Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century)

David Golland's Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity is a wonderful work that examines the impact of local civil rights movements on national leadership and public policy. The book explores how local groups pushed for affirmative action forcing national leaders to react. But this interaction was not always to the benefit of local leaders or the people whom they represented. Golland provides elaborate details of the politics of the Philadelphia Plan and the impact this affirmative action had on the nation. --Clarence Taylor, author of Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union --

Golland provides an in-depth historical accounting of 'bureaucratic inertia, ' 'urban crisis, ' development of Philadelphia Plan, and the roles of mainstreem civil rights organizations, labor, contractors, and industry... The author documents presidential politics beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and refutes Richard Nixon's sincerity. -- Choice --

Constructing Affirmative Action offers a thoughtful new interpretation, clearly presented and based on judicious research in primary sources. It will become the standard book on the struggle for equal employment opportunity in the construction trades. -- Journal of American History --

Few historians have focused so much research on the construction industry and trade unions as one of the key sites of the modern affirmative action battle. With the U.S. Supreme Court possibly poised to overturn affirmative action, we need to see what we may lose with its dismantling. -- American Historical Review --

David Hamilton Golland is assistant professor of history at the City University of New York. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.