Achieving this latter goal, Johnson explained, would be the “more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.”

Johnson rejected the idea that individual merit was the sole basis for measuring equality.

“Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in – by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings,” Johnson said. “It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.”

Johnson took a structural view of discrimination against Black Americans and explained that racial differences could not “be understood as isolated infirmities.”

“They are a seamless web,” Johnson said. “They cause each other. They result from each other. They reinforce each other.”

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” Johnson said, “but rather the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice.”

Johnson also rejected comparisons to other minorities who immigrated to the U.S. and had allegedly overcome discrimination through assimilation.

“They did not have the heritage of centuries to overcome,” Johnson said, “and they did not have a cultural tradition which had been twisted and battered by endless years of hatred and hopelessness, nor were they excluded – these others – because of race or color – a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in our society.”

That profound battle over how to address the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow and modern-day inequalities is once again before the Supreme Court.

Though the court is the most diverse in American history – with three justices of color and four women – the conservatives, who have historically opposed affirmative action programs, hold a 6-3 majority.

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