How black Americans were on the rise before affirmative action, author Jason Riley explains in fascinating new book

New York Post

07-05-2025

Jason Riley makes his living by his pen — and wastes no ink or time in mincing words.
'There's a lot of intellectual cowardice going on in the country right now, and it's a product, I think, of the ascendance of progressivism,' he tells The Post in an interview about his new book, 'The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don't Need Racial Preferences to Succeed.'
The book's title alone is sure to spur debate. Its author, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, is somewhat bemused by his position as a provocateur.
'I find it annoying that I have to make what I consider commonsensical points that others deem controversial, to say, 'No, police are not a bigger problem than the criminals.' This is something that'll get your head handed to you today to say,' he declares.
' 'Black kids should spend more time studying and less time playing video games, and that will go a long way toward closing the achievement gap in schools' is a very controversial thing to say.'
The historical record
Riley, who grew up in Buffalo, set himself a huge task with his latest work: show how affirmative action slowed previous trends of black upward mobility.
This could be the definitive book shattering the myth.
The reaction to the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found affirmative-action college-admission programs violate the 14th Amendment, prompted Riley to write it.
3 Jason Riley's forthcoming book, 'The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don't Need Racial Preferences to Succeed.'
'There was so much doomsaying up to the decision on how the black middle class would be impacted if the court banned racial preferences. And the argument seemed to be that racial preferences had created the black middle class, and so blacks would be devastated if these policies go away. And I wanted to say that is not what the historical record shows,' he says.
'This idea that black advancement in this country is contingent on special treatment, set-asides, quotas and what have you is just something not supported by the facts,' he adds.
'What really prompted the book is to respond to this sky-is-falling-argument I was hearing about the court case and what could happen if the justices rule the way they ultimately did.'
'Before DEI programs'
Riley rattles off statistics:
'Between 1940 and 1960, the black poverty rate in this country fell from 87% to 47%. Nineteen-sixty is not only before any affirmative-action starting. It's during Jim Crow. It's before any major civil-rights acts of the '60s had passed,' he says, with some incredulity.
'It's before DEI programs.'
It did continue to drop — 'but at a much slower rate.'
That example echoes through all the data.
'Whether it's black educational attainment, poverty reduction, blacks entering middle-class professions, black crime rate and involvement with the criminal-justice system, all of these trends were moving in a positive direction at a faster rate in the decades prior to the implementation of affirmative-action policy,' he notes.
3 Miss Jean Leonard (left), Air Force Sergeant Harry Logan (center), and Mrs. Harry Logan (right), displaying bright smiles by Hotel Theresa in Harlem, New York.
Bettmann Archive
'When the policy objective has been colorblindness or equal treatment, blacks have made much greater strides than when the policy objective has been reverse discrimination.'
Another theme of the book, in Riley's succinct words: 'Culture does matter.'
'One of the problems with a lot of people on the left who write about these issues, and particularly among civil-rights advocates in that crowd, is not wanting to talk about cultural differences, behavioral differences and so forth and also not wanting to talk about a very real problem in poor black communities, which is that the behaviors and attitudes that are conducive to upward mobility are demeaned and derided as acting white.'
'So the black kid who is studious, who does spend a lot of time studying, who raises his hand in class gets mocked by fellow blacks who accuse him of acting white,' he says.
'There was a time in black America where that was unheard of, and I think it's one of the reasons that you saw those black gains in the first two-thirds of the 20th century — because there was an emphasis from the black leadership on down, Martin Luther King on down, that were obsessed with how black people carried themselves, how they comported themselves, schooling speech and so forth.'
'Staying out of trouble with the law, not giving white racists any excuses, that was part of the goal, but also that, just for its own sake, these behaviors were conducive to upward mobility. And that has been lost in the post-'60s era, and now you have a lot of black writers and thinkers and politicians and media folks who don't believe that black behavior should be any part of the discussion.'
'This celebration of antisocial behavior that you get from the hip-hop world and the rap world and so forth, don't talk to us about that until you get rid of white racism in this country, that's the problem, not this behavior.'
'The Affirmative Action Myth' is a damning indictment of liberal public policy — and of modern black leadership.
3 Scenes from a chaotic protest over the death of George Floyd in New York, NY on May 30, 2020.
Christopher Sadowski
'What is their legacy?'
'What did the Black Panthers accomplish? What is their legacy, and does it match that of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King and Whitney Young and all of these leaders of blacks during the 1950s and '60s who got concrete results?' Riley says.
He notes the black homicide rate 'fell by double digits' in the 1940s and again in the 1950s.
'This was just a crazy statistic because this was during a period of the great migration out of the South for blacks' — and 'from rural areas to urban areas. And typically, urban areas are much more violent in this country than rural areas, so you have blacks teeming into cities, and the violent crime rate among blacks falling in a period it was staying relatively level for whites.'
The good news didn't last: 'This all would start to be reversed by the late '60s, and then it'll get worse in the '70s and the '80s and the '90s, where you're getting 2,300 homicides a year in New York City by the mid-'90s. It was just an incredible turnaround.'
Riley doesn't blame racism — or 'systemic racism.'
'The black leadership shifted in its focus from equal treatment to special treatment, and that's the real trend you saw in the late 1960s beginning in the post-King era, the rise of the Black Power movement. There was also a focus among the black leadership, the NAACP types, National Urban League, to acquire more black political power. The thinking was: If we can get our own folks in office, our own people elected, the rest will take care of itself. It's all about getting the political power,' he explains.
'Black poor got poorer'
And they got it: 'In the 1970s, you start getting black mayors of large cities in this country with large black populations, your Detroits, your Clevelands, New York in 1990, Los Angeles, Chicago and on and on. But that black political leadership, that black political power, did not translate into more economic gains for blacks. In fact, the black poor got poorer under Sharpe James in Newark or under Marion Barry in Washington, DC.'
Riley shakes his head.
'They wanted to translate that political power into special preferences for blacks, and they continue down that road. And I think they took their eye off the ball in terms of developing that human capital.'
The media, meanwhile, promote Black Lives Matter and spotlight thinkers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi, who blame 'white racism' and 'don't want to hear about black behavior, no matter how self-defeating it is,' Riley complains.
'There's a racial-grievance industry in this country, and it is extremely lucrative. And Black Lives Matter is the latest example,' he says.
'The politicians like to use racial grievance to get people to the polls. The activists like to use it to raise money and stay relevant. And whether it's actually what the black underclass in particular needs is a secondary concern for them.'
A call to arms
Riley's book is not just a history then — it's a call to arms to America's African Americans.
'The Black Lives Matter movement has been quite dangerous in terms of the narratives it's promoting. A lot of the people participating in those demonstrations, riots or protests have been misled about what's going on in black America.'
'They've been led to believe that George Floyd was your typical black American. George Floyd was a career criminal who was high on drugs when he was killed by police while resisting arrest,' Riley concludes.
'Most black people are not drug addicts, not career criminals. We don't resist arrest.'
As he writes optimistically in his new book, 'black history is also about what a race of people managed to accomplish against all odds in the face of . . . oppression, and this history reveals inconvenient truths for those who claim that ending 'systemic racism' is a prerequisite for black advancement.'