Dr. Claudia Hampton & the History of Affirmative Action in California

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too.

Kelly  0:38  
Claudia Hudley, was born in Mississippi on September 20, 1917, to General and Gertrude Hudley. The Hudleys left the south as part of the great migration, moving to Chicago, where Claudia attended elementary and high school. In 1935, Claudia graduated with a Bachelors of Science degree in Chemistry from Central YMCA College in Chicago, an integrated institution that admitted not just African American students and women, but also Jewish, Catholic and Japanese students. When the Central YMCA College Board of Directors voted in 1945, to put caps on the number of Black and Jewish students who could enroll, the president and many faculty members resigned in protest, and founded what is now Roosevelt University in Chicago. After college graduation, Claudia couldn't find work as a chemist, facing rampant discrimination, both for her race and for her sex. So she worked in a local welfare office for the next six years. When she married and gave birth to their daughter, Kathryn, she needed employment that would work better with child care, and her father and the local ward captain helped her find a job as an elementary school teacher in Chicago. In the early 1960s, the Hampton family moved to Los Angeles, where Claudia's husband had been offered a job as a school principal. Claudia, now Claudia Hampton, taught in East LA and was then appointed to direct the compensatory education program in the Los Angeles Unified School District. In August, 1965, riots broke out in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles. The six days of rioting killed 34 people, and caused an estimated $40 million in damages. After the riots, Governor Pat Brown appointed a commission to look into the causes of the violence and to make suggestions for improvements to the city. The resulting McCone Commission, named after the chair, former CIA head John A. McCone, wrote a 101 page report, which included a recommendation to create the LA Schools and Community Relations Unit in the Office of Urban Affairs, which Claudia Hampton was tapped to direct. At the same time, Hampton was also attending the University of Southern California, where she earned a doctoral degree in education in 1970, with a thesis entitled, "The Effects of School Desegregation on the Scholastic Achievement of Relatively Advantaged Negro Children." Hampton was also active in the LA chapter of the NAACP, and she co founded Women on Target, a political and educational advocacy group led by Black women. She was initiated into the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated in 1975 and served on AKA's local Social Action Committee. In 1974, Republican Governor Ronald Reagan appointed Hampton to the Board of Trustees for the California State University system, making her the first Black woman trustee for the system. Hampton served on the board for the next 20 years, reappointed by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and Republican governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. For three of those years, 1979 to 1981, Hampton served as chair of the board. Throughout her tenure, Hampton was viewed as the affirmative action trustee. And she leaned into that role, advocating strong positions on affirmative action, although, as she noted in an interview, "I never, to my knowledge, have been criticized for being a one issue trustee." Hampton's time on the board coincided with the rise and fall of affirmative action in the state of California. In September of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, and national origin, by organizations receiving federal contracts and subcontracts. Discrimination on the basis of sex was added to the list two years later. As part of that executive order, federal contractors were required to take affirmative action to provide equal opportunities. The Federal Office of Civil Rights, in 1972, turned its attention to higher education, issuing new higher education guidelines that mandated that universities outline their plans for affirmative action in accordance with the executive order, so that they could continue to receive federal funding. Unlike the University of California system, the California State University system prior to 1972, did not have a non discrimination or affirmative action policy in place, either for hiring or for admissions. In 1973, the California State Legislature released a master plan, creating more flexibility in admissions to address concerns the joint committee had regarding the lack of racial diversity in the university systems, recommending that, "Each segment of California public higher education strive to approximate by ,the general ethnic, sexual and economic composition of the recent California high school graduates." Without legislative mandates, the CSU Trustees could no longer ignore the issue. It was not until after Hampton had joined the board in late 1974, that the California State University Board of Trustees finally adopted a resolution to establish a system wide policy of non discrimination and affirmative action. On the same day that Claudia Hampton was sworn in, the trustees were introduced to the system's first affirmative action officer, Herbert Carter, who would hold the role for six years. Despite these promising developments, securing funding for the implementation of affirmative action, and putting the programs in place was a constant struggle, and for 20 years, Hampton had to use every tool she had to champion the needs of minority faculty, staff and students. Dr. Claudia Hampton died on August 13, 1994, in Los Angeles, of cancer. In her LA Times obituary, CSU Chairman Jim Considine was quoted as saying, "No one has been more instrumental in shaping the course of higher education in this state. She was never afraid to fight for what she believed in. And she always seemed to win, because, in the end, she was always on the moral high ground." Two years later, in 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action at public universities in the state, including in the California State University system. Joining me now to discuss Dr. Claudia Hampton and affirmative action in California, is Dr. Donna J. Nicol, the Associate Dean of Personnel and Curriculum and Professor of History in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University Long Beach, and the author of, "Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action."

Kelly  10:49  
Hi, Donna, thanks so much for joining me today. 

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  10:52  
Thank you so much for having me.

Kelly  10:54  
 I am really interested in learning about Dr. Hampton, and I want to hear a little bit about how you came to write this book. I understand this was sort of a one of those moments in the archive that shifts what you're about to do. So could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  11:11  
Yeah, so I was looking in the Cal State Dominguez Hills digital archive, for anything that I could find on an organization that my grandmother created in the late 70s, called the Office for Black Community Development. They received a $1.1 million grant from Jerry Brown, to create a Black supermarket training program. And I remember being involved with her as a kid. So I was just trying to find anything, and happened to stumble across a photograph of Dr. Claudia Hampton. And it said trustee Claudia Hampton, appointed by Ronald Reagan. I said, "What? This is a Black woman standing at a podium with Reagan?" You know, given what I know about, or at least at the time knew about Reagan's politics, I was quite stunned to see this Black woman. So I did what any intrepid historian would do is I Googled her and found a little bit, mostly that the Cal State system created a scholarship program in her honor in the 90s. And they gave a little descriptive blurb of who she was. And so that kind of sent me on the way. It was just like, "Oh, she was a trustee in the Cal State system in the 70s? Let me find out more." And that's that's really how the project got started.

Kelly  12:34  
So let's talk a little bit about this appointment by Reagan. As you say, this is unexpected. And not only is she a Black woman, but she was a Democrat and was outspoken in favor of affirmative action. None of these things seem like the kind of person that Ronald Reagan as governor would appoint to a position like this. How did this come about? How did it come about that Reagan even knew who she was and that he wanted her to be on the board of Cal State?

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  13:03  
Yeah, so it actually happened because of some ingenuity on the part of another Black woman by the name of Virna Canson. So, Virna Canson was the West Coast Regional Director of the NAACP, and Reagan's Education Secretary, a man by the name of Alex Sheriffs would routinely try to keep his hand on the pulse of what was going on in terms of educational policy. During this time, mostly, it had to deal with busing and school desegregation. So what Sheriffs did was invite Canson to, you know, like a 20 minute meeting with him to, you know, just go over whatever she had on her mind. But Canson knew, because her area was of expertise was not in education, it was actually in banking and credit unions. She called around to all of the branch presidents of the NAACP in California, and said, "Hey, I got this meeting with Reagan's Education Secretary. Why don't you guys join me for this meeting?" She didn't tell Sheriffs she was doing this. She just said I need some help. And it just so happened that Claudia Hampton was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP and the president at the time could not attend. So Hampton was the representative on behalf of the president. So they go to Sheriffs' meeting, and he's kind of been rushed by like eight to 12 people from all over the state, along with Canson. And what was slated to be a 20 - 30 minute meeting ended up going more than an hour because he was so engrossed in the conversation. That conversation led to a kind of vetting process, an informal process, where Sheriffs would just meet with people, this group all over the state. They would meet anywhere they could. If he was down in Los Angeles, they would meet in, you know, at restaurants or they would meet at an airport. And so it kind of was a group where, through attrition, some people just said, "Okay, I can't make it." And it got down to Claudia Hampton was pretty much the last person standing. And why this is so important is like, what is she getting vetted for? You know, well, Sheriffs knew that he was going to make a transition to the Cal State system as the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs after Reagan's term as governor was up. And so eventually,  Sheriffs asks Reagan, "Hey, can you appoint this woman? I've been meeting with her for over a year now." And Reagan's like, "Well, who is she?" And so Sheriffs kind of fills him in and says, "You know, her politics are pretty moderate. Yes, she was a part of the NAACP. But you know, I've talked to her about various race scenarios. I really think that she's the right fit for the Cal State system." And that's really how it happened. It was a lot of luck, and some ingenuity. And that's how she got her meeting with Ronald Reagan. She still didn't know at the time when she met with Ronald Reagan that she was getting appointed to the Board of Trustees. It just kind of took her by surprise. The appointment was made after Sheriffs moved into the Vice Chancellor position, and kind of went from there.

Kelly  16:50  
Let's talk a little bit then about what a board of trustees does. Full disclosure, I've worked in higher ed administration for 20 years, and I can't really tell you what the Board of Trustees does. In this in this particular instance, of course, California has the University of California system. It has the Cal State system. It has the city college system. And so this is it for Cal State, the Board of Trustees for the entire Cal State System, which is a lot of campuses. So what they do? 

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  17:22  
Yes, so in the Cal State context, there's 23 campuses currently. But the trustees basically have oversight responsibility for every aspect of the university, whether it's to appoint presidents and to appoint chancellors, down to educational policy. They approve the schematic plans for a new building. Anytime there is a change to the ed code, they are responsible for interfacing with the legislature. So it's broad. They can do things like pull the funding for a student newspaper, if they feel so inclined. They can approve an academic program or not. They were instrumental, not necessarily in a good way, but instrumental in approving the Black Studies curriculum in the 1960s. So they have wide kind of control. But because the Cal State system was created through a statutory provision, meaning they were created for the purpose of helping to build our teachers, or create our teachers, they're under more strict scrutiny than University of California, which was created through a public trust in the California constitution. The difference is pretty, pretty stark, meaning the UCs have more fiscal control over everything. I guess the best way to describe that is that the legislature provides funding to the University of California, but not the strict scrutiny. Whereas with the Cal States, they are under the control of the board of education as well. So they have to answer to the legislature and the Board of Education at the same time. So their budgets are scrutinized much more closely. And then with the city colleges, they're under a Board of Governors. And that Board of Governors has a lot of control over them, but not to the same extent as the Cal States.

Kelly  19:37  
Claudia Hampton, of course, had a lot of experience in education at all levels before she had this position. That's not necessarily the typical background of a trustee. Right. So what does that background give her? How does it help her in her ability to understand what sorts of things need to be done and figure out kind of how she can find a position for what she wants to do as a trustee.?

Speaker 1  20:05  
Yeah, so her her background in K 12 education really allows her, one, she understands policymaking. She understands the kind of current issues that students are facing in terms of what they need, before they get to the university, the kind of preparation that they need. The other thing that her her education background has allowed for her is that she knows how to interface with superintendents and people in leadership, where other members of the board don't have necessarily that experience. They might be coming from business, they might be coming from communications or, you know, other other arenas, and they just don't have an understanding of education process, or how long it takes to get things done within a university setting. And so she came in with a lot of advantages in that regard, but probably her biggest advantage is that she knew how to interact with people, all these different constituents, because her job in K 12 went beyond the classroom. She interacted with the ACLU and NAACP because she was responsible for monitoring the desegregation process of LA Unified after it was deemed to be practicing racial discrimination in the 1970s. So she knew how to work with external partners in ways that a lot of other people did not.

Kelly  21:46  
So, you talk about her approach, you use the term sly civility. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that means. There's something different and it's something that she's wildly successful doing. So could you talk a little bit about what what you mean by that, how she's able to use that to really gain a lot of success? 

Speaker 1  22:06  
So sly civility was a resistant strategy that was coined by cultural theorists Homi Bhabha, and when Homi Bhabha is talking about sly civility, he's talking about it within the context of colonial India. And what he says is that what Indian people have to do, in order to help the other colonized and disenfranchised folks, is, if one of them gets access to the institutions of the colonizer, in this case, the British, they have to enact sly civility. And so sly civility, really, is this idea that you enter in spaces that are traditionally cut off to you, that you behave civilly toward the people who are in power. And then you gain access to their resources, the opportunities, and you pass that information back on to other disenfranchised people. So you, you get access, but you don't just stop at having access. You get access for the purpose of giving access and passing it on to someone else. So for Claudia Hampton, she enacts sly civility, pretty much in a lot of almost all of her interactions when she's on the board. To give you just a really quick example, in her first year on the board, one of the other trustees used a racial epithet against her. And instead of clapping back or checking this person for using this racist language against her, instead, she told the chair of the committee where they were meeting, that she would handle this interaction offline. And what this does is it ingratiates her to the predominantly white men on the board, who, you know, are assuming because she's a Black woman, she's going to attack this white man for what he said. Instead, she pulled him to the side and said, "Hey, this is unacceptable." And that helped her to court favor with the other white men on the board who said, "Oh, she's a political moderate, we can negotiate with her." And so this gives her some capital that she's able to later use, because, you know, folks are like, "Oh at least, she's, she's level headed, and she's not one of these radicals." And then eventually, over time, she keeps building this capital to the point where she's able to get funding for affirmative action at times when no one wanted to spend any money on the implementation of affirmative action.

Kelly  24:56  
One of the ways that she uses this sly civility is by hosting dinner parties. And you know, it brings to mind like the the women who who first get somewhere have to like make coffee for the men or something. So she's doing this, but but doing it with a very particular rationale, and I get the impression she liked hosting and liked cooking. Could you talk a little bit about that, and how she's using this ability to host people to make them feel comfortable in her home? And using that ability to get the things that she's looking for, like that's funding for affirmative action?

Speaker 1  25:30  
Yeah. So, you know, she's very aware that she needed access to the informal telephone network, where all of the backdoor deals were happening, but she was locked out of for the first two or three years on the board. You know, the the trustees meet at least six times a year. And there was radio silence for over the summer. And when they would come into the next meeting, decisions were pretty much made. And she she could figure this out, because she was she was silent her first year on purpose, so that she could study the board culture, and she kept noticing, "Hey, I don't have an opportunity to really ask a question, because they've already decided." So one of the ways that she was going to gain access was to host the, you know, a group of these men, not all of them, but a group of them, the people that she had deemed the most powerful ones, just by her observations, she's going to invite them to dinner at her house. And she's going to use this to relationship build, so that eventually they will discuss policy with her and she could trade votes with them. And so she called this the game of Boardsmanship. And her entre point was to kind of use gender norms of the day to work for her instead of against her because she knew her race was already a problem for some of the some of the men on the board. But if she played hostess, she could kind of disarm that racism. And there are other Black women who are using similar models during this period. So there's Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, who was the first African American principal of a school in Charlotte, North Carolina, who eventually went on to help establish the Black studies program at UNC Charlotte. And so she called a well the person who did the biography of Maxwell-Roddey called it charismatic advocacy. And so it's how do you ensure that even though you're the first of something, that you're not the last, and the way to do that, for Black women was to relationship build, figure out a way to become friends so that they can see that you're safe, that you are, you're not asking for too much. And so using this kind of instrumental leadership that management theorist by the name of Jean Lipman-Blumen, it says that you can use yourself as the instrument to create leadership opportunities. And so cooking dinner was not a deficit, it was actually something that Claudia Hampton really used to good effect. And even when she became board chair, some five years later, she continued that practice. And that gave her the ability to go into meetings prepared to defend affirmative action. And when she became a board chair, it enabled her to figure out, "Okay, all of these folks are my allies. Let them talk first," and then everybody else would have to play defense.

Kelly  28:58  
What all was affirmative action? It's not just one thing, of course, and throughout the time that Claudia Hampton is on the board, which is a very long time, there are different ways she's approaching it, different things she's trying in order to get better representation, better diversity among the student body, the staff, the faculty. What were the various methods and things she was trying, programs she was building in order to achieve that diversity?

Speaker 1  29:26  
Yeah. So you know, affirmative action starts as an executive order by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. And it really has to deal with federal contracting. That's the initial iteration of the executive order. And it wasn't until a group of feminist mostly middle class white women began to press the federal government and say, "Well, universities receive federal funding. Aren't those federal contractors? Why aren't you applying those same rules to all of these is intuitions?" And so when they started to make that claim or complaint, rather, the federal government came out with a new set of rules in 1972, which actually clarified the distinction between non discrimination and affirmative action. People think they're the same. They're two separate things. They're connected but not the same. And so with that, non discrimination basically says that you won't use someone's status, whether it's their gender, their race, their national origin, you won't use that as a barrier to keeping people out. But affirmative action says that you're going to take an extra demonstrative step, to help those underrepresented people because of their race, their gender, national origin, you're going to do something extra to help bring them in to the institution. So by the time that Claudia Hampton gets on the board, in 1974, the rules are really clear now. But there is a lot of feet dragging by members of the Board of Trustees, some of the legislators, even governors that profess to have support for affirmative action. And so Hampton is really trying to ensure that there's the implementation of affirmative action, not just the law itself. So some of the programs that she's really fighting for, she fought with Mervyn Dymally, who was lieutenant governor, and he had a seat on the board. There was no implementation when it came to people who would put in bids for architecture projects. And so it took two years to get the committee, the grounds and buildings committee to implement affirmative action where they would do a competitive bidding process that would not exclude architects of color. So that was one of the things that she fought for. She fought for funding for, it was called Young Black Scholars program that was created by 100 black men in Los Angeles, because the Cal States had been woefully deficient in recruiting Black male students. And so she helped get them a half a million dollar grant, over a three year period to increase the enrollment of Black male students. She was instrumental in helping the chancellor at the time, the first woman Chancellor, Ann Reynolds get the Chancellor's Doctoral Incentive Program, which would be a type a type of feeder program and pipeline, to get doctoral students of color into the Cal State system. There was just a number of things that she did in terms of trying to make sure that campus presidents were held accountable for the implementation of affirmative action, and not just relying on these kind of middle layer of people who are affirmative action officers. So it was really about implementation more so than the law itself. And a lot of times you needed funding in order to implement the law. 

Kelly  32:52  
And one of the ways we know that it worked and did increase the diversity and representation on campus is that in 1996, of course, the state of California voted to end affirmative action programs. Can you talk a little bit about what has happened since 1996? And the ways that we see that, in fact, these programs were really helping? 

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  33:39  
Yeah, so before California got rid of affirmative action, there was really great signs of progress being made, in terms of there was a 27% increase in the number of faculty of color, so it had risen pretty dramatically. And it's been at that same level and has not, is pretty much been flat since '96, in terms of the faculty ranks. In terms of the student body, you see, the Latinx student population had grown by over 50%. You saw the Black and Asian student population grow by about 25%, respectively. So you see this kind of growth and the number of women who are promoted as faculty, staff, administrators, along with the student body really grows in those 20 years that she served on the board. But after '96, you see this just mass kind of decline in terms of student numbers. So the Black student population cuts in half. It goes from 8% down to 4%. You see the Latinx student population grow, but the caveat here is that the Latinx student population, full stop, in whether it's high school or college, grows, and their population, for the whole community grows. So it goes from 7% to 15%, in a 20 year period. And what was so crazy about that is with that growth, the Latinx student graduation rate has been flat in the Cal State since 2015. You even have in the UC system that those populations dropped pretty much precipitously in half. The only way that these, there's starting to be an uptick in the Latino admission rate, is that the UCs have moved to a thing called holistic review. So holistic review is a way to kind of sidestep not having affirmative action, but looking at multivaried factors for admission. So it's been, the loss of affirmative action has been devastating. Not only can you not use affirmative action, in terms of admission, but you can't use any race based scholarships, all of that is gone. And it's not just higher ed that's affected by this. In the city of Los Angeles, African Americans represented 15% of all folks that won contracts. And now that number sits at 0.23%. So it has been a tremendous loss to minority and women getting into the, into higher education and federal contracting. And folks will say, "Well, you know, there's more women in higher education than ever before." And it's like, yeah, but that's not because of policies that you've created. That's just because women are more interested in going to university because they've been locked out of it for so long.

Kelly  37:00  
And, of course, you know, we're talking about a time in the 70s, through the 90s. And so people might think, "Oh, the problem of representation on boards of trustees is totally solved by now." Right. And that's, of course, not the case. So we see, in the story of Claudia Hampton, how much good just one Black woman on the board was able to do. Could you talk a little bit about what the larger picture looks like in boards of trustees and why that's important?

Speaker 1  37:29  
Yeah. So across the United States, approximately 70% of the student body is students of color and women. But if you look at board representation, it's about 70% white men. So there is a complete mismatch between who's the policymakers and who are the people affected by the policies. And there doesn't seem to be the kind of attention to this, because one, we don't know who the trustees are. But what we also don't understand a lot of times is that these are political appointments. In most public institutions, you're appointed by the governor. And it's a kind of political patronage type of system. So people, you know, they're going to appoint folks who were campaign donors, their friends, people who think like them, look like them. You know, and so we have a real problem with, you know, if our elected officials are not diverse people in and of themselves, or they don't value diversity, they're just going to replicate the same systems over and over again.

Kelly  38:45  
And you talk, toward the end of the book, about how learning about Claudia Hampton's approach has changed your approach. Could you reflect on that a little bit?

Speaker 1  38:55  
Yeah. So I was raised up in the Black radical tradition. I came from a family of activists. My grandmother, we used to call her garage, "The Activists' Hotel," where people who were, you know, like really committed to the cause, but didn't have a lot of money, they could stay for a couple of months until they got on their feet. And in exchange, my grandmother required them to do consciousness raising sessions in our living room. And so we would learn, and I would I was a kid, I would sit under the feet of these activists, and just listen to them. So for me to study and learn about someone who uses kind of moderate politics, where, you know, I come from the radical school that says that you need to respect my humanity, full stop, I shouldn't have to comport to respectability, you know, in order to in order to get equality. But over time, what I realized studying her and then also working in the institutions themselves, as a faculty member, and now as an administrator, I realized that I don't have to have an either or approach, that I can be a Black radical when necessary. But I also can be a liberal insider or moderate, when it's necessary. And so she really taught me by, you know, studying and reading about her, and listening to her audio, she really taught me that there's not a single approach. And that, you know, sometimes you're going to need to reach across the table and work with people whose whose politics are different than yours. 

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  41:28  
So I think this book has a lot of lessons for all of us. Could you tell listeners how to get a copy?

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  42:07  
Yeah, so you can go directly to my website at www.DonnaJNicol.com, and go straight to the research page. And the links to purchase the book are right there. It's also on Amazon and other book retailers.

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  44:27  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Dr. Donna J. Nicol  41:10  
You know, I really want people to understand the connection between this historical past and what is happening now with affirmative action. And also we, you know, the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in the Harvard case last year, and folks will probably say something like, "So what's the point of studying this history?" And the point is that these identity politics, and they're, it's cyclical, and it keeps happening over and over again. And so what can people do? You know, what are some solutions now that affirmative action is gone? One, go to holistic review. We've seen that there has been like a 17%, uptake, uptick in Latinx students at UCLA, because they use holistic review. The other thing is that instead of universities, or what universities can do, is ask their donors if they want race based scholarships. They can put them in community foundations. So I just read a story the other day that the folks at University of Missouri who gave money when they were having all of those protests, at Ferger, in Ferguson, and so forth, they wanted scholarships, specifically targeted for African Americans. And now, because of the Supreme Court decision, just recently, conservative groups are trying to sue the University of Missouri for these scholarships. Well, one way around that is to go to the local community foundation, and you can establish a Black Excellence Scholarship. And so I think people need to understand that understanding the contours of affirmative action, understanding how people lobbied against affirmative action, will help you create a plan, a workaround plan. And then the other thing is that because the Supreme Court did not get rid of affirmative action in the military institutions, you know, so the various military academies still have affirmative action, there still is the real possibility to bring affirmative action back, even if it's on a state by state level. California attempted it again, two years ago. It failed because no one explained to young people in particular what affirmative action is and was. I had a group of students sitting in class and said, "Hey, Dr. Nicol, you know, you're talking about affirmative action, but we don't know what it is." And I realized in that moment, one I was old, but two, the messaging about what it is and how it can benefit various groups were important. So all of this to say is that understanding historical context is important. And then making those kind of connections between what Hampton dealt with, and what we're dealing with now, we can we can get some strategies from her. And then just to put a fine point on this, the Biden administration has a Black woman who works as the Director for the Office of Management and Budget, a woman named Shalanda Young, and they call her the Republican whisperer in the Biden administration because she uses a lot of the same tactics that Claudia Hampton uses, and she has prevented government shutdowns because of that relationship. So she's from Louisiana, and everyone who's in the Louisiana delegation, whether they're Republican or Democrat, she'll send them crawfish and gumbo. So you know, it's like, almost similar to Hampton cooking dinner. Instead, she just gets it shipped from Louisiana and they kind of do like their own little Mardi Gras up in in DC. So there are people who are utilizing some of these tactics right now, probably have no awareness that it's sly civility, but they're no less effective. 

Kelly  45:16  
Well, Donna, thank you so much for speaking with me. I loved learning about Claudia Hampton and I think this is really really important stuff for everyone to study.

Speaker 1  45:25  
Thank you so much for having me. I really do appreciate it. I really enjoyed it.

Teddy  45:48  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode, and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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