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0 pointsErrantX15y ago0 comments

Patricks summary was just the basics of the case. The background is that Duke Power originally segregated employees, only employing African-Americans in the labor sector. Then the civil rights laws came in and they introduced requirements, including an IQ test, that didn't violate the laws, but had the same effect.

''Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?''

Simple answer is no, they didn't.

The court basically found that because African-Americans had suffered a lower standard of education (their wording: ''Because they are Negroes, petitioners have long received inferior education in segregated schools, and this Court expressly recognized these differences in Gaston County v. United States, 395 U.S. 285 (1969)'') and that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation.

More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. (it's an interesting case)

Whether that would be the same now, I don't know. On the other hand I could completely believe that companies are still worried by it, and so avoid IQ tests etc.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

gjm1115y ago· 2 in thread

[I attempted to reply to this, got a weird error code from HN, tried again, saw two copies of my reply both marked as "dead", and am now very confused. I'm trying again in different words in case there's some dupe-checker thing at work.]

> The court basically found [...] that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation.

No, not quite. The WP article (which incidentally I couldn't get at with your URL, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v_Duke_Power_Co worked) quotes the judgement as saying that they didn't question the company's motive, but that its policies were illegally discriminatory regardless of motive.

ErrantXOP15y ago

Yeh you are right on both points (HN mungs the period on the end of the URL... grr).

The WP article was a bit of a mess so I've been rewriting/sourcing it - and, yes, the court carefully states that it didn't believe it was deliberate discrimination. That part of my comment was incorrect. :)

btilly15y ago

Useless trick. If you want to include the period at the end of the URL, you just have to put another punctuation mark following the URL. Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co., or (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.. (I figured this out from reading the source code after getting tripped up by wrong URLs when the URL finished the sentence in a parenthetical comment. I can't promise that it won't break at some point.)

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