| In 1966, thirteen black employees of the Duke Power Company's
Dan River Plant in Draper, North Carolina, filed a lawsuit against
the company challenging the requirement of a high school diploma
or a passing grade on an intelligence test for internal transfer
or promotion. In the groundbreaking decision Griggs v. Duke
Power (1971), the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor
of the plaintiffs, finding such employment practices in violation
of Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when they disparately
affected minorities, and in doing so delivered a significant
anti-employment discrimination verdict. Legal scholars rank
Griggs v. Duke Power on par with Brown v. Board of
Education (1954) in terms of its importance and impact on
eradicating race discrimination from American institutions.
In Race, Labor, and Civil Rights, Robert Samuel Smith
offers the first full-length historical examination of this
important case and its connection to civil rights activism during
the second half of the 1960s.
Smith explores all aspects of Griggs, highlighting
the sustained energy of the grassroots civil rights community
and the critical importance of courtroom activism. After years
of nonviolent, direct action protests, Smith shows, African
Americans remained vigilant in the 1960s, heading back to
the courts to reinvigorate the civil rights acts in an effort
to remove the lingering institutional bias left from decades
of overt racism. He asserts that alongside the more boisterous
expressions of black radicalism of the late sixties, foot
soldiers and local leaders of the civil rights community—many
of whom were working-class black southerners—mustered ongoing
legal efforts to mold Title 7 into meaningful law. Smith also
highlights the persistent judicial activism of the NAACP-Legal
Defense and Education Fund and the ascension of the second
generation of civil rights attorneys.
By exploring the virtually untold story of Griggs v. Duke
Power, Smith's enlightening study connects the case and
the campaign for equal employment opportunity to the broader
civil rights movement and in doing so reveals the civil rights
community's continued spirit of legal activism well into the
1970s.
Robert Samuel Smith is an assistant professor in
the Africana Studies Department at the University of North
Carolina, Charlotte. |
