In 1954, 20 year old George Frederickson traveled by ship to South Africa as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Brown v. Board of Education had just been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. It was meant to signal the end of legalized racial segregation in schools of the United States, overruling the “separate but equal” principle set forth in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case.
George entered South Africa six years after the 1948 start of institutionalized racial segregation in that country, called Apartheid. As we all know, the purpose of Apartheid was to ensure that South Africa was controlled politically, socially, and economically by the nation's dominant minority white population. White citizens had the highest status under Apartheid followed by the legislatively designated classifications of Indians, Colored and then Black Africans.
The first apartheid law was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949, followed closely by the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950, which made it illegal for most South African citizens to marry across racial lines. The Population Registration Act, 1950 classified all South Africans into one of the four racial groups I just mentioned. Places of residence were determined by racial classification.
And we all know that it got worse—terribly worse—from there, with 3.5 million Black Africans removed from their homes and forced into segregated neighborhoods as a result of apartheid legislation that extended all the way to 1983. While Apartheid officially ended in the 1990s, the social effects and economic legacy of apartheid continue to the present day, particularly that of inequality.
Working in South Africa for two years was George Frederickson's introduction to inequality and the concept of social equity. This was a pivotal formative lens through which he now saw life.
Fast forward 11 years: in 1967 George, now armed with a PhD in public administration from USC, joined others in organizing an “Unconvention” in part to protest the American Society for Public Administration's conference that failed to address race relations, the Vietnam war, riots, student sit-ins on campus and rampant inequality. The Unconvention had more participants than the ASPA conference that year.
It is an understatement to say that there was a general sense that the field of public administration was out of touch with the issues of the day.
Directly after this, Syracuse University professor Dwight Waldo met with George and others to organize the first Minnowbrook Conference. The gathering was intended as an opportunity to take stock of where the field of public administration was, where it was going and where it needed to go. Two-thirds of the participants were academics and one-third were practitioners. All were under the age of 35. There were no women and there was one person of color in attendance.
In writing the summary for the book that came from the Minnowbrook conference, George seized on the term social equity to summarize the sentiments participants {and nonparticipants} expressed about inequality, unfairness, discrimination, poverty and injustice. As George's wife Mary wrote in her biography of George, “This idea came to him not from the papers that were written and then published in the book, it came to him from the tone of the conference itself.”
The book containing the papers was called Toward a New Public Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective, and was published in 1971. This marked the beginning of the New Public Administration — a pivotal movement in our field.
In 1997, George published a new book, The Spirit of Public Administration, where he wrote “The task of public administration is to efficiently, economically, and equitably organize and manage the full range of public (governmental, quasi-governmental, and nongovernmental) institutions.” With this writing, George popularized the idea that there are three pillars of public administration, with equity being just as important as efficiency and economy.