Appearing this morning on George Brauchler’s radio show, Chris Murray, who until earlier this year was the longtime attorney for the Colorado Republican Party, called collegiate affirmative action “racist” and compared them to Jim Crow laws. He was speaking about the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard (where Murray himself attended law school) and the University of North Carolina.
Affirmative action policies in both admissions and hiring were instituted to counter the state-endorsed segregation laws collectively known as Jim Crow.
Brauchler asked Murray if he thinks the SCOTUS ruling will “change the way schools that are invested in this diversity, equity and inclusion stuff, do business?” Specifically he wanted to know if colleges still try to continue to consider race as a factor during the admissions process. Murray replied by noting that when the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, it took years of lawsuits to force Southern states to end Jim Crow laws.
Murray: Look at the legacy out of the Jim Crow South, when the Civil Rights Act was first passed and you started getting court decisions saying, ‘hey, guys, you really can’t discriminate, right? Well, what happened for about ten years, there had to be a series of lawsuits in federal cases saying, ‘no, you can’t do it that way either, guys really. We mean it, you have to stop discriminating.’
Unfortunately, I think there’s a lot of colleges, especially elite colleges, that are committed to affirmative action and, let’s call it what it is, George- It’s racist, right?
Brauchler: Yeah.
Murray: They are committed to these sorts of race-based admissions and we’ve seen in the past that when folks are committed to that, it takes a while to disabuse them of it. Hopefully this is a big step in that direction.
Listen to Brauchler’s full interview with Murray here. Murray’s comments comparing affirmative action to Jim Crow start at 12:40.
Reached via email after publication, Murray told the Colorado Times Recorder that he is no longer representing the Colorado GOP and that he doesn’t know if the party has hired a new lawyer.
Colorado GOP Chair Dave Williams did not respond to an email inquiry as to whether the party has new legal representation.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified Murray as the lawyer for the Colorado Republican Party. After having the state GOP as a client since 2015, Murray stopped representing it sometime after March 20 of this year. The Colorado Times Recorder regrets the error.
