This Week in People’s History, Sep 24–30, 2025
Affirmative Action Had a Long Run, But Not Nearly Long Enough
SEPTEMBER 24 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of President Lyndon Johnson signing Executive Order 11246, requiring federal agencies and federal contractors to practice both non-discrimination and affirmative action in employment matters. The 1965 rule, which survived innumerable legal and political challenges for almost 60 years, was rescinded by the current occupant of the White House in January of this year.
A thorough defense of the value of affirmative action in this space is more than I am capable of. I think that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was persuasive and as succinct as possible in her June 2023 dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v University of North Carolina, where she wrote” “Our country has never been colorblind. Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented “intergenerational transmission of inequality” that still plagues our citizenry.”
For the complete text of that dissent, visit https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/29/kentanji-brown-jackson-affirmative-action-dissent
Working for Amazon Is Very, Very, Dangerous
SEPTEMBER 26 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s release of its stunning report, “Catching Amazon on a Lie,” showing that Amazon warehouse workers suffer from sky-high injury rates. The company’s primary response is to attempt to mislead the public, job safety enforcers and lawmakers by denying what the records show. For access to both the 53-minute audio version of the CIR report and its transcript, visit https://revealnews.org/podcast/catching-amazon-in-a-lie/
Witch-Hunt Targets Hazel Scott
SEPTEMBER 29 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of a mid-20th-century case of the same kind of right-wing cancel-culture that is seeing a full-barrel revival today.
The cancellation victim then was the wildly talented vocalist-pianist-composer-actress Hazel Scott, who was described as a Communist in “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television,” published in June 1950.
Scott, who had never been a Communist, denied the accusation, and demanded the opportunity to testify to that effect to the House Un-American Activities Committee. When she did so on September 22, she told the committee she had never been a Communist, but when questioned by the committee staff, she could not deny having supported Communist Party member Benjamin Davis's successful run for New York City City Council in 1945.
When Scott testified to HUAC, she was the star of the very successful 3-month-old “Hazel Scott Show,” on the DuMont television network. Even having merely voted for a Communist was too much for DuMont bigwigs, who pulled the plug on the show a week later.
Scott lost her TV show, and her career as recording artist was never as successful as it had been before her HUAC run-in, but she did perform frequently in clubs and made several television appearances on variety shows such as “Jackie Gleason’s Cavalcade of Stars” and “Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town.” She moved to France in 1957 and remained in Europe for 10 years.
Earlier this year, radio station WQXR aired a 2-hour special, “Still Swinging, Still Classic, A Musical Biography of Hazel Scott” hosted by Terrance McKnight. You can listen to the program, which mixes Hazel Scott’s fascinating life-story with dozens of her exciting performances, at https://www.wqxr.org/story/112430-still-swinging-still-classic-a-musical-biography-of-pioneering-pianist-hazel-scott/
Bad Medicine at Johns Hopkins
SEPTEMBER 30 IS THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of the termination, in 2015, of a profoundly unethical program that was conducted for years by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.
The Johns Hopkins program, which was ostensibly intended to diagnose and treat cases of Black Lung Disease among coal miners, had for years been acting as a front for the coal mining industry. It had been conducting X-Ray and CT examinations of coal miners who were experiencing the kind of respiratory distress that afflicts people with coal workers' pneumoconiosis, which is also known as Black Lung Disease, which is caused by the deposition of large amounts of coal dust in the lungs.
Even though Black Lung is always suspected in the case of respiratory insufficiency among workers with heavy exposure to coal dust, the disease can only be diagnosed by means of X-Ray and CT imaging. Only a physician can make such a diagnosis after viewing the images.
The Johns Hopkins scam was simplicity itself. Make sure that the diagnosing physicians would rule out Black Lung almost no matter what they could see on the images. The reputation of Johns Hopkins as one of the most lauded medical institutions in the U.S. was so impressive that efforts by other doctors to contradict the Johns Hopkins findings were almost always ignored. The result was that literally hundreds of coal miners who were very belatedly (often as a result of an autopsy) discovered to have Black Lung Disease, were denied government benefits that they would have been legally entitled to. You can read the Center for Public Integrity’s Pulitzer Prize winning report of Johns Hopkins unethical behavior here: https://publicintegrity.org/environment/johns-hopkins-medical-unit-rarely-finds-black-lung-helping-coal-industry-defeat-miners-claims/
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