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.

Robert Samuel Smith is an assistant professor in the Africana Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.