Background on Phillips v. the Martin Marietta Corp. and Griggs v. the Duke Power's Dan River Steam Station

    ressRelease p iat an a 

December 3, 1970 

BACKGROUND 

Phillips v. the Martin Marietta Corp. 
Griggs v. the Duke Power's Dan River Steam Station 

Attorneys for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 
Inc. (LDF) are preparing for the first Supreme Court tests of 
the 1964 Civil Rights Act's Title VII provision, which forbids 
job discrimination on grounds of race, color, religion, national 
origin or sex. The two Title VII cases, which involve sex dis- 
crimination charges against the Martin Marietta Corporation in 
Jacksonville, Florida and racial discrimination charges against 
the Duke Power's Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, will 
be heard by the high court in early December. 

If these LDF suits succeed, they will give new hope to two 
of the most exploited groups in the labor force -- blacks and 
women -- and will probably lead the way to success in hundreds 
of similar cases against members of the American business community 
whose arbitrary standards of hiring, firing, and promoting 
employees have led to job discrimination. 

Mrs. Ida Phillips' sex discrimination case against the Martin 
Marietta Corporation began in 1966 when she answered that company's 
“help wanted" ad for assembly line workers, knowing she could 
fulfill the only stated requirement -- a high school diploma. 
Mrs. Phillips, a white woman who had six children, was turned down 
for the job because she had preschool youngsters. Distressed by 
her predicament, Mrs. Phillips went to the Equal Employment 
Opportunities Commission, got the right to sue, and has been in 
the courts ever since, while waiting tables. 

In the high court, LDF attorneys will argue that although the 
company's policy prohibits hiring even women whose preschool off- 
springs have a grandmother at home to take care of them or a day 
care center to go to, the company has no rule against employing 
widowers left with the same responsibility to care for young 
children. 

LDF lawyers will further charge that although Title VII allows 
for "bona fide occupational qualifications" to dictate a preference 
for one sex over the other for certain jobs, Martin Marietta did 
not claim any such reason for excluding Mrs. Phillips from its 
assembly lines, nor did the company assert that women with pre- 
school children were any less capable, efficient, trustworthy, or 
otherwise less valuable employees than men with such children. 

If Ida Phillips wins her case, she may well become a significant 
figure in women's liberation, although she probably never had any 
such thoughts. 

NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. | 10 Columbus Circle | New York, N.Y. 10019 | (212) 586-8397 

= President 



Phillips v. Martin Marietta 
Griggs v. Duke Power's Dan River Steam Station -2- 

A few statistics reveal the implications of her challenge. 
While 29% of the mothers of preschool children work, the majority 
of these are nonwhites who work out of need, rather than choice. 
Ida Phillips is making a fight for the equal rights of all women, 
but it is minority women who have the most to gain from her claim. 

In the second test case, Willie S. Griggs, a black man:who 
works as a power company laborer, is charging racial discrimination 
against his employer, the Duke Power's Dan River Steam Station. His 
complaint attacks testing and formal educational requirements at 
Duke where their effect is to disqualify a disproportionate number 
of blacks from jobs or promotions, and where these requirements 
have no demonstrable relationship to the skills needed to perform 
the job. 

LDF lawyers hope to show that these testing and educational 
requirements kept Griggs pinned at the lowest level in his 
company, where, after seven years of employment and earning top 
pay in his company's traditionally black Labor Department, he was 
still making less than the minimum any white employee took home. 

Duke, which generates and sells electricity, is a company that 
Maintained separate drinking, toilet, and locker facilities labelled 
“white" and "colored" until a few years ago. 

Not until a year after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act 
did the first black man escape from the Labor Department to a 
position one peg above in the Coal Handling Department. That 
man had 13 years' seniority and a high school education. Almost 
immediately afterward, the company laid down additional requirements 
for transferring a step up from the black Labor Department: either 
you had to have a high school diploma, management said, or achieve 
a specific score on one of two (highly abstract) intelligence 
tests -- the "Wonderlic" or the "Bennett." 

A lower court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth 
Circuit have already ruled that the policy placed an unfair 
burden on Duke's long-tenured black employees, since tenured white 
workers had been permitted for years to transfer throughout the 
plant without passing tests or having a high school diploma. 

Now, LDF lawyers hope the Supreme Court will find that the 
kinds of tests and educational requirements Duke adopted violate 
Title VII because they (1) exclude blacks disproportionately and 
(2) have nothing to do with the ability to do the job in question. 

Underlying this challenge to the discriminatory policies of 
Duke, are the conditions under which most blacks get their education 
in the South, which make it less likely for black people than for 
whites to be able to satisfy such testing and schooling requirements. 

Statistics point to the fact that only a third as many black 
men as whites graduate from high school in North Carolina. Segregated, 
inferior education serves to remove a great deal of the inclination 
to learn. Add to that the evidence that formal education often does 
little to improve a black man's chances in the South, and the common 
need to bring some money into a poor household at an early age, and 
the high rate of early dropoutism there becomes easy to understand. 
That was even more true in Griggs' school days than now. 

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