In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision last year that ended affirmative action in higher education, Harvard Law School, a defendant in the case, announced last week that they admitted only 19 Black students this year—the lowest number admitted since 1965.
While Black first-year law school enrollment was up 3% nationwide, Harvard’s admission shortfalls are dramatic and worrisome. On average, 50-70 Blacks were admitted annually prior to the June 2023 Students for Fair Admissions SCOTUS ruling. As the “charter school” for Critical Race Theory, Harvard’s students and faculty have played a pivotal role in mapping systemic racism and promoting anti-racist perspectives and policy reform.
The Harvard admission concerns shine light on a more troublesome, persistent trend. From 2014 to the present, the percentage of Black lawyers nationally has remained unchanged at 5%. There is, frankly, a meaningless trickle of Black law school graduates annually. Not enough to even merit the designation as a pipeline.
And why does this matter?
Because of the standard that SCOTUS has set for demonstrating unequal protection under the 14th amendment. Overwhelmingly, disproportionately, stubbornly racially disparate outcomes are not enough. Evidence of racial animus is required which both mystifies and nullifies how systemic racism works.
Just one life and death example should suffice.
37 years after SCOTUS’ decision in McKleskey v. Kemp which revealed profoundly racial results in Georgia’s pursuit of the death penalty and jury verdicts, 53% of Georgia’s current death row inmates are Black. Only 14% of the overall US population, 41% of death row inmates nationally are Black. (Note: President Joe Biden commuted the death sentence for all federal death row inmates on 12/23/2024). In the absence of concrete evidence that prosecutors uniquely target Blacks for the death penalty or that jurors habitually exercise racial bias in their deliberations, the death penalty in America remains a racist institution.
At this point in our history, there are realistically only two ways to reverse that trend. Ban the death penalty nationally or mount a hostile takeover of prosecutor offices, supplanting White leadership with Black justice warriors.
“Waiting for White people to get it” is no longer an option.
Hoping that the Students for Fair Admissions decision will not result in a precipitous decline in Black law school graduates is magical thinking.
The affirmative action script needs to be flipped in Black’s favor.
We need to arm our nation’s HBCU law schools to train and graduate justice warriors.
