Historians of affirmative action mostly avoided asking why it emerged when it did

Evidence

With one clear exception (Skrentny), these analyses seldom address the issue of “why affirmative action?” and “why at a given historical moment?” Instead, their main burden has been to demonstrate that federal policy was in fact effective. That is, once federal officials, especially several presidents in a row beginning with Lyndon Johnson, decided to endorse affirmative action and develop an institutional structure to implement and enforce the policy, it happened. Graham (but not the other historians of affirmative action) even argues, roughly, that the federal government was too effective in the sense that affirmative action policy created an elaborate system of social regulation by bureaucrats and courts that is now unresponsive to public wishes, excessively interventionist, and counterproductive. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1970

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: why did affirmative action emerge at that specific historical moment? Skrentny’s exception is named but not summarized here — his answer would be worth reading.