Opinion: 401 U.S. 424 (1971)

HOLDING:  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from basing their hiring decisions on requirements or tests that are not a reasonable measure of job capability and that disproportionately disqualify persons based on classifications such as race.  

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted to dismantle racial discrimination and segregation in the United States and went into effect in July 1965.  Before the effective date of the Act, Duke Power Company openly discriminated based on race in the hiring and assigning of employees at its Dan River power plant.  In 1965, the Company abandoned its policy of restricting black employees to the Labor department but continued to require a high school education to work in the other four departments.  The Company also implemented the additional requirement of satisfactory scores on two professionally prepared aptitude tests.  Current employees could qualify for transfer to the other departments if they had a high school diploma or passed two general intelligence tests.  

A group of black employees argued that these requirements disproportionately affected black applicants and were prohibited under the Act.  They contended that these requirements were unrelated to measuring job capability because white employees hired before the high school diploma requirement continued to perform satisfactorily in the other departments and because the new requirements did not have a demonstrable relationship to successful job performance.  

The District Court found as a fact that Duke Power had no racial purpose or invidious intent in the adoption of the employment requirements and that they were applied fairly to all races.  The Supreme Court reversed, concluding that there was no evidence either requirement was significantly related to successful job performance and both operated to disqualify black applicants at a substantially higher rate than white applicants.  The Court held that the Act “proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. . . . If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.”

President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, July 2, 1964 (source: http://photolab.lbjlib.utexas.edu/detail.asp?id=18031)