how to harvard reference a photo essay

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Harvard Style Guide: Images or photographs

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Images or photographs (print)

Reference : Photographer/Creator Last name, Initial(s). (Year) Title of image/photograph [Photograph/Image]. Place of publication: Publisher.

Example : O’Meara, S. (2014) Orchid [Photograph]. Co. Clare: Collins Press.

In-Text-Citation :

• Author(s) Last name (Year)
• (Authors(s) Last name, Year)
• O’Meara (2014) shows a perfect example of the epipactis atrorubens.
• The velvety red of the epipactis atrorubens is captured beautifully in the above image (O’Meara, 2014)....

Still unsure what in-text citation and referencing mean? Check here .

Still unsure why you need to reference all this information? Check here . 

Images or photographs (online)

Reference : Photographer/Creator Last name, Initial(s). (Year)  Title of image/photograph . Available at: URL (Accessed Day Month Year).

Example : O’Meara, S. (2014) Orchid . Available at: www.theburrenorchidcollection.ie (Accessed 3 February 2014).

As detailed for Images/Photographs (print).

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• Writing Tips

How to Cite an Online Image in Harvard Referencing

3-minute read

• 5th August 2020

Want to use an image you found online in your academic writing ? Read our guide below and find out how to cite an online image using Harvard referencing , including the in-text citations and reference list entry.

To cite an image found online in Harvard referencing, you need to give the creator’s surname and the year of creation in the in-text citations :

This picture depicts George V and Nicholas II in Berlin (Sandau, 1913).

If you name the creator in the main text, though, you only need to include the date in brackets. For example:

Sandau’s (1913) photograph depicts George V and Nicholas II in Berlin.

You won’t always be able to find the creator or date for images you find online, though. In these cases, you’ll need to adapt the citation accordingly:

• If you cannot find an image’s creator, give its title in italics (if you can’t find the title either, use a short description of what the picture depicts).
• When the date is missing, use the abbreviation ‘n.d.’ (short for ‘no date’).

This might work in practice as follows:

Rasputin was known for his piercing gaze ( Detail of Rasputin , n.d.).

Here, for instance, we give a description of the photo you can see below. And the reader would then use this description to look up the photo in the reference list, where you’ll provide full source information.

Online Images in a Harvard Reference List

The reference list format for an online image in Harvard referencing is:

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Creator surname, Initial. (year) Title of image , Collection (if applicable) [Online]. Available at URL (Accessed date).

So, for our first example above, the full reference would be:

Sandau, E. (1913)  Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia (1868-1968), and King George V (1865-1936) , Royal Collection Trust [Online]. Available at https://www.mountainsandmegapixels.com/?lightbox=dataItem-kas62h851 (Accessed 4 March 2019).

As with citations, though, you’ll need to adapt the reference if you don’t have the creator’s name or year of production. The key points here are:

• When no creator name is available, use the image title (or a description) in its place. You will also use this to determine the position of the source in an alphabetical reference list.
• For images with no date, use ‘n.d.’ in place of the year.

Thus, we would reference the second example above as follows:

Detail of Rasputin (n.d.) [Online]. Available at http://www.referenced.co.uk/ten-historical-figures-who-died-unusual-deaths/ (Accessed 8 May 2020).

Harvard Variations and Proofreading

Harvard referencing is a style, not a system. Consequently, the exact format used for citations and references may vary. We’ve used the guidelines set out in the Open University’s guide to Harvard referencing [PDF] , but make sure to check your university’s style guide if you have one.

Whatever style of referencing you use, though, clarity and consistency are key. So, to make sure your academic writing is always error free, why not ask Proofed’s referencing experts to check your citations are all in order?

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Finding and referencing images: Referencing images

• Referencing images
• Finding images and videos

Introduction

In this guide, ' IMAGE ' is used to refer to any visual resource such as a diagram, graph, illustration, design, photograph, or video. They may be found in books, journals, reports, web pages, online video, DVDs and other kinds of media. This guide also refers to ‘ CREATOR ’. This could be an illustrator, photographer, author or organisation.

The examples are presented in Harvard (Bath) style and offer general guidelines on good practice. For essays, project reports, dissertations and theses, ask your School or Department which style they want you to use. Different referencing styles require the use of similar information but will be formatted differently. For more information on other referencing styles, visit our referencing guide .

Using images to illustrate or make clear the description and discussion in your text is useful, but it is important that you give due recognition to the work of other people that you present with your own. This will help to show the value of their work to your assignment and how your ideas fit with a wider body of academic knowledge.

It is just as important to properly cite and reference images as it is the journal articles, books and other information sources that you draw upon. If you do not, you could find yourself accused of plagiarism and/or copyright infringement.

Using images and copyright

For educational assignments it is sufficient to cite and reference any image used. If you publish your work in any way , including posting online, then you will need to follow copyright rules. It is your responsibility to find out whether, and in what ways, you are permitted to use an image in your coursework or publications. Please refer to our copyright guidance and ask for further assistance if you are unsure.

Some images are given limited rights for reuse by their creators. This is likely to be accompanied with a requirement to give recognition to their work and may limit the extent to which it can be modified. The ‘Creative Commons’ copyright licensing scheme offers creators a set of tools for telling people how they wish their work to be used. You can find out more about the different kinds of licence, and what they mean, on the organisation’s web pages .

What is a caption?

Any image that you use should be given a figure number  and a brief description of what it is. Permission for use of an image in a published work should be acknowledged in the figure caption. Some organisations will require the permission statement to be given exactly as they specify. If they are required, permissions need to be stated in addition to the citing and referencing guidance given below.

Referencing images in PowerPoint slides

For a presentation you should include a brief citation under the image. Keep a reference list to hand (e.g. hidden slide) for questions. Making a public presentation or posting it online is publishing your work. You must include your references and observe permission and copyright rules.

Example of a caption

Figure 1. Library book. Reproduced with permission from: Rogers, T., 2015, University of Bath Library

Citing and referencing images

Citing images from a book or journal article.

If you wish to refer to images used in a book or journal, they are cited in the same way as text information , for example:

The functions and flow of genetic information within a plant cell can be visualised as a complex system (Campbell et al., 2015, pp. 282-283).

Campbell et al. (2015, pp. 282-283) have clearly illustrated how a plant cell functions.

If you were to include this example in an essay the caption and citation below the image would look similar to this:

Figure 7. The functions and flow of genetic information within a plant cell (Campbell et al., 2015, pp. 282-283).

The reference at the end of the work would be as recommended for a book reference in our general referencing guide .

For a large piece of work such as a dissertation, thesis or report, a list of figures may be required at the front of the work after the contents page. Check with your department for information on specific requirements of your work.

Google images

When referencing an image found via Google you need to make sure that the information included in your reference relates to the original website that your search has found. Click on the image within the results to get to the original website and take your reference information from there. Take care to use credible sources with good quality information.

Citing and referencing images from a web page

If you use an image from a web page, blog or an online photograph gallery you should reference the individual image . Cite the image creator in the caption and year of publication. The creator may be different from the author of the web page or blog. They may be individual people or an organisation. Figure 2 below gives an example of an image with a corporate author:

List the image reference within your references list at the end of your work, using the format:

NASA, 2015.  NASA astronaut Tim Kopra on Dec. 21 spacewalk [Online]. Washington: NASA. Available from: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasa-astronaut-tim-kopra-on-dec-21-spacewalk [Accessed 7 January 2015].

Wikipedia images

If you want to reference an image included in a Wikipedia article, double-click on the image to see all the information needed for your reference. This will open a new page containing information such as creator, image title, date and specific URL. The format should be:

Iliff, D., 2006. Royal Crescent in Bath, England - July 2006  [Online] .  San Francisco: Wikimedia Foundation. Available from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Crescent_in_Bath,_England_-_July_2006.jpg [Accessed 7 January 2016].

Images and designs from exhibitions, museums or archives

If you want to reference an image or design that you have found in an exhibition, museum or archive, then you also need to observe copyright rules and reference the image correctly. The format is:

For example, if you want to reference an old black and white photograph from 1965 that is held in an archive at the University of Bath:

Bristol Region Building Record, 1965. Green Park House (since demolished), viewed from southwest [Photograph]. BRBR, D/877/1. Archives & Research Collections, University of Bath Library.

NB if you were to reproduce this archive image in your work, or any part of it (rather than just cite it), you would also need to note ‘© University of Bath Library’. This copyright note should be added to the image caption along with the citation.

Referencing your own images

If you take a photograph, you do not have to reference it. For sake of clarity you may want to add “Image by author” to the caption. If you create an original illustration or a diagram that you have produced from your own idea then you do not have to cite or reference them. If you generate an image from a graphics package, for example a molecular structure from chemistry drawing software, you do not need to cite the source of the image.

Referencing images that you adapt from elsewhere

If you use someone else’s work for an image then you must give them due credit. If you reproduce it by hand or using graphics software it is the same as if you printed, scanned or photocopied it. You must cite and reference the work as described in this guide. If the image is something that you have created in an earlier assignment or publication you need to reference earlier piece of work to avoid self-plagiarism. If you want to annotate information to improve upon, extend or change an existing image you must cite the original work. However, you would use the phrase ‘adapted from’ in your citation and reference the original work in your reference list.

AI generated images

If you have used an AI tool to generate an image you must acknowledge that tool as a source  (see point 7 of the  academic integrity statement ).

This content is not recoverable; it cannot be linked or retrieved. There is no published source that you can reference directly. Instead you would give an in-text, ‘personal communications’ citation , as described in part 15 of our 'Write a citation' guidance (from the Harvard Bath guide). This type of citation includes the author details followed by (pers. comm.) and the date of the communication.

For example, an image of a shark in a library generated with Craiyon with a ‘personal communications’ citation included in the image caption:

Figure 3. Shark in a library image generated using an AI tool (Craiyon, AI Image Generator (pers. comm.) 14 July 2022). 

Online images and resources for your work

The library has compiled a list of useful audio-visual resources, including images, that can be used for essays or assignments. Visit the ' finding images and videos ' tab of this guide to find out more.

• Next: Finding images and videos >>
• Last Updated: Nov 6, 2023 3:07 PM
• URL: https://library.bath.ac.uk/images

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How to Cite Images, Tables and Diagrams

The pages outlines examples of how to cite images, tables and diagrams using the Harvard Referencing method .

An image found online

In-text citations

Mention the image in the text and cite the author and date:

The cartoon by Frith (1968) describes ...

If the image has no named author, cite the full name and date of the image:

The map shows the Parish of Maroota during the 1840s (Map of the Parish of Maroota, County of Cumberland, District of Windsor 1840-1849)

List of References

Include information in the following order:

• author (if available)
• year produced (if available)
• title of image (or a description)
• Format and any details (if applicable)
• name and place of the sponsor of the source
• accessed day month year (the date you viewed/ downloaded the image)
• URL or Internet address (between pointed brackets).

Frith J 1968, From the rich man’s table, political cartoon by John Frith, Old Parliament House, Canberra, accessed 11 May 2007, <http: // www . oph.gov.au/frith/theherald-01.html>.

If there is no named author, put the image title first, followed by the date (if available):

Khafre pyramid from Khufu’s quarry 2007, digital photograph, Ancient Egypt Research Associates, accessed 2 August 2007, <http: // www . aeraweb.org/khufu_quarry.asp>.

Map of the Parish of Maroota, County of Cumberland, District of Windsor 1840-1849, digital image of cartographic material, National Library of Australia, accessed 13 April 2007, <http: // nla . gov.au/nla.map-f829>.  

Online images/diagrams used as figures

Figures include diagrams, graphs, sketches, photographs and maps. If you are writing a report or an assignment where you include a visual as a figure, unless you have created it yourself, you must include a reference to the original source.

Figures should be numbered and labelled with captions. Captions should be simple and descriptive and be followed by an in-text citation. Figure captions should be directly under the image.

Cite the author and year in the figure caption:

Figure 1: Bloom's Cognitive Domain (Benitez 2012)

If you refer to the Figure in the text, also include a citation:

As can be seen from Figure 1 (Benitez 2012)

Provide full citation information:

Benitez J 2012, Blooms Cognitve Domain, digital image, ALIEM, accessed 2 August 2015, <https: // www . aliem.com/blooms-digital-taxonomy/>.   

Online data in a table caption

In-text citation

If you reproduce or adapt table data found online you must include a citation. All tables should be numbered and table captions should be above the table.

  Table 2: Agricultural water use, by state 2004-05 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006)

If you refer to the table in text, include a citation:

As indicated in Table 2, a total of 11 146 502 ML was used (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006)

Include the name of the web page where the table data is found.

Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006, Water Use on Australian Farms , 2004-05, Cat. no. 4618.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, accessed 4 July 2007, <https: // www . abs.gov.au>.

FAQ and troubleshooting

Harvard referencing

• How to cite different sources
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• Citing images and tables
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How to Cite an Image in Harvard Style?

Published by Alaxendra Bets at August 27th, 2021 , Revised On August 23, 2023

Images are inserted in a text and then referenced at the end of the manuscript. However, the in-text citations for an image are different from that of non-visual material. The in-text citation for an image is given below the image, where, instead of the author’s name, the image creator’s or photographer’s name is given, along with the image title and the year it was photographed.

In-Text and Reference List Format with Examples

Harvard referencing style uses the following basic format for citing and referencing an image file:

In-text citation: (Name of photographer or creator, Year of Publication)

Reference list entry: Author Surname, Author Initial. (Year Published). Title in italics. [Format, e.g., image] Available at: http://Website URL [Accessed Date Accessed].

For example:

In-text citation: Construct validity is usually thought of as the degree to which assessments measure what they are designed to measure, but since our assessments do much more than provide a score, we think of construct validity more broadly—as the degree to which our assessments accomplish what they are designed to accomplish. (Lectica, Inc, 2014)

Reference list entry: Lectica, Inc, (2014). Validity . [image] Available at: https://dts.lectica.org/_about/las_reliability_validity.php [Accessed 19 Oct. 2014].

However, some institutions also follow this basic format for the reference list entry:

Author(s) of the visual item – Surname and initials year of publication, Title of the visual item in italics, Extra information – photograph/painting etc., Publisher name, Place of publication.

Types of Citations Depending on Source of Image

Citations for image files in Harvard might slightly vary, depending on where the image was taken from.

1.    Charts

Some academic texts include an image that is actually an image of a chart. Whereas some writers create their own charts or copy-paste charts from external sources, some might choose to take a screenshot of a chart from an external source and include that as an image file in their manuscript. In either case, acknowledging the chart’s original creators is compulsory.

Luckily, Harvard has made authors’ tasks easier by keeping the citation and referencing format the same for charts and images. After all, charts are treated in the same way as an image file in Harvard texts. A chart, cited in Harvard, would be cited in the following way, for instance:

In-text citation: (Newton 2007) to be placed directly below the chart or its image.

Reference list entry: Newton, AC 2007, Forest Ecology and Conservation: A Handbook of Techniques , Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

2.    Personal images

If an image has been created by the writer themselves, it’s important that this is mentioned in the text. Otherwise, there will be confusion about whether an external source was referred to for the image.

In Harvard style, a personal image would be cited in the same way as an image created by someone else (as mentioned above), for example:

In-text citation: (Whyle 2008)

Reference list entry: Whyle, M 2008, Untitled [photographs of classroom displays], unpublished photographs.

Where the phrase ‘photographs of classroom displays’ refers to the format of the image, indicating it’s an image(s) of classroom displays.

1.    Clipart images from online software libraries

Cliparts are also a form of image, except that they’re not naturally captured, like one would capture the image of a tree outside, for instance. Rather, cliparts are created using software in computer systems.

Even the everyday use software app in Windows, Paint, can be used to create clipart. Microsoft Word also has texts that are in the form of clipart. They’re textual pieces that are in the form of images.

Such an image is also treated as a normal image. As such, it’s cited in pretty much the same way too. However, in place of an author name, the name of the software and/or the corporation that created and/or uses that software is written instead, for example:

In-text citation: (Microsoft Clip Art Gallery 2010)

Reference list entry : Microsoft Clip Art Gallery 2010, Untitled [gymnast graphic], Microsoft Corporation.

Here, this image is untitled. The word ‘untitled’ is written without italicisation. However, if the title were present, it would have been included and in italics.

2.    Images without creator’s/photographer’s name

Often times an image might be missing its creator’s or photographer’s name. Harvard referencing dictates that authors cite such an image in the same way as that mentioned above. However, the title of the image is treated as the name of the creator or photographer, for example:

( Confrontation during Hong Kong protests 2019) where ‘Confrontation during Hong Kong protests’ is the name of the image, and as the example shows, it’s being used as the creator’s/photographer’s name.

3.    Images without creation or publication dates

As with every other type of material that is missing a date, Harvard also uses the ‘n.d’ abbreviation to indicate ‘no date’ for an image. Furthermore, for images without titles, a brief description of the image is included instead (for example, the phrase ‘photographs of classroom displays’ in the example above) in place of the title. This is followed by the date the image was accessed on or n.d. if not applicable. For example:

(Google, n.d.)

In-text citation: (LookPictures n.d.)

Reference list entry: LookPictures n.d., Love Picture Ducks , photograph,

http://www.lookpictures.net/gallery/Love-Pictures/1391/Love-Picture-Ducks/

[Accessed 16 April 2012].

Important point to note: Some institutions recommend not enclosing the format of the image file in [] in Harvard style, such as the t’rm ‘photog’aph’ in the above example shows. However, if this method or any other method for citation is to be followed, it should be kept consistent throughout the manuscript, not to mention in accordance with what the institution has officially recommended.

Citing images viewed in person

Citing images that are viewed physically by oneself, instead of on the internet, are considered to be viewed ‘in person.’ Once they are seen in person, the writer might decide to find them online and then include them in his or her manuscript. One might view an image in person when one sees an image in a/an:

• Art gallery
• Art exhibition

…and so on.

In Harvard referencing, such images are cited and referenced in the same way as an image originally obtained from an online source. Following are some examples of such ‘in-person sources of images.

The general format is again the same, that is:

Name of institution/art gallery/location insteadcreator’sor’s name in italics image was viewed in followed by when, not separated by any comma.

4.    Image from a book   

Name in italics followed by the year and page number if available. For examplGertsakis’sis’s work, Their eyes will tell you, everything and nothing , 2017, in Millner and Moore (2018, p. 138) …

5.    Image from Flickr

Image title followed by date accessed. For example:

This photo showing a panorama of Austrian mountains (Crazzolara 2018) is of high quality.

6.    Original artwork

Image title in italics followed by date accessed. For example:

JSutherland’snd’s masterly depiction of early morning light at an artist’s camp in Box Hill was particularly admired in her painting The Mushroom Gatherers (1895).

7.    When works have been viewed in-situ

In-situ refers to the original situation in which an image was seen in person for the first time. The general format for citing such images is:

Is DamHirst’sst’s painting Veillove’sve’s secrets (2017) reminiscent of Aboriginal artist Emily KKngwarreye’sye’s workHere’sre’s an example of a Harvard style citation of an original work viewed in a temporary exhibition:

In Wishing Well , Ektoras (2014) demonstrates..

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do you cite art in text harvard.

When citing art in Harvard style:

• Use artist’s last name and year of creation in parentheses.
• Example: (Smith, 2022) for in-text citation.
• In bibliography, include artist, year, title, medium, and location.
• Format: Artist. (Year). Title. Medium. Location: Gallery/Museum.

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Referencing - BU Harvard 23-24 Full Guide: Images or Photographs

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• What information you need: author/date/page numbers
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• No author or identifiable person/organisation
• Author published more than one source in same year
• Inserting Pictures and Tables (Figures)
• More than one source cited
• Abbreviating organisation names
• Source cited or quoted in another source (citing second hand)
• Chapter author of an edited book
• Legislation - UK Statutes (Acts of Parliament)
• Personal communications e.g interviews, photographs
• Unpublished sources e.g lectures
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• Reference books, Encyclopedias and Formularies
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Images or Photos

Important Notes:

• When inserting images or photographs into your university work, add it as a figure and just follow our  instructions how to layout and reference figures .
• If you have permission from BU academics who are setting and marking your assignments to use your own personal photographs, reference those using the instructions for personal communications .
• When using photos or images in your University work that you find online, we recommend using those that are copyright free / creative commons licensed . You will find a list of free to use image websites in our  Copyright for Researchers guide .

Instructions how to reference an image or photograph

Click on the headings below for instructions

Online image or photo

Referencing an online image or photograph: details, order and format

Instructions for referencing an online image or photograph

Inserting and citing figures   (e.g. table, diagram, chart, graph, map, picture, image, illustration, photograph , screenshot etc.) in the main text of your work:

The example above is a photograph, so you could copy and insert the photograph into your work adding this citation underneath it:

[PHOTOGRAPH OF MEMORIAL WOULD BE INSERTED HERE FOR EXAMPLE]

Figure 1: Brownsea Island Charles van Raalte memorial (Downer 2009)

Referring to figures in the main text of your work (following instructions from the 'Citing in the Text' tab of this guide, point 6)

Use the figure number, so in the example used above you would approach it like this for example:

• e.g. Figure 1 shows a photograph of Brownsea Island …

If you had taken the photograph yourself, you would indicate that in the citation:

• e.g. Figure 2: Brownsea Island (personal collection).

Referencing a figure at the end of your work

< Online image or photograph

Organisation/Photographer/Artist’s Surname/Family Name, INITIALS., Year. Title of image [type of image]. Place of publication: Publisher (of online image, if available). Available from: URL [Accessed Date].

• e.g. Downer, C., 2009. Brownsea Island Charles van Raalte memorial - geograph.org.uk - 1445875.jpg [photograph]. Dorset: geography.org.uk. Available from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brownsea_Island,_Charles_van_Raalte_memorial_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1445875.jpg [Accessed 28 August 2016].

Print image or photo

Referencing a print image or photograph: details, order and format

Instructions for referencing a print image or photograph

Organisation/Photographer/Artist’s Surname/Family Name, INITIALS., Year.  Title of image  [type of image]. Place of publication: Publisher if available. Collection Details if available (Collection, Document number, Geographical Town/Place: Name of Library/Archive/Repository).

• e.g. McNally, K., 1974.  Primary 7 children from Bangor Central Primary School display their ‘Let’s look at Ulster’ project on the early settlement of Beannchor  [photograph]. Antrim: Ulster Television. ITA/IBA/Cable Authority archive, 5023/9, Bournemouth: Bournemouth University.
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Harvard Referencing Guide: Images - Figure from a book

• Introduction to the Guide
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• Webpage - Introduction
• Webpage - Individual Authors
• Webpage - Corporate Authors
• Webpage - No Author - No Date
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Images from Books

Images - From Books

Figure from a book

Images fall into two broad categories. These are ;

Figures .   These include photographs, illustrations, drawings, diagrams, logos, graphs and maps etc.

Tables .     These are simply word/numbers that are displayed in orderly rows as columns such as a sprea dshe et.

• Include a caption with a number and in-text citation -  below the image for a figure but above the image for a table.
• Make a reference to the image at the relevant point in your text.
• Include a full reference in your Reference List/Bibliography

A reference to an image from a book will generally require the following elements:

• Author of the book          
• Year of publication                     (in round brackets)
• Title of the book                         (in italics)
• Place of publication: Publisher

In-text citation

Full reference for the Reference List / Bibliography

Online figure

Online table

Harvard Referencing Guide: A - Z

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How to Cite an Image | Photographs, Figures, Diagrams

Published on March 25, 2021 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on June 28, 2022.

To cite an image, you need an in-text citation and a corresponding reference entry. The reference entry should list:

• The creator of the image
• The year it was published
• The title of the image
• The format of the image (e.g., “photograph”)
• Its location or container (e.g. a website , book , or museum)

The format varies depending on where you accessed the image and which citation style you’re using: APA , MLA , or Chicago .

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Table of contents

Citing an image in apa style, citing an image in mla style, citing an image in chicago style, frequently asked questions about citations.

In an APA Style reference entry for an image found on a website , write the image title in italics, followed by a description of its format in square brackets. Include the name of the site and the URL. The APA in-text citation just includes the photographer’s name and the year.

The information included after the title and format varies for images from other containers (e.g. books , articles ).

When you include the image itself in your text, you’ll also have to format it as a figure and include appropriate copyright/permissions information .

Images viewed in person

For an artwork viewed at a museum, gallery, or other physical archive, include information about the institution and location. If there’s a page on the institution’s website for the specific work, its URL can also be included.

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In an MLA Works Cited entry for an image found online , the title of the image appears in quotation marks, the name of the site in italics. Include the full publication date if available, not just the year.

The MLA in-text citation normally just consists of the author’s last name.

The information included after the title and format differs for images contained within other source types, such as books and articles .

If you include the image itself as a figure, make sure to format it correctly .

A citation for an image viewed in a museum (or other physical archive, e.g. a gallery) includes the name and location of the institution instead of website information.

In Chicago style , images may just be referred to in the text without need for a citation or bibliography entry.

If you have to include a full Chicago style image citation , however, list the title in italics, add relevant information about the image format, and add a URL at the end of the bibliography entry for images consulted online.

Chicago also offers an alternative author-date citation style . Examples of image citations in this style can be found here .

For an image viewed in a museum, gallery, or other physical archive, you can again just refer to it in the text without a formal citation. If a citation is required, list the institution and the city it is located in at the end of the bibliography entry.

The main elements included in image citations across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the name of the image’s creator, the image title, the year (or more precise date) of publication, and details of the container in which the image was found (e.g. a museum, book , website ).

In APA and Chicago style, it’s standard to also include a description of the image’s format (e.g. “Photograph” or “Oil on canvas”). This sort of information may be included in MLA too, but is not mandatory.

Untitled sources (e.g. some images ) are usually cited using a short descriptive text in place of the title. In APA Style , this description appears in brackets: [Chair of stained oak]. In MLA and Chicago styles, no brackets are used: Chair of stained oak.

For social media posts, which are usually untitled, quote the initial words of the post in place of the title: the first 160 characters in Chicago , or the first 20 words in APA . E.g. Biden, J. [@JoeBiden]. “The American Rescue Plan means a $7,000 check for a single mom of four. It means more support to safely.”

MLA recommends quoting the full post for something short like a tweet, and just describing the post if it’s longer.

In APA , MLA , and Chicago style citations for sources that don’t list a specific author (e.g. many websites ), you can usually list the organization responsible for the source as the author.

If the organization is the same as the website or publisher, you shouldn’t repeat it twice in your reference:

• In APA and Chicago, omit the website or publisher name later in the reference.
• In MLA, omit the author element at the start of the reference, and cite the source title instead.

If there’s no appropriate organization to list as author, you will usually have to begin the citation and reference entry with the title of the source instead.

Check if your university or course guidelines specify which citation style to use. If the choice is left up to you, consider which style is most commonly used in your field.

• APA Style is the most popular citation style, widely used in the social and behavioral sciences.
• MLA style is the second most popular, used mainly in the humanities.
• Chicago notes and bibliography style is also popular in the humanities, especially history.
• Chicago author-date style tends to be used in the sciences.

Other more specialized styles exist for certain fields, such as Bluebook and OSCOLA for law.

The most important thing is to choose one style and use it consistently throughout your text.

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Caulfield, J. (2022, June 28). How to Cite an Image | Photographs, Figures, Diagrams. Scribbr. Retrieved March 12, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/citing-sources/cite-an-image/

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Like any book or journal article, images created by someone else must be cited with a 'sufficient acknowledgment'. This means every time you use an image in an essay  you must provide a citation where the image appears and then an entry in your reference list or bibliography. You must also provide a citation to any images you use in presentations, blogs or websites.

It is vital that you keep an accurate record of everything you consult when doing your work and cite what you have used clearly so that:

• You can find the original source  again yourself
• Someone reading your work will be able to  find the original source
•  You can avoid plagiarism by making clear what is your work and what is in the source

You can maintain a record of the references you using either a bibliographic software package such as EndNote or by recording the details manually on reference cards.

 For more information on quoting and managing references see the  i-cite website

Sufficient Acknowledgment

To comply with copyright law, even within educational exceptions, you must always include a sufficient acknowledgment when using still and moving images. Think of this like referencing a text - if you did not include the reference you would be plagiarising another person's work.

A sufficient acknowledgement should include the following:

• Artist/ maker/ author
• Title of the work and date made
• Source of the reproduction/film

For example: Julia Margaret Cameron, The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty, 1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Image databases, like Bridgeman and Artstor, often include an acknowledgement for you to use which can be directly copied and pasted into your work. 

When using an image from Flickr or Creative Commons, the name of the person who has uploaded the image can also be used. This is usually included in the details section of the image. 

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A Quick Guide to Harvard Referencing | Citation Examples

Published on 14 February 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on 15 September 2023.

Referencing is an important part of academic writing. It tells your readers what sources you’ve used and how to find them.

Harvard is the most common referencing style used in UK universities. In Harvard style, the author and year are cited in-text, and full details of the source are given in a reference list .

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Table of contents

Harvard in-text citation, creating a harvard reference list, harvard referencing examples, referencing sources with no author or date, frequently asked questions about harvard referencing.

A Harvard in-text citation appears in brackets beside any quotation or paraphrase of a source. It gives the last name of the author(s) and the year of publication, as well as a page number or range locating the passage referenced, if applicable:

Note that ‘p.’ is used for a single page, ‘pp.’ for multiple pages (e.g. ‘pp. 1–5’).

An in-text citation usually appears immediately after the quotation or paraphrase in question. It may also appear at the end of the relevant sentence, as long as it’s clear what it refers to.

When your sentence already mentions the name of the author, it should not be repeated in the citation:

Sources with multiple authors

When you cite a source with up to three authors, cite all authors’ names. For four or more authors, list only the first name, followed by ‘ et al. ’:

Sources with no page numbers

Some sources, such as websites , often don’t have page numbers. If the source is a short text, you can simply leave out the page number. With longer sources, you can use an alternate locator such as a subheading or paragraph number if you need to specify where to find the quote:

Multiple citations at the same point

When you need multiple citations to appear at the same point in your text – for example, when you refer to several sources with one phrase – you can present them in the same set of brackets, separated by semicolons. List them in order of publication date:

Multiple sources with the same author and date

If you cite multiple sources by the same author which were published in the same year, it’s important to distinguish between them in your citations. To do this, insert an ‘a’ after the year in the first one you reference, a ‘b’ in the second, and so on:

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A bibliography or reference list appears at the end of your text. It lists all your sources in alphabetical order by the author’s last name, giving complete information so that the reader can look them up if necessary.

The reference entry starts with the author’s last name followed by initial(s). Only the first word of the title is capitalised (as well as any proper nouns).

Sources with multiple authors in the reference list

As with in-text citations, up to three authors should be listed; when there are four or more, list only the first author followed by ‘ et al. ’:

Reference list entries vary according to source type, since different information is relevant for different sources. Formats and examples for the most commonly used source types are given below.

• Entire book
• Book chapter
• Translated book
• Edition of a book

Journal articles

• Print journal
• Online-only journal with DOI
• Online-only journal with no DOI
• General web page
• Online article or blog
• Social media post

Sometimes you won’t have all the information you need for a reference. This section covers what to do when a source lacks a publication date or named author.

No publication date

When a source doesn’t have a clear publication date – for example, a constantly updated reference source like Wikipedia or an obscure historical document which can’t be accurately dated – you can replace it with the words ‘no date’:

Note that when you do this with an online source, you should still include an access date, as in the example.

When a source lacks a clearly identified author, there’s often an appropriate corporate source – the organisation responsible for the source – whom you can credit as author instead, as in the Google and Wikipedia examples above.

When that’s not the case, you can just replace it with the title of the source in both the in-text citation and the reference list:

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Harvard referencing uses an author–date system. Sources are cited by the author’s last name and the publication year in brackets. Each Harvard in-text citation corresponds to an entry in the alphabetised reference list at the end of the paper.

Vancouver referencing uses a numerical system. Sources are cited by a number in parentheses or superscript. Each number corresponds to a full reference at the end of the paper.

A Harvard in-text citation should appear in brackets every time you quote, paraphrase, or refer to information from a source.

The citation can appear immediately after the quotation or paraphrase, or at the end of the sentence. If you’re quoting, place the citation outside of the quotation marks but before any other punctuation like a comma or full stop.

In Harvard referencing, up to three author names are included in an in-text citation or reference list entry. When there are four or more authors, include only the first, followed by ‘ et al. ’

Though the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there is a difference in meaning:

• A reference list only includes sources cited in the text – every entry corresponds to an in-text citation .
• A bibliography also includes other sources which were consulted during the research but not cited.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, September 15). A Quick Guide to Harvard Referencing | Citation Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 12 March 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/referencing/harvard-style/

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Quick guide to Harvard referencing (Cite Them Right)

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There are different versions of the Harvard referencing style. This guide is a quick introduction to the commonly-used Cite Them Right version. You will find further guidance available through the OU Library on the Cite Them Right Database .

For help and support with referencing and the full Cite Them Right guide, have a look at the Library’s page on referencing and plagiarism . If you need guidance referencing OU module material you can check out which sections of Cite Them Right are recommended when referencing physical and online module material .

This guide does not apply to OU Law undergraduate students . If you are studying a module beginning with W1xx, W2xx or W3xx, you should refer to the Quick guide to Cite Them Right referencing for Law modules .

Table of contents

In-text citations and full references.

• Secondary referencing
• Page numbers
• Citing multiple sources published in the same year by the same author

Full reference examples

Referencing consists of two elements:

• in-text citations, which are inserted in the body of your text and are included in the word count. An in-text citation gives the author(s) and publication date of a source you are referring to. If the publication date is not given, the phrase 'no date' is used instead of a date. If using direct quotations or you refer to a specific section in the source you also need the page number/s if available, or paragraph number for web pages.
• full references, which are given in alphabetical order in reference list at the end of your work and are not included in the word count. Full references give full bibliographical information for all the sources you have referred to in the body of your text.

To see a reference list and intext citations check out this example assignment on Cite Them Right .

Difference between reference list and bibliography

a reference list only includes sources you have referred to in the body of your text

a bibliography includes sources you have referred to in the body of your text AND sources that were part of your background reading that you did not use in your assignment

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Examples of in-text citations

You need to include an in-text citation wherever you quote or paraphrase from a source. An in-text citation consists of the last name of the author(s), the year of publication, and a page number if relevant. There are a number of ways of incorporating in-text citations into your work - some examples are provided below. Alternatively you can see examples of setting out in-text citations in Cite Them Right .

Note: When referencing a chapter of an edited book, your in-text citation should give the author(s) of the chapter.

Online module materials

(Includes written online module activities, audio-visual material such as online tutorials, recordings or videos).

When referencing material from module websites, the date of publication is the year you started studying the module.

Surname, Initial. (Year of publication/presentation) 'Title of item'. Module code: Module title . Available at: URL of VLE (Accessed: date).

OR, if there is no named author:

The Open University (Year of publication/presentation) 'Title of item'. Module code: Module title . Available at: URL of VLE (Accessed: date).

Rietdorf, K. and Bootman, M. (2022) 'Topic 3: Rare diseases'. S290: Investigating human health and disease . Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1967195 (Accessed: 24 January 2023).

The Open University (2022) ‘3.1 The purposes of childhood and youth research’. EK313: Issues in research with children and young people . Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1949633&section=1.3 (Accessed: 24 January 2023).

You can also use this template to reference videos and audio that are hosted on your module website:

The Open University (2022) ‘Video 2.7 An example of a Frith-Happé animation’. SK298: Brain, mind and mental health . Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=2013014&section=4.9.6 (Accessed: 22 November 2022).

The Open University (2022) ‘Audio 2 Interview with Richard Sorabji (Part 2)’. A113: Revolutions . Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1960941&section=5.6 (Accessed: 22 November 2022).

Note: if a complete journal article has been uploaded to a module website, or if you have seen an article referred to on the website and then accessed the original version, reference the original journal article, and do not mention the module materials. If only an extract from an article is included in your module materials that you want to reference, you should use secondary referencing, with the module materials as the 'cited in' source, as described above.

Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) 'Title of message', Title of discussion board , in Module code: Module title . Available at: URL of VLE (Accessed: date).

Fitzpatrick, M. (2022) ‘A215 - presentation of TMAs', Tutor group discussion & Workbook activities , in A215: Creative writing . Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/forumng/discuss.php?d=4209566 (Accessed: 24 January 2022).

Note: When an ebook looks like a printed book, with publication details and pagination, reference as a printed book.

Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) Title . Edition if later than first. Place of publication: publisher. Series and volume number if relevant.

For ebooks that do not contain print publication details

Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) Title of book . Available at: DOI or URL (Accessed: date).

Example with one author:

Bell, J. (2014) Doing your research project . Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Adams, D. (1979) The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy . Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/kindle-ebooks (Accessed: 23 June 2021).

Example with two or three authors:

Goddard, J. and Barrett, S. (2015) The health needs of young people leaving care . Norwich: University of East Anglia, School of Social Work and Psychosocial Studies.

Example with four or more authors:

Young, H.D. et al. (2015) Sears and Zemansky's university physics . San Francisco, CA: Addison-Wesley.

Note: You can choose one or other method to reference four or more authors (unless your School requires you to name all authors in your reference list) and your approach should be consistent.

Note: Books that have an editor, or editors, where each chapter is written by a different author or authors.

Surname of chapter author, Initial. (Year of publication) 'Title of chapter or section', in Initial. Surname of book editor (ed.) Title of book . Place of publication: publisher, Page reference.

Franklin, A.W. (2012) 'Management of the problem', in S.M. Smith (ed.) The maltreatment of children . Lancaster: MTP, pp. 83–95.

Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) 'Title of article', Title of Journal , volume number (issue number), page reference.

If accessed online:

Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) 'Title of article', Title of Journal , volume number (issue number), page reference. Available at: DOI or URL (if required) (Accessed: date).

Shirazi, T. (2010) 'Successful teaching placements in secondary schools: achieving QTS practical handbooks', European Journal of Teacher Education , 33(3), pp. 323–326.

Shirazi, T. (2010) 'Successful teaching placements in secondary schools: achieving QTS practical handbooks', European Journal of Teacher Education , 33(3), pp. 323–326. Available at: https://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/log... (Accessed: 27 January 2023).

Barke, M. and Mowl, G. (2016) 'Málaga – a failed resort of the early twentieth century?', Journal of Tourism History , 2(3), pp. 187–212. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2010.523145

Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) 'Title of article', Title of Newspaper , Day and month, Page reference.

Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) 'Title of article', Title of Newspaper , Day and month, Page reference if available. Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

Mansell, W. and Bloom, A. (2012) ‘£10,000 carrot to tempt physics experts’, The Guardian , 20 June, p. 5.

Roberts, D. and Ackerman, S. (2013) 'US draft resolution allows Obama 90 days for military action against Syria', The Guardian , 4 September. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/04/syria-strikes-draft-resolut... (Accessed: 9 September 2015).

Surname, Initial. (Year that the site was published/last updated) Title of web page . Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

Organisation (Year that the page was last updated) Title of web page . Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

Robinson, J. (2007) Social variation across the UK . Available at: https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/social-variation... (Accessed: 21 November 2021).

The British Psychological Society (2018) Code of Ethics and Conduct . Available at: https://www.bps.org.uk/news-and-policy/bps-code-ethics-and-conduct (Accessed: 22 March 2019).

Note: Cite Them Right Online offers guidance for referencing webpages that do not include authors' names and dates. However, be extra vigilant about the suitability of such webpages.

Surname, Initial. (Year) Title of photograph . Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

Kitton, J. (2013) Golden sunset . Available at: https://www.jameskittophotography.co.uk/photo_8692150.html (Accessed: 21 November 2021).

stanitsa_dance (2021) Cossack dance ensemble . Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/COI_slphWJ_/ (Accessed: 13 June 2023).

Note: If no title can be found then replace it with a short description.

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Answered By: Elaine Pocklington Last Updated: Jan 11, 2024     Views: 130630

Cite Them Right Harvard   referencing style: Look under the tab "Media and Art" and  find "Photographic Prints or Slides" suggested elements for a reference are: Artist/Photographer's name (if known), Year of production. Title of image . [type of medium] and Place of Publication

For Example: Beaton,C. (1956)  Marilyn Monroe  [Photograph]. (Marilyn Monroe's own private collection).

Referencing your own photographs, it should be as above with your name and year taken. Give it a title and reference it as a photograph from your own private collection.

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• Referencing and Citing

Harvard Referencing

• Summarising/Paraphrasing
• Citations/Direct Quotations
• Books (print or online)
• Electronic Journal Article
• Website/Web Document
• Journal/Magazine Article
• Academic publications
• Audiovisual material
• News Article (print or online)
• Figures/Tables
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Figures & Graphs

Figures include diagrams and all types of graphs. An i m a ge,  photo, illustration or screenshot  displayed for scientific purposes is classed as a figure.

All figures in your paper must be referred to in the main body of the text. At the bottom of the figure is the title, explaining what the figure is showing and  the legend, i.e. an explanation of what the symbols, acronyms or  colours  mean.

In-text citation:

The in-text reference is placed beneath the legend and title with the heading 'Figure' and starts with a sequential figure number (e.g. Figure 1, Figure 2). 

Figure 1: PHYSICAL PRODUCTION, selected commodities, Australia, 2010-11 to 2015-16 ( Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017)

If the source is from a book or journal (print or electronic) or from a web document with page numbers, add the page number to the in-text citation. 

If the figure is altered in any way from the original source, add 'Modified from source', eg.

(Modified from source: Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017)

In main text:

Production of sugar in Australia was estimated at 34 million tonnes in 2015-16 (Figure 1). 

Reference list:

References should be listed in the Harvard Referencing Style according to format. 

Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017, Crops and plantations , Retrieved: 24 February, 2018 from  http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Latestproducts/4632.0.55.001Main%20Features302015-16?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=4632.0.55.001&issue=2015-16&num=&view=

Tables are numerical values or text displayed in rows and columns.

Each table should be displayed with a brief explanatory title at the top. 

Number all tables in the order they appear in the text.

Table 27.4 Immunity to selected bacterial infections

( Source: Knox et al. 2014, p. 669. )

If the table is altered in any way from the original source, add 'Modified from source'.

(Modified from source: Knox et al.  2014,  p. 669. )

Some bacteria, like those that cause tuberculosis, have evolved the means of surviving and living within phagocytic macrophages (Table 27.4). 

As Table 27.4 shows, some bacteria , like those that cause tuberculosis, have evolved the means of surviving an d living within phagocytic macrophages. 

Knox, B., Ladiges, P., Evans, B. & Saint, R. 2014,  Biology: an Australian focus , 5th edn,  McGraw-Hill Education, North Ryde, NSW.

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Harvard Reference Generator

Referencing a photograph.

Please fill out ALL the details below, then click the button to generate your reference in the correct format.

About The Harvard Referencing Tool

If you're a student and have ever had to write reports, essays or a thesis, you will have had to reference the sources of information you have used. If you mention something that someone else has written/published, you need to give them credit by referencing their work.

The Harvard Referencing System is one of the preferred layouts for these references. It is a relatively strict way of arranging the bibliographical information.

This Harvard Reference Generator tool takes in the raw information - things like author, title, year of publication - and creates the reference in the correct form.

You can then highlight and copy this into the bibliography section of your report - arranging them alphabetically by authors' surnames .

You then reference this next to the relevant section within the main text of your essay in the format (Author, Year) such as (Smith, 1983) .

If you are citing more than one work from the same author in the same year , you add a letter to the year to differentiate them (not the first one, though)

Harvard Reference Photograph Format

The correct format for a Harvard Photo Citation is:

What's the point of a bibliography in a report or essay?

Cite A Online image or video in Harvard style

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• Select style:
• Archive material
• Chapter of an edited book
• Conference proceedings
• Dictionary entry
• Dissertation
• DVD, video, or film
• E-book or PDF
• Edited book
• Encyclopedia article
• Government publication
• Music or recording
• Online image or video
• Presentation
• Press release
• Religious text

Use the following template or our Harvard Referencing Generator to cite a online image or video. For help with other source types, like books, PDFs, or websites, check out our other guides. To have your reference list or bibliography automatically made for you, try our free citation generator .

Reference list

Place this part in your bibliography or reference list at the end of your assignment.

In-text citation

Place this part right after the quote or reference to the source in your assignment.

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Free Harvard Referencing Generator

Generate accurate Harvard reference lists quickly and for FREE, with MyBib!

🤔 What is a Harvard Referencing Generator?

A Harvard Referencing Generator is a tool that automatically generates formatted academic references in the Harvard style.

It takes in relevant details about a source -- usually critical information like author names, article titles, publish dates, and URLs -- and adds the correct punctuation and formatting required by the Harvard referencing style.

The generated references can be copied into a reference list or bibliography, and then collectively appended to the end of an academic assignment. This is the standard way to give credit to sources used in the main body of an assignment.

👩‍🎓 Who uses a Harvard Referencing Generator?

Harvard is the main referencing style at colleges and universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. It is also very popular in other English-speaking countries such as South Africa, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. University-level students in these countries are most likely to use a Harvard generator to aid them with their undergraduate assignments (and often post-graduate too).

🙌 Why should I use a Harvard Referencing Generator?

A Harvard Referencing Generator solves two problems:

• It provides a way to organise and keep track of the sources referenced in the content of an academic paper.
• It ensures that references are formatted correctly -- inline with the Harvard referencing style -- and it does so considerably faster than writing them out manually.

A well-formatted and broad bibliography can account for up to 20% of the total grade for an undergraduate-level project, and using a generator tool can contribute significantly towards earning them.

⚙️ How do I use MyBib's Harvard Referencing Generator?

Here's how to use our reference generator:

• If citing a book, website, journal, or video: enter the URL or title into the search bar at the top of the page and press the search button.
• Choose the most relevant results from the list of search results.
• Our generator will automatically locate the source details and format them in the correct Harvard format. You can make further changes if required.
• Then either copy the formatted reference directly into your reference list by clicking the 'copy' button, or save it to your MyBib account for later.

MyBib supports the following for Harvard style:

🍏 What other versions of Harvard referencing exist?

There isn't "one true way" to do Harvard referencing, and many universities have their own slightly different guidelines for the style. Our generator can adapt to handle the following list of different Harvard styles:

• Cite Them Right
• Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU)
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Daniel is a qualified librarian, former teacher, and citation expert. He has been contributing to MyBib since 2018.

Home / Guides / Citation Guides / Harvard Referencing / Harvard Referencing Style Examples / How to reference an article in Harvard referencing style

How to reference an article in Harvard referencing style

What is an article.

Almost all writers and academics reference other people’s writing in their works. Referencing demonstrates that you have researched your topic, are well versed in its arguments and theories, and it also helps avoid charges of plagiarism.  

The Harvard citation system is just one of many referencing styles – and which style you choose is normally guided by the institution or publication you are writing for.

In this article, you will learn how to use the Harvard citation system to reference the following types of articles:

• journal article
• newspaper article
• magazine article

Properly citing article details in the reference list will help the readers to locate your source material if they wish to read more about a particular area or topic.

Information you need:

• Author name
• (Year published)  
• ‘Article title’  
• Journal/newspaper/magazine name  
• Day and month published, if available
• Volume number, if available
• (Issue) number, if available
• Page number(s), if available

If accessed online:

• Available at: URL or DOI  
• (Accessed: date).

Journal articles

Academic or scholarly journals are periodical publications about a specific discipline. No matter what your field is, if you are writing an academic paper, you will inevitably have to cite a journal article in your research. Journal articles often have multiple authors, so make sure you know when to use et al. in Harvard style . The method for referencing a journal article in the reference list is as follows:

Reference list (print) structure:

Last name, F. (Year published) ‘Article title’, Journal name , Volume(Issue), Page(s).

Shepherd, V. (2020) ‘An exploration around peer support for secondary pupils in Scotland with experience of self-harm’, Educational Psychology in Practice, 36(3), pp. 297-312.

Note that the article title uses sentence case. However, the title of the journal uses title case. Additionally, the volume number comes immediately after the journal title followed by the issue number in round brackets.

If the original material you are referencing was accessed online, then the method for citing it in the reference list will be the same as that in print, but with an additional line at the end.  

Reference list (online) structure:

Last name, F. (Year published) ‘Article title’, Journal Name , Volume(Issue), Page(s). Available at: URL or DOI (Accessed: date).  

Shepherd, V. (2020) ‘An exploration around peer support for secondary pupils in Scotland with experience of self-harm’, Educational Psychology in Practice, 36(3), pp. 297-312. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02667363.2020.1772726 (Accessed: 08 October 2020).

In-text citation (print or online) structure:

In-text citations are written within round brackets and start with the last name of the author followed by the year published, both separated by a comma.

You can also mention the author within the text and only include the publication year in round brackets.

Examples:  

In this article (Shepherd, 2020) deals with…  

According to Shepherd (2020), when peer support is available…  

Talking about the secondary education system, Shepherd (2020, p.299) suggests that…

Newspaper articles

Even if you are referring to an incident which is public knowledge, you still need to cite the source.  

The name of the author in a newspaper article is referred to as a byline. Below are examples for citing an article both with and without a byline.  

Reference list (print) structure:  

Last name, F. (Year published). ‘Article title’, Newspaper name , Day Month, Page(s).

Hamilton, J. (2018). ‘Massive fire at local department store’, The Daily Local, 10 August, p. 1.

Last name, F. (Year published). ‘Article title’, Newspaper name , Day Month, Page(s). Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).

Gambino, L. (2020) ‘Kamala Harris and Mike Pence clash over coronavirus response in vice-presidential debate,’ The Guardian, 8 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/07/debate-kamala-harris-mike-pence-latest-news (Accessed: 8 October 2020).

Reference list structure, no byline:

The basic reference list structure for the reference is the same for both print and online articles. If information isn’t available, simply omit it from the reference.

Newspaper name (Year published) ‘Article Title’, Day Month, Page(s). Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).

The Chronicler (2016) ‘Local man wins lottery jackpot twice in one year’, 30 May, p. 14. Available at: https://thechroniclerpaper.com/local-man-wins-lottery-twice (Accessed: 1 October 2020).

In-text citation structure (print or online):

The last name of the author and date are written in round brackets, separated by a comma. The method is similar to referencing journal articles in in-text citations.

(Hamilton, 2018)

In his paper, Gambino (2020) mentioned that…

For articles accessed online which do not have an author, the name of the publication is mentioned in place of the author’s name and is italicized.

( The Chronicler , 2016)

Magazine articles  

The structure of magazine articles is similar to that of a journal article.

Last name, F. (Year published) ‘Article title’, Magazine Name , Volume(Issue), Page(s).

Ornes, S. (2020). “To save Appalachia’s endangered mussels, scientists hatched a bold plan”, ScienceNews, (198), p.2.

Last name, F. (Year published) ‘Article title’, Magazine name , Volume(Issue), Page(s). Available at: URL (Accessed: Date).

Ornes, S. (2020) ‘To save Appalachia’s endangered mussels, scientists hatched a bold plan’, ScienceNews, (198), p.2. Available at: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/endangered-mussels-appalachia-rivers-biologists-conservation-plan (Accessed: 3 October 2020).

  In-text citation (print or online) structure:

(Author last name, Year published)

(Ornes, 2020)

Published October 29, 2020.

Harvard Formatting Guide

Harvard Formatting

• et al Usage
• Direct Quotes
• In-text Citations
• Multiple Authors
• Page Numbers
• Writing an Outline
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The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap

How a civil rights ideal got hijacked.

Supported by

The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked

The fall of affirmative action is part of a 50-year campaign to roll back racial progress.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at the magazine and is the creator of The 1619 Project. She also teaches race and journalism at Howard University.

Anthony K. Wutoh, the provost of Howard University, was sitting at his desk last July when his phone rang. It was the new dean of the College of Medicine, and she was worried. She had received a letter from a conservative law group called the Liberty Justice Center. The letter warned that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, the school “must cease” any practices or policies that included a “racial component” and said it was notifying medical schools across the country that they must eliminate “racial discrimination” in their admissions. If Howard refused to comply, the letter threatened, the organization would sue.

Listen to this article, read by Janina Edwards

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Wutoh told the dean to send him the letter and not to respond until she heard back from him. Hanging up, he sat there for a moment, still. Then he picked up the phone and called the university’s counsel: This could be a problem.

Like most university officials, Wutoh was not shocked in June when the most conservative Supreme Court in nearly a century cut affirmative action’s final thin thread. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the court invalidated race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Universities across the nation had been preparing for the ruling, trying both to assess potential liabilities and determine the best response.

But Howard is no ordinary university. Chartered by the federal government two years after the Civil War, Howard is one of about 100 historically Black colleges and universities, known as H.B.C.U.s. H.B.C.U. is an official government designation for institutions of higher learning founded from the time of slavery through the end of legal apartheid in the 1960s, mostly in the South. H.B.C.U.s were charged with educating the formerly enslaved and their descendants, who for most of this nation’s history were excluded from nearly all of its public and private colleges.

Though Howard has been open to students of all races since its founding in 1867, nearly all of its students have been Black. And so after the affirmative-action ruling, while elite, predominantly white universities fretted about how to keep their Black enrollments from shrinking, Howard (where I am a professor) and other H.B.C.U.s were planning for a potential influx of students who either could no longer get into these mostly white colleges or no longer wanted to try.

Wutoh thought it astounding that Howard — a university whose official government designation and mandate, whose entire reason for existing, is to serve a people who had been systematically excluded from higher education — could be threatened with a lawsuit if it did not ignore race when admitting students. “The fact that we have to even think about and consider what does this mean and how do we continue to fulfill our mission and fulfill the reason why we were founded as an institution and still be consistent with the ruling — I have to acknowledge that we have struggled with this,” he told me. “My broader concern is this is a concerted effort, part of an orchestrated plan to roll back many of the advances of the ’50s and ’60s. I am alarmed. It is absolutely regressive.”

Wutoh has reason to be alarmed. Conservative groups have spent the nine months since the affirmative-action ruling launching an assault on programs designed to explicitly address racial inequality across American life. They have filed a flurry of legal challenges and threatened lawsuits against race-conscious programs outside the realm of education, including diversity fellowships at law firms, a federal program to aid disadvantaged small businesses and a program to keep Black women from dying in childbirth. These conservative groups — whose names often evoke fairness and freedom and rights — are using civil rights law to claim that the Constitution requires “colorblindness” and that efforts targeted at ameliorating the suffering of descendants of slavery illegally discriminate against white people. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.

During the civil rights era, this country passed a series of hard-fought laws to dismantle the system of racial apartheid and to create policies and programs aimed at repairing its harms. Today this is often celebrated as the period when the nation finally triumphed over its original sin of slavery. But what this narrative obscures is that the gains of the civil rights movement were immediately met with a backlash that sought to subvert first the language and then the aims of the movement. Over the last 50 years, we have experienced a slow-moving, near-complete unwinding of the idea that this country owes anything to Black Americans for 350 years of legalized slavery and racism. But we have also undergone something far more dangerous: the dismantling of the constitutional tools for undoing racial caste in the United States.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Court began to vacillate on remedies for descendants of slavery. And for the last 30 years, the court has almost exclusively ruled in favor of white people in so-called reverse-discrimination cases while severely narrowing the possibility for racial redress for Black Americans. Often, in these decisions, the court has used colorblindness as a rationale that dismisses both the particular history of racial disadvantage and its continuing disparities.

This thinking has reached its legal apotheosis on the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Starting with the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the court found that it wasn’t the segregation of Black and Latino children that was constitutionally repugnant, but the voluntary integration plans that used race to try to remedy it. Six years later, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Shelby v. Holder, gutting the Voting Rights Act, which had ensured that jurisdictions could no longer prevent Black Americans from voting because of their race. The act was considered one of the most successful civil rights laws in American history, but Roberts declared that its key provision was no longer needed, saying that “things have changed dramatically.” But a new study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since the ruling, jurisdictions that were once covered by the Voting Rights Act because of their history of discrimination saw the gap in turnout between Black and white voters grow nearly twice as quickly as in other jurisdictions with similar socioeconomic profiles.

These decisions of the Roberts court laid the legal and philosophical groundwork for the recent affirmative-action case. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard involved two of the country’s oldest public and private universities, both of which were financed to a significant degree with the labor of the enslaved and excluded slavery’s descendants for most of their histories. In finding that affirmative action was unconstitutional, Roberts used the reasoning of Brown v. Board of Education to make the case that because “the Constitution is colorblind” and “should not permit any distinctions of law based on race or color,” race cannot be used even to help a marginalized group. Quoting the Brown ruling, Roberts argued that “the mere act of ‘separating children’” because of their race generated “ ‘a feeling of inferiority’” among students.

But in citing Brown, Roberts spoke generically of race, rarely mentioning Black people and ignoring the fact that this earlier ruling struck down segregation because race had been used to subordinate them. When Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote those words in 1954, he was not arguing that the use of race harmed Black and white children equally. The use of race in assigning students to schools, Warren wrote, referring to an earlier lower-court decision, had “a detrimental effect upon colored children” specifically, because it was “interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.”

Roberts quickly recited in just a few paragraphs the centuries-long legacy of legal discrimination against Black Americans. Then, as if flicking so many crumbs from the table, he used the circular logic of conservative colorblindness to dispatch that past with a pithy line: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

By erasing the context, Roberts turned colorblindness on its head, reinterpreting a concept meant to eradicate racial caste to one that works against racial justice.

Roberts did not invent this subversion of colorblindness, but his court is constitutionalizing it. While we seem to understand now how the long game of the anti-abortion movement resulted in a historically conservative Supreme Court that last year struck down Roe v. Wade, taking away what had been a constitutional right, Americans have largely failed to see that a parallel, decades-long antidemocratic racial strategy was occurring at the same time. The ramifications of the recent affirmative-action decision are clear — and they are not something so inconsequential as the complexion of elite colleges and the number of students of color who attend them: We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of a compact that the civil rights movement forged, a shared understanding that racial inequality is harmful to democracy.

The End of Slavery, and the Instant Backlash

When this country finally eliminated first slavery and then racial apartheid, it was left with a fundamental question: How does a white-majority nation, which for nearly its entire history wielded race-conscious policies and laws that oppressed and excluded Black Americans, create a society in which race no longer matters? Do we ignore race in order to eliminate its power, or do we consciously use race to undo its harms?

Our nation has never been able to resolve this tension. Race, we now believe, should not be used to harm or to advantage people, whether they are Black or white. But the belief in colorblindness in a society constructed on the codification of racial difference has always been aspirational. And so achieving it requires what can seem like a paradoxical approach: a demand that our nation pay attention to race in order, at some future point, to attain a just society. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”

Racial progress in the United States has resulted from rare moments of national clarity, often following violent upheavals like the Civil War and the civil rights movement. At those times, enough white people in power embraced the idea that racial subordination is antidemocratic and so the United States must counter its legacy of racial caste not with a mandated racial neutrality or colorblindness but with sweeping race-specific laws and policies to help bring about Black equality. Yet any attempt to manufacture equality by the same means that this society manufactured inequality has faced fierce and powerful resistance.

This resistance began as soon as slavery ended. After generations of chattel slavery, four million human beings were suddenly being emancipated into a society in which they had no recognized rights or citizenship, and no land, money, education, shelter or jobs. To address this crisis, some in Congress saw in the aftermath of this nation’s deadliest war the opportunity — but also the necessity — for a second founding that would eliminate the system of racial slavery that had been its cause. These men, known as Radical Republicans, believed that making Black Americans full citizens required color-consciousness in policy — an intentional reversal of the way race had been used against Black Americans. They wanted to create a new agency called the Freedmen’s Bureau to serve “persons of African descent” or “such persons as once had been slaves” by providing educational, food and legal assistance, as well as allotments of land taken from the white-owned properties where formerly enslaved people were forced to work.

Understanding that “race” was created to force people of African descent into slavery, their arguments in Congress in favor of the Freedmen’s Bureau were not based on Black Americans’ “skin color” but rather on their condition. Standing on the Senate floor in June 1864, Senator Charles Sumner quoted from a congressional commission’s report on the conditions of freed people, saying, “We need a Freedmen’s Bureau not because these people are Negroes but because they are men who have been for generations despoiled of their rights.” Senator Lyman Trumbull, an author of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, declared: “The policy of the states where slavery has existed has been to legislate in its interest. … Now, when slavery no longer exists, the policy of the government must be to legislate in the interest of freedom.” In a speech to Congress, Trumbull compelled “the people of the rebellious states” to be “as zealous and active in the passage of laws and the inauguration of measures to elevate, develop and improve the Negro as they have hitherto been to enslave and degrade him.”

But there were also the first stirrings of an argument we still hear today: that specifically aiding those who, because they were of African descent, had been treated as property for 250 years was giving them preferential treatment. Two Northern congressmen, Martin Kalbfleish, a Dutch immigrant and former Brooklyn mayor, and Anthony L. Knapp, a representative from Illinois, declared that no one would give “serious consideration” to a “bureau of Irishmen’s affairs, a bureau of Dutchmen’s affairs or one for the affairs of those of Caucasian descent generally.” So they questioned why the freedmen should “become these marked objects of special legislation, to the detriment of the unfortunate whites.” Representative Nelson Taylor bemoaned the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, which he accused of making a “distinction on account of color between two races.” He argued, “This, sir, is what I call class legislation — legislation for a particular class of the Blacks to the exclusion of all whites.”

Ultimately, the Freedmen’s Bureau bills passed, but only after language was added to provide assistance for poor white people as well. Already, at the very moment of racial slavery’s demise, we see the poison pill, the early formulation of the now-familiar arguments that helping a people who had been enslaved was somehow unfair to those who had not, that the same Constitution that permitted and protected bondage based on race now required colorblindness to undo its harms.

This logic helped preserve the status quo and infused the responses to other Reconstruction-era efforts that tried to ensure justice and equality for newly freed people. President Andrew Johnson, in vetoing the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which sought to grant automatic citizenship to four million Black people whose families for generations had been born in the United States, argued that it “proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy and patriotic foreigners,” who would still be subjected to a naturalization process “in favor of the Negro.” Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, but this idea that unique efforts to address the extraordinary conditions of people who were enslaved or descended from slavery were unfair to another group who had chosen to immigrate to this country foreshadowed the arguments about Asian immigrants and their children that would be echoed 150 years later in Students for Fair Admissions.

As would become the pattern, the collective determination to redress the wrongs of slavery evaporated under opposition. Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872. And just 12 years after the Civil War, white supremacists and their accommodationists brought Reconstruction to a violent end. The nation’s first experiment with race-based redress and multiracial democracy was over. In its place, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 ushered in the period of official racial apartheid when it determined that “the enforced separation of the races … neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man … nor denies him the equal protection of the laws.” Over the next six decades, the court condoned an entire code of race law and policies designed to segregate, marginalize, exclude and subjugate descendants of slavery across every realm of American life. The last of these laws would stand until 1968, less than a decade before I was born.

Thurgood Marshall’s Path to Desegregation

In 1930, a young man named Thurgood Marshall, a native son of Baltimore, could not attend the University of Maryland’s law school, located in the city and state where his parents were taxpaying citizens. The 22-year-old should have been a shoo-in for admission. An academically gifted student, Marshall had become enamored with the Constitution after his high school principal punished him for a prank by making him read the founding document. Marshall memorized key parts of the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. After enrolling at Lincoln University, a prestigious Black institution, he joined the debate team and graduated with honors.

But none of that mattered. Only one thing did: Marshall was a descendant of slavery, and Black people, no matter their intellect, ambition or academic record, were barred by law from attending the University of Maryland. Marshall enrolled instead at Howard University Law School, where he studied under the brilliant Charles Hamilton Houston, whose belief that “a lawyer is either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society” had turned the law school into the “West Point of civil rights.”

It was there that Marshall began to see the Constitution as a living document that must adapt to and address the times. He joined with Houston in crafting the strategy that would dismantle legal apartheid. After graduating as valedictorian, in one of his first cases, Marshall sued the University of Maryland. He argued that the school was violating the 14th Amendment, which granted the formerly enslaved citizenship and ensured Black Americans “equal protection under the law,” by denying Black students admission solely because of their race without providing an alternative law school for Black students. Miraculously, he won.

Nearly two decades later, Marshall stood before the Supreme Court on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that the equal-protection clause enshrined in the 14th Amendment did not abide the use of racial classifications to segregate Black students. Marshall was not merely advancing a generic argument that the Constitution commands blindness to color or race. The essential issue, the reason the 14th Amendment existed, he argued, was not just because race had served as a means of classifying people, but because race had been used to create a system to oppress descendants of slavery — people who had been categorized as Black. Marshall explained that racial classification was being used to enforce an “inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible.” The court, he said, “should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for.” He sought the elimination of laws requiring segregation, but also the segregation those laws had created.

The Supreme Court, in unanimously striking down school segregation in its Brown decision, did not specifically mention the word “colorblind,” but its ruling echoed the thinking about the 14th Amendment in John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. “There is no caste here,” Harlan declared. “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But he also made it clear that colorblindness was intended to eliminate the subordination of those who had been enslaved, writing, “In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He continued, “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race … is a badge of servitude.”

The court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was not merely a moral statement but a political one. Racial segregation and the violent suppression of democracy among its Black citizens had become a liability for the United States during the Cold War, as the nation sought to stymie Communism’s attraction in non-European nations. Attorney General James P. McGranery submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Truman administration supporting a ruling against school segregation, writing: “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed. The United States is trying to prove to the people of the world of every nationality, race and color that a free democracy is the most civilized and most secure form of government yet devised by man. … Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.”

Civil rights activists were finally seeing their decades-long struggle paying off. But the architects and maintenance crew of racial caste understood a fundamental truth about the society they had built: Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them. Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction , it would inevitably self-replicate.

One can see this in the effort to desegregate schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Across the country, North and South, white officials eliminated laws and policies mandating segregation but also did nothing to integrate schools. They maintained unofficial policies of assigning students to schools based on race, adopting so-called race-neutral admissions requirements designed to eliminate most Black applicants from white schools, and they drew school attendance zones snugly around racially segregated neighborhoods. Nearly a decade after Brown v. Board, educational colorblindness stood as the law of the land, and yet no substantial school integration had occurred. In fact, at the start of 1963, in Alabama and Mississippi, two of the nation’s most heavily Black states, not a single Black child attended school with white children.

By the mid-1960s, the Supreme Court grew weary of the ploys. It began issuing rulings trying to enforce actual desegregation of schools. And in 1968, in Green v. New Kent County, the court unanimously decided against a Virginia school district’s “freedom-of-choice plan” that on its face adhered to the colorblind mandate of Brown but in reality led to almost no integration in the district. “The fact that in 1965 the Board opened the doors of the former ‘white’ school to Negro children and of the ‘Negro’ school to white children merely begins, not ends, our inquiry whether the Board has taken steps adequate to abolish its dual, segregated system,” the court determined.

The court ordered schools to use race to assign students, faculty and staff members to schools to achieve integration. Complying with Brown, the court determined, meant the color-conscious conversion of an apartheid system into one without a “ ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.” In other words, the reality of racial caste could not be constitutionally subordinated to the ideal of colorblindness. Colorblindness was the goal, color-consciousness the remedy.

Using Race to End Racial Inequality

Hobart Taylor Jr., a successful lawyer who lived in Detroit, was mingling at a party in the nation’s capital in January 1961 to celebrate the inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson as vice president of the United States. Taylor had not had any intention of going to the inauguration, but like Johnson, Taylor was a native son of Texas, and his politically active family were early supporters of Johnson. And so at a personal request from the vice president, Taylor reluctantly found himself amid the din of clinking cocktail glasses when Johnson stopped and asked him to come see him in a few days.

Taylor did not immediately go see Johnson. After a second request came in, in February, Taylor found himself in Johnson’s office. The vice president slid into Taylor’s hands a draft of a new executive order to establish the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which Johnson would lead. This was to be one of President John F. Kennedy’s first steps toward establishing civil rights for Black people.

Taylor’s grandfather had been born into slavery, and yet he and Taylor’s father became highly successful and influential entrepreneurs and landowners despite Texas’ strict color line.

The apartheid society Taylor grew up in was changing, and the vice president of the United States had tapped him to help draft its new rules. How could he say no? Taylor had planned on traveling back to Detroit that night, but instead he checked into the Willard Hotel, where he worked so intently on the draft of the executive order that not only did he forget to eat dinner but also he forgot to tell his wife that he wasn’t coming home. The next day, Taylor worked and reworked the draft for what would become Executive Order 10925, enacted in March 1961.

A few years later, in an interview for the John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, Taylor would recall what he considered his most significant contribution. The draft he received said employers had to “take action” to ensure that job applicants and employees would not be discriminated against because of their race, creed, color or national origin. Taylor thought the wording needed a propellant, and so inserted the word “affirmative” in front of action. “I was torn between ‘positive’ and ‘affirmative,’ and I decided ‘affirmative’ on the basis of alliteration,” he said. “And that has, apparently, meant a great deal historically in the way in which people have approached this whole thing.”

Taylor added the word to the order, but it would be the other Texan — a man with a fondness for using the N-word in private — who would most forcefully describe the moral rationale, the societal mandate, for affirmative action. Johnson would push through Congress the 1964, 1965 and 1968 civil rights laws — the greatest civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

But a deeply divided Congress did not pass this legislation simply because it realized a century after the Civil War that descendants of slavery deserved equal rights. Black Americans had been engaged in a struggle to obtain those rights and had endured political assassinations, racist murders, bombings and other violence. Segregated and impoverished Black communities across the nation took part in dozens of rebellions, and tanks rolled through American streets. The violent suppression of the democratic rights of its Black citizens threatened to destabilize the country and had once again become an international liability as the United States waged war in Vietnam.

But as this nation’s racist laws began to fall, conservatives started to realize that the language of colorblindness could be used to their advantage. In the fall of 1964, Barry Goldwater, a Republican who was running against President Johnson, gave his first major national speech on civil rights. Civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins had lambasted Goldwater’s presidential nomination, with King saying his philosophy gave “aid and comfort to racists.” But at a carefully chosen venue — the Conrad Hilton in Chicago — in front of a well-heeled white audience unlikely to spout racist rhetoric, Goldwater savvily evoked the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to undermine civil rights. “It has been well said that the Constitution is colorblind,” he said. “And so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation. … Our aim, as I understand it, is not to establish a segregated society or an integrated society. It is to preserve a free society.”

The argument laid out in this speech was written with the help of William H. Rehnquist. As a clerk for Justice Robert Jackson during the Brown v. Board of Education case, Rehnquist pushed for the court to uphold segregation. But in the decade that passed, it became less socially acceptable to publicly denounce equal rights for Black Americans, and Rehnquist began to deploy the language of colorblindness in a way that cemented racial disadvantage.

White Americans who liked the idea of equality but did not want descendants of slavery moving next door to them, competing for their jobs or sitting near their children in school were exceptionally primed for this repositioning. As Rick Perlstein wrote in his book “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus,” when it came to race, Goldwater believed that white Americans “didn’t have the words to say the truth they knew in their hearts to be right, in a manner proper to the kind of men they wanted to see when they looked in the mirror. Goldwater was determined to give them the words.”

In the end, Johnson beat Goldwater in a landslide. Then, in June 1965, a few months after Black civil rights marchers were barbarically beaten on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and two months before he would sign the historic Voting Rights Act into law, Johnson, now president of a deeply and violently polarized nation, gave the commencement address at Howard University. At that moment, Johnson stood at the pinnacle of white American power, and he used his platform to make the case that the country owed descendants of slavery more than just their rights and freedom.

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair,” Johnson said. “This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

For a brief moment, it seemed as if a grander, more just vision of America had taken hold. But while Goldwater did not win the election, 14 years later a case went before the Supreme Court that would signal the ultimate victory of Goldwater’s strategy.

Claiming Reverse Discrimination

Allan Bakke was enjoying a successful career at NASA when he decided he wanted to become a physician. Bakke grew up in a white middle-class family — his father worked for the Post Office, and his mother taught school. Bakke went to the University of Minnesota, where he studied engineering and joined the R.O.T.C. to help pay for college, and then served four years as a Marine, including seven months in Vietnam. It was there that Bakke became enamored with the medical profession. While still working at NASA, he enrolled in night courses to obtain a pre-med degree. In 1972, while he was in his 30s, Bakke applied to 11 medical schools, including at his alma mater, and was rejected by all 11.

One of the schools that Bakke, who was living in California at the time, applied to was the University of California at Davis. The school received 2,664 applications for 100 spots, and by the time he completed his application, most of the seats had already been filled. Some students with lower scores were admitted before he applied, and Bakke protested to the school, claiming that “quotas, open or covert, for racial minorities” had kept him out. His admission file, however, would show that it was his age that was probably a significant strike against him and not his race.

Bakke applied again the next year, and U.C. Davis rejected him again. A friend described Bakke as developing an “almost religious zeal” to fight what he felt was a system that discriminated against white people in favor of so-called minorities. Bakke decided to sue, claiming he had been a victim of “reverse” discrimination.

The year was 1974, less than a decade after Johnson’s speech on affirmative action and a few years after the policy had begun to make its way onto college campuses. The U.C. Davis medical school put its affirmative-action plan in place in 1970. At the time, its first-year medical-school class of 100 students did not include a single Black, Latino or Native student. In response, the faculty designed a special program to boost enrollment of “disadvantaged” students by reserving 16 of the 100 seats for students who would go through a separate admissions process that admitted applicants with lower academic ratings than the general admissions program.

From 1971 to 1974, 21 Black students, 30 Mexican American students and 12 Asian American students enrolled through the special program, while one Black student, six Mexican Americans and 37 Asian American students were admitted through the regular program. Bakke claimed that his right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been violated. Though these laws were adopted to protect descendants of slavery from racial discrimination and subordination, Bakke was deploying them to claim that he had been illegally discriminated against because he was white. The case became the first affirmative-action challenge decided by the Supreme Court and revealed just how successful the rhetorical exploitation of colorblindness could be.

Justice Lewis Powell, writing for a fractured court in 1978, determined that although the 14th Amendment was written primarily to bridge “the vast distance between members of the Negro race and the white ‘majority,’” the passage of time and the changing demographics of the nation meant the amendment must now be applied universally. In an argument echoing the debates over the Freedmen’s Bureau, Powell said that the United States had grown more diverse, becoming a “nation of minorities,” where “the white ‘majority’ itself is composed of various minority groups, most of which can lay claim to a history of prior discrimination at the hands of the State and private individuals.”

“The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color,” Powell wrote. “If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.” Powell declared that the medical school could not justify helping certain “perceived” victims if it disadvantaged white people who “bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered.”

But who or what, then, did bear the responsibility?

Bakke was raised in Coral Gables, a wealthy, white suburb of Miami whose segregationist founder proposed a plan to remove all Black people from Miami while serving on the Dade County Planning Board, and where the white elementary school did not desegregate until after it was ordered by a federal court to do so in 1970, the same year U.C. Davis began its affirmative-action program. The court did not contemplate how this racially exclusive access to top neighborhoods and top schools probably helped Bakke to achieve the test scores that most Black students, largely relegated because of their racial designation to resource-deprived segregated neighborhoods and educational facilities, did not. It did not mean Bakke didn’t work hard, but it did mean that he had systemic advantages over equally hard-working and talented Black people.

For centuries, men like Powell and Bakke had benefited from a near-100 percent quota system, one that reserved nearly all the seats at this nation’s best-funded public and private schools and most-exclusive public and private colleges, all the homes in the best neighborhoods and all the top, well-paying jobs in private companies and public agencies for white Americans. Men like Bakke did not acknowledge the systemic advantages they had accrued because of their racial category, nor all the ways their race had unfairly benefited them. More critical, neither did the Supreme Court. As members of the majority atop the caste system, racial advantage transmitted invisibly to them. They took notice of their race only when confronted with a new system that sought to redistribute some of that advantage to people who had never had it.

Thus, the first time the court took up the issue of affirmative action, it took away the policy’s power. The court determined that affirmative action could not be used to redress the legacy of racial discrimination that Black Americans experienced, or the current systemic inequality that they were still experiencing. Instead, it allowed that some consideration of a student’s racial background could stand for one reason only: to achieve desired “diversity” of the student body. Powell referred to Harvard’s affirmative-action program, which he said had expanded to include students from other disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those from low-income families. He quoted an example from the plan, which said: “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor, just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

But, of course, a (white) farm boy from Idaho did not descend from people who were enslaved, because they were farmers from Idaho. There were not two centuries of case law arguing over the inherent humanity and rights of farm boys from Idaho. There was no sector of the law, no constitutional provision, that enshrined farm boys from Idaho as property who could be bought and sold. Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.

In Bakke, the court was legally — and ideologically — severing the link between race and condition. Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition. With a few strokes of his pen, Powell wiped this context away, and just like that, the experience of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow was relegated to one thing: another box to check.

Yet at the same time Powell was drafting this ruling, cases of recalcitrant school districts still refusing to integrate Black children were making their way to the Supreme Court. Just 15 years earlier, the federal government called up National Guardsmen to ensure that handfuls of Black students could enroll in white schools.

Indeed, Powell wrote this opinion while sitting on the same court as Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 became the first Black justice in the Supreme Court’s 178-year history. In Brown, Marshall helped break the back of legalized segregation. Now, as the court deliberated the Bakke case, a frustrated Marshall sent around a two-and-a-half-page typed memo to the other justices. “I repeat, for next to the last time: The decision in this case depends on whether you consider the action of the regents as admitting certain students or as excluding certain other students,” he wrote. “If you view the program as admitting qualified students who, because of this Nation’s sorry history of racial discrimination, have academic records that prevent them from effectively competing for medical school, then this is affirmative action to remove the vestiges of slavery and state imposed segregation by ‘root and branch.’ If you view the program as excluding students, it is a program of ‘quotas’ which violates the principle that the ‘Constitution is color-blind.’”

When Marshall’s arguments did not persuade enough justices, he joined with three others in a dissent from a decision that he saw as actively reversing, and indeed perverting, his legacy. They issued a scathing rebuke to the all-white majority, accusing them of letting “colorblindness become myopia, which masks the reality that many ‘created equal’ have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.”

Marshall also wrote his own dissent, where he ticked off statistic after statistic that revealed the glaring disparities between descendants of slavery and white Americans in areas like infant and maternal mortality, unemployment, income and life expectancy. He argued that while collegiate diversity was indeed a compelling state interest, bringing Black Americans into the mainstream of American life was much more urgent, and that failing to do so would ensure that “America will forever remain a divided society.”

Marshall called out the court’s hypocrisy. “For it must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution, as interpreted by this court, did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro,” he wrote. “Now, when a state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier.”

At the end of his lengthy dissent, Marshall pointed out what had become the court’s historic pattern. “After the Civil War, our government started ‘affirmative action’ programs. This court … destroyed the movement toward complete equality,” he wrote. As he said, “I fear that we have come full circle.”

The Reagan Rollback

In 1980, having just secured the Republican nomination for the presidency, Ronald Reagan traveled to Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair to give an address. It was there in that county, a mere 16 years earlier, that three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klansmen, among the most notorious killings of the civil rights era.

Standing in front of a roaring crowd of about 10,000 white Mississippians, Reagan began his general-election campaign. He did not mention race. He did not need to. Instead he spoke of states’ rights, replicating the language of Confederates and segregationists, to signal his vision for America.

Despite the Bakke ruling, affirmative action continued to gain ground in the 1970s, with a deeply divided Supreme Court upholding limited affirmative action in hiring and other areas, and the Jimmy Carter administration embracing race-conscious policies. But Reagan understood the political power of white resistance to these policies, which if allowed to continue and succeed would redistribute opportunity in America.

Once in office, Reagan aggressively advanced the idea that racial-justice efforts had run amok, that Black Americans were getting undeserved racial advantages across society and that white Americans constituted the primary victims of discrimination.

A 1985 New York Times article noted that the Reagan administration was “intensifying its legal attack on affirmative action” across American life, saying the administration “has altered the government’s definition of racial discrimination.” As early as the 1970s, Reagan began using the phrase “reverse discrimination” — what the political scientist Philip L. Fetzer called a “covert political term” that undermined racial redress programs by redefining them as anti-white. Reagan’s administration claimed that race-conscious remedies were illegal and that hiring goals for Black Americans were “a form of racism” and as abhorrent as the “separate but equal” doctrine struck down by Brown v. Board.

Reagan, who had secretly called Black people monkeys and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Yet in the first commemoration of that holiday in 1986, he trotted out King’s words to condemn racial-justice policy. “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has become a go-to for conservatives seeking to discredit efforts to address the pervasive disadvantages that Black Americans face. And it works so effectively because few Americans have read the entire speech, and even fewer have read any of the other speeches or writings in which King explicitly makes clear that colorblindness was a goal that could be reached only through race-conscious policy. Four years after giving his “Dream” speech, King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” And during a 1968 sermon given less than a week before his assassination, King said that those who opposed programs to specifically help Black Americans overcome their disadvantage “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the Black man’s color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”

But as the sociologist Stuart Hall once wrote, “Those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it true.” Reagan deftly provided the road map to the nation’s racial future. Tapping into white aversion to acknowledging and addressing the singular crimes committed against Black Americans, conservatives, who had not long before championed and defended racial segregation, now commandeered the language of colorblindness, which had been used to dismantle the impacts of legal apartheid. They wrapped themselves in the banner of rhetorical equality while condemning racial-justice activists as the primary perpetrators of racism.

“There’s this really concerted, strategic effort to communicate to white people that racial justice makes white people victims, and that when people demand racial justice, they don’t actually mean justice; they mean revenge,” Ian Haney López, a race and constitutional law scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “Black people are treated as if they are just any other Americans. There is no history of racial subordination associated with Black people. There is no structural or systemic racism against African Americans. By 1989, it’s over. Reactionary colorblindness has won.”

Diversity vs. Redress

Perhaps no single person has more successfully wielded Reagan’s strategy than Edward Blum. In 1992, Blum, who made his living as a stockbroker, decided to run for Congress as a Republican in a Texas district carved out to ensure Black representation. Blum was trounced by the Black Democratic candidate. He and several others sued, arguing that a consideration of racial makeup when creating legislative districts violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause. Despite the fact that until a 1944 Supreme Court ruling, Texas had selected candidates through all-white primaries, and the fact that the district had been created in part in response to the state’s history of Black-voter suppression, Blum’s side won the case, forcing a redrawing of legislative districts in a manner that diluted Black and Latino voting power. Since that victory, Blum has mounted a decades-long campaign that has undermined the use of race to achieve racial justice across American life.

Blum is not a lawyer, but his organizations, funded by a mostly anonymous cadre of deep-pocketed conservatives, have been wildly effective. It is Blum, for instance, who was the strategist behind the case against the Voting Rights Act. When the Supreme Court again narrowly upheld affirmative action in college admissions in the early 2000s, Blum set his sights on killing it altogether. In that 2003 case, Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion preserving limited affirmative action but putting universities on notice by setting an arbitrary timeline for when the court should determine that enough racial justice will have been achieved. “It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student-body diversity in the context of public higher education,” O’Connor wrote. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” The use of the term “racial preferences” is key here. Instead of a policy created to even the playing field for a people who had been systematically held back and still faced pervasive discrimination, affirmative action was cast as a program that punished white Americans by giving unfair preferential treatment to Black Americans.

Blum didn’t wait 25 years to challenge affirmative action. His case brought on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a soft-spoken white woman who sued the University of Texas at Austin, after she was denied admission, went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court ultimately upheld the university’s admissions program. In his second attempt, Blum changed tactics. As he told a gathering of the Houston Chinese Alliance in 2015: “I needed Asian plaintiffs.” In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Blum’s group argued, and the court agreed, that affirmative-action programs discriminated against Asian Americans and, at the University of North Carolina, also white students. But many saw Blum’s use of another historically marginalized group in the lawsuit as an attempt to neutralize any argument that those targeting affirmative action opposed racial equality.

Blum’s success relied on defining affirmative action as a program about “visual diversity,” treating race as a mere collection of physical traits and not a social construct used to subordinate and stigmatize. When colleges seek diversity, he said, they are “really talking about skin-color diversity. How somebody looks. What’s your skin color? What’s the shape of your eyes? What’s the texture of your hair? Most Americans don’t think that the shape of your eyes tells us much about who you are as an individual. What does your skin color tell the world about who you are as an individual?” This reasoning resounds for many Americans who have also come to think about race simply as what you see.

Blum has described racial injustice against Black Americans as a thing of the past — a “terrible scar” on our history. As he awaited the court’s ruling last April, Blum told The Christian Science Monitor that today’s efforts to address that past were discriminatory and in direct conflict with the colorblind goals of Black activism. He said that “an individual’s race or ethnicity should not be used to help that individual or harm that individual in their life’s endeavors” and that affirmative action was “in grave tension with the founding principles of our civil rights movement.” But the civil rights movement has never been about merely eliminating race or racism; it’s also about curing its harms, and civil rights groups oppose Blum’s efforts.

Yet progressives, too, have unwittingly helped to maintain the corrupt colorblind argument that Blum has employed so powerfully, in part because the meaning of affirmative action was warped nearly from its beginning by the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning in Bakke. When the court determined that affirmative-action programs could stand only for “diversity” and not for redress, many advocates and institutions, in order to preserve these programs, embraced the idea that the goal of affirmative action was diversity and inclusiveness and not racial justice. Progressive organizations adopted the lexicon of “people of color” when discussing affirmative-action programs and also flattened all African-descended people into a single category, regardless of their particular lineage or experience in the United States.

Campuses certainly became more “diverse” as admissions offices focused broadly on recruiting students who were not white. But the descendants of slavery, for whom affirmative action originated, remain underrepresented among college students, especially at selective colleges and universities. At elite universities, research shows, the Black population consists disproportionately of immigrants and children of immigrants rather than students whose ancestors were enslaved here.

So, at least on this one thing, Blum is right. Many institutions have treated affirmative-action programs as a means of achieving visual diversity. Doing so has weakened the most forceful arguments for affirmative action, which in turn has weakened public support for such policies. Institutions must find ways, in the wake of the affirmative-action ruling, to address the racism that Black people face no matter their lineage. But using affirmative action as a diversity program — or a program to alleviate disadvantage that any nonwhite person faces — has in actuality played a part in excluding the very people for whom affirmative action and other racial redress programs were created to help.

Taking Back the Intent of Affirmative Action

Just as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund used the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as a legal catalyst for eliminating apartheid in all American life, Blum and those of like mind intend to use the affirmative-action ruling to push a sweeping regression in the opposite direction: bringing down this nation’s racial-justice programs and initiatives.

Right after the June ruling, 13 Republican state attorneys general sent letters to 100 of the nation’s biggest companies warning that the affirmative-action ruling prohibits what they call “discriminating on the basis of race, whether under the label of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ or otherwise. Treating people differently because of the color of their skin, even for benign purposes, is unlawful and wrong.” Companies that engage in such racial discrimination, the letter threatened, would “face serious legal consequences.”

The letter points to racial-justice and diversity-and-inclusion programs created or announced by companies, particularly after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. In response to the killing, a multigenerational protest movement arose and faced violent suppression by law enforcement as it sought to force this nation to see that the descendants of slavery were still suffering and deserved repair. Corporations took a public stance on racial justice, vowing to integrate everything from their boardrooms to their suppliers. Monuments to white supremacists and Confederates that had stood for 100 years were finally vanquished from the public square. And many colleges and other institutions vocally committed to racial justice as an ethos.

But that fragile multiracial coalition — which for a period understood racial redress as a national good needed to secure and preserve our democracy — has been crushed by the same forces that have used racial polarization to crush these alliances in the past. Conservatives have spent the four years since George Floyd’s murder waging a so-called war against “woke” — banning books and curriculums about racism, writing laws that eliminate diversity-and-inclusion programs and prohibiting the teaching of courses even at the college level that are deemed racially “divisive.”

In other words, conservatives have used state power to prepare a citizenry to accept this new American legal order by restricting our ability to understand why so much racial inequality exists, particularly among the descendants of slavery, and why programs like affirmative action were ever needed in the first place.

“Something really stunning and dangerous that has happened during the Trump era is that the right uses the language of colorblindness or anti-wokeness to condemn any references to racial justice,” Haney López told me. “This rhetoric is a massive fraud, because it claims colorblindness toward race but is actually designed to stimulate hyper-race-consciousness among white people. That strategy has worked.”

Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.

Despite these realities, conservative groups are initiating a wave of attacks on racial-equality programs. About 5 percent of practicing attorneys are Black, and yet one of Blum’s groups, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, sued law firms to stop their diversity fellowships. In August, it also sued the Fearless Fund, a venture-capital firm founded by two Black women, which through its charitable arm helps other Black women gain access to funding by giving small grants to businesses that are at least 51 percent owned by Black women. Even though according to the World Economic Forum, Black women receive just 0.34 percent of venture-capital funds in the United States, Blum declared the fund to be racially discriminatory. Another Blum group, Students for Fair Admissions, has now sued the U.S. Military Academy, even though the Supreme Court allowed race-conscious admissions to stand in the military. Another organization, the Center for Individual Rights, has successfully overturned a decades-long Small Business Administration policy that automatically treated so-called minority-owned businesses as eligible for federal contracts for disadvantaged businesses.

Last year, a group called the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation sued the City and County of San Francisco over their funding of several programs aimed at eliminating disparities Black Americans face, including the Abundant Birth Project, which gives stipends for prenatal care, among other supports, to Black women and Pacific Islanders to help prevent them from dying during childbirth. Even though maternal mortality for Black women in the United States is up to four times as high as it is for white women, conservatives argue that programs specifically helping the women most likely to die violate the 14th Amendment. Even as this lawsuit makes its way through the courts, there are signs of why these sorts of programs remain necessary: It was announced last year that the Department of Health and Human Services opened a civil rights investigation into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for allegations of racism against Black mothers following the death of a Black woman who went there to give birth.

It is impossible to look at the realities of Black life that these programs seek to address and come to the conclusion that the lawsuits are trying to make society more fair or just or free. Instead they are foreclosing the very initiatives that could actually make it so.

And nothing illuminates that more than the conservative law group’s letter warning Howard — an institution so vaunted among Black Americans that it’s known as the Mecca — that its medical school must stop any admissions practices that have a “racial component.” Howard’s medical school, founded in 1868, remains one of just four historically Black medical schools in the United States. Howard received nearly 9,000 medical-school applicants for 130 open seats in 2023. And while almost all of the students who apply to be Howard undergraduates are Black, because there are so few medical-school slots available, most applicants to Howard’s medical school are not. Since the school was founded to serve descendants of slavery with a mission to educate “disadvantaged students for careers in medicine,” however, most of the students admitted each year are Black.

That has now made it a target, even though Black Americans account for only 5 percent of all U.S. doctors, an increase of just three percentage points in the 46 years since Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Bakke. Despite affirmative action at predominantly white schools, at least 70 percent of the Black doctors and dentists in America attended an H.B.C.U. H.B.C.U.s also have produced half of the Black lawyers, 40 percent of Black engineers and a quarter of Black graduates in STEM fields.

Even Plessy v. Ferguson, considered perhaps the worst Supreme Court ruling in U.S. history, sanctioned the existence of H.B.C.U.s and other Black-serving organizations. If institutions like Howard or the Fearless Fund cannot work to explicitly assist the descendants of slavery, who still today remain at the bottom of nearly every indicator of success and well-being, then we have decided as a nation that there is nothing we should do to help Black Americans achieve equality and that we will remain a caste society.

What we are witnessing, once again, is the alignment of white power against racial justice and redress. As history has shown, maintaining racial inequality requires constant repression and is therefore antithetical to democracy. And so we must be clear about the stakes: Our nation teeters at the brink of a particularly dangerous moment, not just for Black Americans but for democracy itself.

To meet the moment, our society must forcefully recommit to racial justice by taking lessons from the past. We must reclaim the original intent of affirmative-action programs stretching all the way back to the end of slavery, when the Freedmen’s Bureau focused not on race but on status, on alleviating the conditions of those who had endured slavery. Diversity matters in a diverse society, and American democracy by definition must push for the inclusion of all marginalized people. But remedies for injustice also need to be specific to the harm.

So we, too, must shift our language and, in light of the latest affirmative-action ruling, focus on the specific redress for descendants of slavery . If Yale, for instance, can apologize for its participation in slavery, as it did last month, then why can’t it create special admissions programs for slavery’s descendants — a program based on lineage and not race — just as it does for its legacy students? Corporations, government programs and other organizations could try the same.

Those who believe in American democracy, who want equality, must no longer allow those who have undermined the idea of colorblindness to define the terms. Working toward racial justice is not just the moral thing to do, but it may also be the only means of preserving our democracy.

Race-based affirmative action has died. The fight for racial justice need not. It cannot.

Top photo illustration by Mark Harris. Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine focusing on racial injustice. Her extensive reporting in both print and radio has earned a Pulitzer Prize, National Magazine Award, Peabody and a Polk Award. More about Nikole Hannah-Jones

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