The Equal Opportunity Act Was Not About “Quotas”

In 1975, Arthur Fletcher who served as the Assistant Secretary of Labor during the Nixon administration penned the Equal Opportunity Act which was passed. This act stated, “when two people of equal measure apply for a job and both are qualified, if there was or is a history of discrimination in that job or job category based on skin color, the job should first go to the person whose class had been discriminated against”. This program was not just about “quotas”, which were a bastardization of the original act undertaken as an effort to appease African Americans who were being excluded from areas in which no history of discrimination may have occurred.