The Story of Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
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Description
I was a graduate student at Cornell University's School oflndustrial and Labor Relations when Griggs v. Duke Power Co. was handed down on March 8, 1971. Griggs has been called aside from Brown v. Board of Education, "the single most influential civil rights case" in the past 40 years. Coming out of the "New Left" movement of the 1960s and chastened by the election of Richard M. Nixon in 1968, we assumed the worst from a Supreme Court whose Chief Justice was a Nixon appointee, Warren E. Burger, formerly a court of appeals judge in Washington, D.C. We knew that the legality of racially segregated schools depended on the distinction between de Jure and de facto discrimination, and we expected the Court to draw a similar line with respect to racially segregated workforces in the Griggs litigation.
Source Publication
Employment Discrimination Stories
Source Editors/Authors
Joel Wm. Friedman
Publication Date
2006
Recommended Citation
Estreicher, Samuel, "The Story of Griggs v. Duke Power Co." (2006). Faculty Chapters. 456.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/456
