A COMMENTARY by Lee A. Daniels '67

I was an affirmative action admit to Boston Latin School. I entered the seventh grade in 1960. I was an affirmative action admit to the Latin School in the days before such a policy was named and codified in formal terms.

Of course, those were the days when that policy, operating powerfully but without formal acknowledgement in education and in the workplace in America, was reserved almost exclusively for whites.

That was not so at BLS because Latin's unnamed affirmative-action policy of those years applied to all the schoolboys of Boston; so, there was always a smattering of black boys, like me, and Chinese boys in the upwards of seven hundred or more boys the school took in, year in and year out.

As Philip Marson documented in his 1962 Breeder of Democracy: A History of the Boston Latin School, that floodtide of students produced the famed, ferocious two-thirds attrition rate. And that attrition also illuminates three things that resonate loudly in the current controversy. Those things lead to an inescapable description of the cause of the current controversy. First, the attrition rate certifies that BLS did indeed have an affirmative-action admissions policy in the days when its student body was 97 to 98 percent white.

Secondly, it makes clear that the admissions policy was the result of an implicit political bargain between the overwhelmingly white, predominantly working-class population of Boston and BLS: The school could maintain its academic rigor and high standards for graduation (that's what the electorate wanted!) if it let as many boys as possible try to graduate.

Thirdly, in doing so, it would discover that some boys - from poor-quality schools, from rough-and-tumble neighborhoods, and from families with scant material resources - would not only survive but thrive at this school that exalted the classical tradition. Who can deny that this latter point is just as much a part of Latin School treasure chest of pride as the attrition rate?

When I entered BLS in 1960, following my brother who had entered a year earlier, I was probably not a student who an objective observer would have marked for success. I was coming from an elementary school of atrocious quality, the old Dwight on West Springfield Street in the South End. Indeed, in my first year at Latin, I did not adjust well in coming from a school where work meant nothing to a school where work was everything - and I failed.

That was the bucket of ice water. I discovered I didn't like failure, and so I went on to graduate. I was able to graduate from Boston Latin School because I got the chance - via the school's "old" admissions policy - to compete: to try to match the school's standards, to try to live up to its historic legacy.

In those days, there was no disparagement of a policy that effectively ignored the poor quality of their prior schooling. The focus then was on providing a chance to an entire cohort of Boston youngsters to expand their opportunities. Along with my parents and the impact of the Civil Rights Movement, the Latin School was central to my understanding that I was living in a world full of possibilities. It made my future possible.

Cutting off an expansive vision of possibility for youngsters who are colored is the root of opposition to affirmative action. Those who oppose today's affirmative action want the "old" kind of affirmative action policy - the one reserved exclusively for whites and shrouded in silence. The one under which four decades' worth of mostly white poor and working-class Boston boys got to test themselves at BLS without stigma or disparagement. The one under which scions of white upper-class families like George W. Bush go on to Yale and Harvard Business School without stigma or disparagement.

Affirmative action isn't new; not at BLS, nor in American society. What's new is its extension across the color line in a systematic way.