Another depressing April 15 is coming, and it’s not about taxes. This will be the 158th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s death, and that always reminds me about what 650,000 or so of our ancestors gave their lives for.

It started out about restoring the Union, of course, but about halfway through Lincoln added the abolition of slavery, as well. At first, it seemed like the latter was achieved pretty nicely by the 13th Amendment that made slavery illegal, but we’ve learned over and over since then that abolition was just the tip of the iceberg, and now we’re likely to get a peek at more of it. That’s because sometime before the Supreme Court justices hang up their robes in June, a majority of them, several only recently robed, are likely to upend another of their longstanding precedents.

If it happens, the makeup of that majority will be identical to the same who last June decided that the 50-year precedent of Roe v. Wade was egregiously wrong from the beginning. What’s more, they were and will be the same justices who testified at their Judiciary Committee hearings, under oath by the way, that preserving established precedents is critical to maintaining confidence not only in the rule of law but in the integrity of the court itself. You and I would go to jail for perjury.

This time, we’re talking about what has come to be called “affirmative action,” the principle that, when most-often implemented, allows schools to consider the race of applicants as one of the factors in their admissions decisions. While this brick in our legal foundation is only 45 years old, it has undoubtedly enabled thousands of underprivileged Black students to upgrade their futures by getting into schools that their academic records alone would not have made possible.

Sure, this principle allows preference to be given to some applicants at the expense of others, often largely white ones with more privileged backgrounds like the plaintiff in the case that permitted this special consideration in the first place. But consider this – for more than 250 years, there were laws in a number of states that made it illegal to teach black people even to read or, as the Supreme Court itself once ruled, to recognize that they had any rights at all that white people were required to recognize.

So, if that’s the background against which we’re deciding whether race can be considered as just one factor in the admissions process, does that really seem like an egregious miscarriage of justice? Particularly when we frequently see preference being given to lesser students just because their parents are alums or gave the school a new squash court. I’m guessing no.

For years, the push for reparations for generations of unspeakable abuses toward our Black citizens has failed to gain much traction at all. Let’s face it, even if you support the concept, there’s not enough gold in Fort Knox to make a dent in the unspeakable damage done since 1619.

So, if that’s a non-starter, does adding a student’s race as an extra ounce of consideration on the scales of the admissions process really seem like too much to pay? No again from here.

And while we may be in favor of maintaining a level playing field for all general purposes – I’m for that, too – I’m hoping the justices will wake (“woke”?) up and allow us to keep trying to level our lumpy field of dreams by maintaining the precedent they themselves promised to uphold. It would do those justices some good, as well.

L. Phillips Runyon III practices law in Peterborough and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court.

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