PROGRAM SPOTLIGHT
Disparity Studies Provide Evidence to Confirm Contracting Inequalities Remembering the Impact of Atlanta’s First Disparity Study on Policies to Support Minority Business By Marcus K. Garner
Black Lives Matter: Now that this important, but painfully underappreciated truth has been reaffirmed and reinforced, the DBE community now can dive into celebrating the continual progress for minority businesses in Atlanta and across the country.
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nclusion policy in government procurement and hiring practices is not uncommon in many local and state agencies. However, without the work (from 30 years ago) of an Atlanta team proving that disadvantaged businesses even needed support, such programs might not exist. In June 1990, the Brimmer-Marshall Study provided evidence supporting a Minority Business Program in the City of Atlanta – designed to create opportunity for black-owned and Hispanic-owned businesses to contract with the City. The groundbreaking work, led by economists Andrew Brimmer, the first black governor of the Federal Reserve; and Ray Marshall, President Jimmy Carter’s former Labor Secretary, was called a ‘Disparity Study,’ and was the catalyst for a cottage industry that has kept Affirmative Action programs going to this day. Further, it helped to galvanize the legacy of Mayor Maynard Jackson’s efforts in Atlanta to include minority enterprise in the fabric of the city’s business.
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In June 1990, Dr. Ray Marshall, Dr. Andrew Brimmer, former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson and former Atlanta City Council President Marvin Arrington marked the presentation of the Brimmer-Marshall Disparity Study to the Atlanta City Council at Atlanta City Hall.
“But for the Study, minority programs wouldn’t have had market access in a whole host of industries,” said Thomas “Danny” Boston, a member of the team of economists, researchers, labor experts and attorneys who worked on the study. Through the early 1980s, public minority programs created so-called “set-asides” that required vendors and contractors doing business with government agencies to allocate a percentage of the tax dollars paying for goods or services to minority- or women-owned businesses in an effort to reverse previous discrimination. The U.S. Supreme Court Decision
in City of Richmond vs. J.A. Croson, 488 U.S. 469, determined in a 6-3 ruling that the program was unconstitutional because it violated the 14th Amendment. The ruling stated that “generalized assertions” of historic racial discrimination were not enough to justify racially based quotas for awarding government contracts. In her majority opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that the Richmond program that set a 30-percent minority hiring mandate, “provides no guidance for the city’s legislative body to determine the precise scope of the injury it seeks to remedy, and would
