Two persistent and pervasive misperceptions plague Americans’ attitudes toward civil rights. First, many believe that racial discrimination is largely confined to states of the former Confederacy. Second, many presume that affirmative action, in both employment and higher education, favors unqualified people of color over qualified whites. To these pernicious errors one can add a third—namely, many Americans assume that civil rights battles are behind us and, in this “post-racial society,” people of color have won. As Chief Justice John Roberts recently observed, justifying his opinion overturning the pivotal §4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.” ^{Footnote 1}

David Golland’s tidy case study of how “affirmative action” evolved in the building trades dispels these inaccuracies. As such, Golland, a historian at Governors State University, has authored a work that exemplifies a distinction crucial to law and society scholarship between the “law in the books” and the “law in action.” ^{Footnote 2}

Golland’s book might well be titled “Promises Made, Promises Broken.” In five chapters sandwiched between his introduction and a conclusion, he meticulously chronicles the tortured path of efforts to provide even a modicum of equal opportunity for skilled black workers in the building construction trades. His analysis is a litany of politicians’ perfidy, administrators’ inertia, and union leaders’ intransigence—all juxtaposed to and opposed by the dogged persistence of civil rights leaders and groups. The through-line is racism; the villain of this tale is Richard M. Nixon. “The popular imagination is right,” Golland notes pithily. “[A]t least when it came to civil rights, Nixon was ‘Tricky Dick’” (p. 4). By contrast, at the beginning of most chapters, Golland spotlights unsung heroes—mason Thomas Bailey; sheet metal worker James Ballard; steamfitters George Rios, Eugene Jenkins, and Eric O. Lewis—who engaged in the mid–twentieth-century struggles to end employment discrimination and inequality. One comes away from reading Golland’s book convinced that efforts to integrate the building construction trades were akin to a ground game resembling trench warfare: “That is hard work” (p. 6).

Hard work, indeed. Given slavery, Jim Crow, and “the New Jim Crow,” ^{Footnote 3} leaving their legacy of outright racial prejudice and go-to racial stereotypes embedded deeply in our national DNA and lodged stubbornly in our individual unconscious, it is no surprise that the episodes in constructing affirmative action that Golland recounts have a distinct Sisyphean feel to them. Chapter One is about diligent efforts, such as those of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Labor Director Herbert Hill, prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to pry open job opportunities for minority builders—efforts that resulted in inching federal contractors “from outright exclusion to tokenism in minority hiring” (p. 9). Chapter Two shifts the focus from official policy-making corridors in Washington, DC, to the streets. As Herbert Hill observed in 1963, “[T]he time has come for freedom rides in Pennsylvania” (p. 37). Northern urban riots in 1963 and 1964 did not put a dent in the statistic that “the national unemployment rate among black youths [was] nearly twice that of whites” (p. 64). Employment opportunity plans in San Francisco and Cleveland take center stage in Chapter Three, plans that Golland describes in his chapter title as “Grasping at Solutions” (pp. 65–101), solutions imperiled by a white “backlash [that] threatened to derail all the precious achievements of the previous decade” (p. 101).

Chapter Five, the title of which recapitulates Golland’s book title, is laced with irony. The Philadelphia Plan was “an affirmative action program that required federal construction contractors to hire and train minority workers in several of the construction trades in Philadelphia” (p. 1). Just when the Philadelphia Plan had survived challenges to its legality, congressional efforts to torpedo it, infighting among bureaucrats charged with implementing it, and fleeting, self-serving presidential support, to achieve modest strides in furthering employment opportunity—in short, just when the Philadelphia Plan appeared to be succeeding, a sharp decline in federally funded building projects, together with on-the-job foremen gaining control over hiring, “resulted in continued employment discrimination in the skilled trades” (p. 146).

What basic lesson does Golland derive from his account? In his introduction, he makes three arguments: first, that Nixon was a fraudulent champion of affirmative action; second, that federal bureaucrats were pivotal political actors, in whose hands—occasionally for better, usually for worse—the prospects for equal employment opportunity rested; and third, “affirmative action in employment is equal employment opportunity” (p. 5). Hands down, Golland embraces his third argument as his most essential insight. His entire analysis of “constructing affirmative action” is underpinned by Golland’s conviction that color-conscious discrimination must be countered with color-conscious affirmative action: “That affirmative action is still required to achieve equal opportunity four decades after its inception is evidence not of a fault in the concept but of a failure in the implementation” (p. 183). Golland’s final words have a familiar ring to them. G. K. Chesterton once observed: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” ^{Footnote 4} Golland’s faith in affirmative action is touching. Unfortunately, his allegiance is undercut by the sheer weight of his own sobering analysis.