One way to shelter one’s business from the government’s investigative zeal was to act in the spirit of voluntarism—to establish pre-emptively a government-approved affirmative action program, along lines laid out in Section 718 of the act. President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, promulgated in the same summer as the Voting Rights Act, had already required that any private company with at least 51 employees set up an affirmative action program if it was going to seek government contracts. There was nothing race-neutral about the system. In fact, the judges who interpreted it wound up
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