Detroit ? On the same day the University of Michigan won a reprieve that will allow it to continue considering race in the fall admissions process, civil rights organizations filed a lawsuit Tuesday aiming to make the reprieve permanent.

At issue is Proposal 2, the anti-affirmative action amendment to Michigan’s Constitution. The amendment takes effect Friday.

Civil rights organizations, including the NAACP’s Detroit chapter and the American Civil Liberties Union, took their case to federal court. They argued the amendment doesn’t apply because of a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case affirming universities’ right to consider race in admissions.

“We have come too far to allow the doors of opportunity to be shut in the face of the American promise of liberty and justice,” Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, said Tuesday at a news conference on the courthouse steps.

But a Washington-based group that has fought against race and gender preferences said the U.S. Supreme Court already decided the issue when it chose not to hear a challenge to California’s Proposition 209, which was passed by voters there in 1996. The California law was the model for Proposal 2.

An appellate panel in that case found that “nobody has a right to a racial preference; a state can decide it doesn’t want them,” said Terence Pell of the Center for Individual Rights.

The same group filed papers Tuesday to appeal Judge David Lawson’s order affirming a deal among the state’s three largest universities – UM, Michigan State University and Wayne State University – and Attorney General Mike Cox. The deal grants the schools a delay until 2007-08 in putting Proposal 2’s mandates in effect for admissions and financial aid.