Introduction: A Very Fortunate Happenstance

Summary

A Very Fortunate Happenstance

This book traces the history of affirmative action implementation and enforcement within the California State University (CSU) system to its end in California with the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996. It focuses on the black woman on the CSU board of trustees who fought for twenty years to enforce this positive law and prevent anti-affirmative action forces from eliminating these programs designed to increase access to the university for racial minority groups and women. The idea for this book came from a “very fortunate happenstance” while researching another project on a local grassroots organization started by my maternal grandmother called the Office for Black Community Development in Watts, California, in 1979. While searching through the CSU Dominguez Hills Digital Photo Archive, I stumbled across a photograph of a black woman standing at a podium in academic regalia at the 1976 commencement ceremony at CSU Dominguez Hills. The name was listed as Trustee Claudia Hampton but what intrigued me most about this photograph was a notation at the bottom of the picture with the words “appointed by Reagan.” Having written about Ronald Reagan for my doctoral dissertation on conservative philanthropy used to fund the academic culture wars of the 1990s, I knew that Reagan, when he served as the governor of California, had shown great contempt for the efforts made by African Americans to secure their civil rights. In fact, Reagan was a great admirer of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who was at the center of efforts to block the enforcement of the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision. The two men shared a belief that school desegregation was a state's rights issue. Similarly, Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, claiming the latter was “humiliating to the South.”2 He opposed the 1948 Supreme Court decision to overturn restrictive covenants in housing; signed the Mulford Act, aimed at disarming the Black Panthers, into law; and he condemned antiwar and civil rights activists as the “greatest threat to freedom and civility”—actions demonstrating hostility toward the peace and social justice advocacy work taken up by groups like the NAACP, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers, among others. Imagine my surprise then at seeing a black woman being appointed by Reagan for any position within his administration.