The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action

Terry Anderson's book is the place to start for anyone who wishes to understand affirmative action's complex and perplexing story. Anderson's account is balanced and information packed and makes for good reading in addtion.

This is an important history of the origins of affirmative action as a social policy for remedying racial inequality in the United States. In contrast to popular belief, affirmative action did not emerge full-blown in the late 1960s, as Anderson demonstrates we can trace its origins to the 1930s and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal policy agenda. The book proceeds through the post World War II era to to show how thinking about such policy inititatives have shifted and changed up through the 1990s. Anderson concludes with the recent lawsuits filed against the University of Michigan and the Supreme Court's decisions on these two cases - Grutter and Gratz. The book tends to focus overly much on political history (as in politicians and the federal government) and less on grass roots social movements that forced such policy formations into the public domain. Nevertheless, it is an excellent resource for teaching undergraduates about the history of affirmative action in the U.S.