Trump reverses decades of civil rights advances

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal for employers in the United States to discriminate in “any term, condition of privilege of employment” based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” The term “affirmative action” was first used in 1961 as part of a series of presidential executive orders with the foremost being President Johnson’s issuance of Executive Order 11246 in 1965 requiring all government contractors and subcontractors with contracts over $50,000 to develop written affirmative action policies and programs, now known as DEI initiatives. Affirmative action was defined as “any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, adopted to correct or compensate for a past or present discrimination from recurring in the future.” Initial efforts in the late 1960’s usually meant that employers would add the terms “equal opportunity employer” to their hiring documents and job announcements but seldom took further steps to correct patterns of discrimination evident in their companies. Employer based affirmative action gradually became a combination of several activities that were initiated and practiced by many large firms and government employers throughout the United States in the early 1970’s. It should be noted that hiring quotas based on race or gender were not then and are not now part of affirmative action employment programs in the United States.