The Negro in Federal Employment: The Quest for Equal Opportunity

The Negro in Federal Employment is a classic study of civil rights in the U.S. civil service at a time of tumultuous change and reexamination. Praised widely on its initial publication in 1967, Krislov's book remains an important part of the canon of literature on African American history, labor and civil service, the political science of federal employment and bureaucratic representativeness, affirmative action, and flashpoint issues of race, discrimination, and accommodation—in short, the continuing quest for equal opportunity.

The modern Classics of the Social Sciences edition from Quid Pro Books adds a new, reflective preface by the author and a new foreword by Keith Boyum, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at California State University, Fullerton.

As Boyum writes, the book remains not only a useful summary of a substantial body of scholarship, "but also also draws essential information from government reports and print media" during a time of "initiatives in the struggle for civil rights." He advises: "Read the book for the historical scholarship, and expect to grasp major themes in an economical rendering." It also has "continuing usefulness in the realm of intellectual history. At least two enduring strands of conceptual work were very usefully forwarded," including representative bureaucracy and the concept of merit. "Krislov offers a still-useful primer. And in doing so, the analysis in this volume appears to anticipate the battles over affirmative action, and more broadly over who gets what, when, and how in contests featuring groups identified by race or national origin."

Finally, Boyum suggests that new readers will "recapture the sense of the times when the civil rights movement was near the top of the national agenda, and seemed unambiguously the right course of action. Yet read the book also to derive a sense of how a strong political science analysis can anticipate future policy developments"—including bias in public employment based on gender and disability, even age and pregnancy status. "In all, this is a slim yet significant book, open to a fresh appreciation."

The book does more than collect data and note trends—it provides a much-recognized intellectual frame to the issues of merit, equality, and representativeness that raw data does not convey. It provides an enduring foundation to these important issues, now available in modern print format and accompanying ebook editions to reach a new generation of readers.