4.2.12 WC: 191694 We were unaware of the pervasive poverty and deprivations — educational, economic, medical, nutritional — that would make real equality impossible, at least in the near term, for so many black people, even if legal inequalities were eliminated. I should have known better even back then, especially after I twice travelled to the Deep South occasions during the turbulent years of the civil rights movement. My first trip was in the early 1960s as part of a student group that was trained at the Howard Law School to be “observers.” During that short visit I had little direct contact with local Black residents of the South. I did meet several Black lawyers and civil rights workers, but they were generally from similar backgrounds to my own. My second trip was by myself in the early summer of 1965, when the Harvard Law School sent me to several historically black colleges in an effort to recruit students for a special program we had instituted to help prepare minority students for law school. I traveled to several Southern states and lived on the campuses of predominantly Black colleges for several days. There too I met college students and professors, many of whom came from middle class homes. I almost certainly met some students from deprived backgrounds, but they appeared, in the context of a campus setting, no different from students with middle class upbringings. I also spent time at several southwestern colleges with Native American and Hispanic students. I had insisted that our recruitment efforts not be limited to African American students and that they should include other minorities and disadvantaged groups that sent few if any students to elite law schools. Even back then, I felt uncomfortable having any decisions, even affirmative ones, based on race alone. I believed then, and I believe now, that the ideal goal of affirmative action is to level the playing field by providing a current advantage to individuals who were subject to past disadvan