CBS Poll: Americans Favor Affirmative Action.

Americans for a Fair Chance, a consortium of six of America’s leading civil rights legal organizations, hails the new CBS poll that finds the majority of Americans support programs that give a “leg up” to minorities. According to the CBS News/New York Times Poll, fifty-three percent “favor programs that make special efforts to help minorities get ahead in order to make up for past discrimination.” More than half of Americans surveyed also believe that affirmative action in hiring, promotions and college admissions should continue.

According to the CBS story, these poll results denote an increase in opinions about affirmative action compared with polls taken in 1997, where 41 percent of those surveyed felt that affirmative action should be continued.

“This poll confirms our findings that America continues to embrace equal opportunity through affirmative action,” said, Shirley J. Wilcher, executive director of Americans for a Fair Chance. In recent weeks, there has been much debate about affirmative action in higher education, as the Supreme Court prepares to hear the University of Michigan cases (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger) on April 1. “It is heartening to see that our citizens support the need to remedy past discrimination and to give all Americans a fair chance,” she added.