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22  STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT 

AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

at 327, this reality informs the exigency of respondents’ cur-
rent admissions policies and their racial diversity goals. 

i 
For much of its history, UNC was a bastion of white su-
premacy.  Its leadership included “slaveholders, the leaders 
of  the  Ku  Klux  Klan,  the  central  figures  in  the  white  su-
premacy  campaigns  of  1898  and  1900,  and  many  of  the
State’s most ardent defenders of Jim Crow and race-based 
Social Darwinism in the twentieth century.”  3 App. 1680.
The university excluded all people of color from its faculty 
and  student  body,  glorified  the  institution  of  slavery,  en-
forced its own Jim Crow regulations, and punished any dis-
sent from racial orthodoxy.  Id., at 1681–1683.  It resisted 
racial integration after this Court’s decision in Brown, and 
was forced to integrate by court order in 1955.  3 App. 1685. 
It took almost 10 more years for the first Black woman to
enroll at the university in 1963.  See Karen L. Parker Col-
lection,  1963–1966,  UNC  Wilson  Special  Collections  Li-
brary.  Even then, the university admitted only a handful
of  underrepresented  racial  minorities,  and  those  students 
suffered constant harassment, humiliation, and isolation.  3 
App. 1685.  UNC officials openly resisted racial integration
well into the 1980s, years after the youngest Member of this
Court was born.19  Id., at 1688–1690.  During that period, 

—————— 

19 In 1979, prompted by lawsuits filed by civil rights lawyers under Ti-
tle VI, the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare “revoked 
UNC’s federal funding for its continued noncompliance” with Brown.  3 
App. 1688; see Adams v. Richardson, 351 F. Supp. 636, 637 (DC 1972); 
Adams  v.  Califano,  430  F. Supp.  118,  121  (DC  1977).    North  Carolina 
sued the Federal Government in response, and North Carolina Senator
Jesse Helms introduced legislation to block federal desegregation efforts.
3 App. 1688.  UNC praised those actions by North Carolina public offi-
cials.  Ibid.  The litigation ended in 1981, after the Reagan administra-
tion settled with the State.  See North Carolina v. Department of Educa-
tion, No. 79–217–CIV–5 (EDNC, July 17, 1981) (Consent Decree).