The Du Pont Company's Affirmative Action Efforts

Jennifer Delton

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511814051.010

9 - The Du Pont Company's Affirmative Action Efforts

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Jennifer Delton

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Jennifer Delton: Affiliation:
Skidmore College, New York

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Summary

Business, at least big business, accepts not only the overall concept of affirmative action by now, but knows that goals and timetables provide a way of showing that they are meeting the law.

A former director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, 1981

The E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company had never shown much interest in equal employment opportunity, the black community, or affirmative action until 1963, when it joined Plans for Progress. Even then its efforts to hire and promote minorities can best be described as lackluster. While the other companies we have thus far considered were at the forefront of integrating American business and industry, the Du Pont Company wasn't. Yet by the early 1970s, like so many other companies, it was forced to respond to racial unrest, government demands, business leadership, and public opinion, and make a concerted attempt to hire and promote minorities. The Du Pont Company's efforts to adjust to the new social and racial realities of the 1960s and 1970s were at once ambivalent and ambitious, and bring together the major themes of the previous chapters: the role of business leaders in changing attitudes and practices, the full acceptance of color-conscious hiring policies, the way integration strengthened human relations managerial techniques, and the adverse relationship between racial integration and labor union activity.

Type: Chapter
Information: Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990 , pp. 255 - 279

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814051.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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9 - The Du Pont Company's Affirmative Action Efforts

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