Helping minority contractors is pretty close to least the federal government can do at this point.
It just so happens that Ta-Nehisi Coats has been spending lots of time on the subject. I recommend his blog to anyone, he is a fantastic writer.
Ta-Nehisi
The gist of his argument is that through statutory and social policies, minorities were given a different deal than whites in this country, housing, education, jobs. I recommend reading all he has written on the subject. This quote really sums it up for me:
One retort that people often make when discussing the history of racism is "We should not dwell on the past." It's an opportunistic claim--no one looks at July 4 and says "We should not dwell on the past." But more to the point, this is not the distant past. The men and women who suffered at the hands of the FHA and the racist aspects of New Deal legislation are very much alive today. Furthermore, their children are alive and the effects of that policy on the country are fairly obvious. We know what we want to know. We believe the ghetto is manifestation of individual will and amorphous culture values because that is what we would prefer to think. It's not so much that we don't want to dwell on the past, so much as we want to choose our past.