, she has written extensively on affirmative action and related issues, including a detailed analysis of the Bakke case at the beginning of the anti-affirmative action backlash. Her work has appeared in the Nation, Newsday, New York Daily News, and elsewhere, and her radio news reports and documentaries have been broadcast on National Public Radio and Minnesota Public Radio.

Kranz has written numerous young-adult books for such publishers as Scholastic and Troll and has written textbooks and curriculum for grades K-12 for such publishers as Prentice-Hall, Houghton-Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Addison Wesley. She has contributed to reference books published by Bowker and to the Contemporary Authors series. She is the author of a novel, Leaps of Faith (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2000), which deals extensively with race, class, and many types of discrimination.