Willie S. Griggs v. Duke Power Company

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the Civil Rights Act) prohibited racial discrimination in hiring and promoting. Legislative history around an amendment to the Civil Rights Act indicated that senators did not intend a blanket prohibition on employers administering general-intelligence tests if the employer fairly administered such tests. However, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that testing requirements for employment must be job related to satisfy the Civil Rights Act. Prior to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, Duke Power Co. (Duke) (defendant) categorically excluded Black employees from all but one of Duke’s departments: the labor department, in which the highest-paid employee earned less than the lowest-paid employee in any other department. In 1955, Duke began requiring a high-school degree for placement in any department other than labor and for transfer to any of the more desirable departments. Beginning in 1965, the date on which the Civil Rights Act went into effect, Duke added an additional path to promotion out of the labor department: passage of one of two high-school equivalency tests. The tests purportedly measured general intelligence but had no relation to job-performance ability. A number of Black employees (plaintiffs) challenged Duke’s diploma and testing policies under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Six of those employees were hired prior to 1955; four of those employees were hired after 1955. The district court held that Duke’s policies reflected no discriminatory purpose and had been applied equally to Black and White employees.