America’s first affirmative action plan was in place long before 1776. It created the legal “set-aside” that exempted white people from enslavement while permitting their enslavement of others. It was fiercely guarded.

When that privilege was endangered in the mid-19th century, the white backlash helped bring on the bloodiest war in our history. After the war, when related white privileges were threatened during Reconstruction, the backlash led to the greatest outbreak of terrorism in our history.

Another affirmative action plan called “Jim Crow” officially lasted until 1965. Throughout, though, white supremacy served as a means for the white elite to exploit non-whites while picking the pockets of the white masses.      

But all this would change in the mid-20th century, thanks to federal government activism. Programs associated with the New Deal and World War II during the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt “created the modern white middle class,” says historian Ira Katznelson of Columbia University.  The intent of these programs was colorblind, but at the insistence of powerful Democratic politicians from the South, they were administered at the state and local level so they could be implemented in a color-biased way. Blacks were also helped by these efforts, but from Social Security to farm programs to FHA home loans to wartime factory employment, whites got the disproportionate share of federal benefits by far.

The GI Bill of 1944 was typical. It was, says Katznelson, “the most wide-ranging set of social benefits ever offered by the federal government in a single, comprehensive initiative” — promising veterans tuition for college and vocational training, loans for homes and for small-business startups.  But in the Jim Crow South, whites-only colleges automatically turned away black applicants, and the chronically underfunded all-black colleges lacked the facilities to accommodate most of them.

When black veterans applied for bank loans to buy homes or start businesses, they were routinely denied, regardless of VA guarantees. In Mississippi in 1947, of 3,229 federally guaranteed GI home loans, two went to black veterans. But prejudice had never been a Southern monopoly. In New York and northern New Jersey, under 100 of the 67,000 total mortgages went to non-whites.

For the white beneficiaries of all these programs, the effect was profound. Yes, these people worked hard to get ahead, but the poor (of any color) had always worked hard and, despite the laissez-fairy-tale, had mostly stayed poor.  Now, though, their efforts were amplified by government-supplied access to education and job training, low-interest and long-term credit, the inheritable equity of home ownership, and old age insurance. After 300 years, white supremacy was finally paying off for the average white person. 

But another change was in store. Beginning in the late 1940s, government favoritism toward whites began to wane — slowly. And as a result, says Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz, “many who [in the 1930s and ’40s] had benefited from the New Deal began [by the 1960s and later] to see themselves less as beneficiaries of public spending than as taxpayers supporting programs that benefited others.” But they weren’t just any “others.” Says Abramowitz, “For many members of the new white middle class, the issue…was race.”

After three centuries in which racial inequality had been the norm, equality wasn’t seen as evenhandedness; it was decried as government discrimination against whites. This sense of racial grievance increasingly fed resentment of the federal government that distributed the benefits, and of the Democratic Party with which it was identified.  A backlash was predictable. This time, it would bring on the greatest political realignment in our history.

JIM WIGGINS is a retired Copiah-Lincoln Community College history instructor.