Earth’s radiation budget We have learned about the gre

Earth’s radiation budget
We have learned about the greenhouse effect. Now, with the
greenhouse
effect in mind, lets dive a little deeper and see what is
happening in the
atmosphere.
The Structure of the Atmosphere
Temperature
varia3ons define the
atmosphere�s four
principal layers:
the troposphere,
stratosphere,
mesosphere, and
exosphere.
The ozone layer is
within the
stratosphere.
This picture represents the temperature profile of the
atmosphere. As you will recall
from Week 2’s lecture, most gas molecules are within the lower

atmosphere,
specifically, the troposphere. Within the troposphere,
temperatures decrease with
increases in altitude. This is because incoming solar energy is
absorbed by the Earth, a
blackbody, and back radiation from the Earth heats up the
atmosphere (Gas molecules
in the atmosphere can be blackbodies, however, they are not as
effective at absorbing
and maintaining heat as the solid Earth). Thus, temperature
vertically decreases as
you move away from the heat source (the Earth).
Interestingly, there is an inversion within the stratosphere.
Temperature increases
when you go higher in altitude. This makes stratosphere a very
stable environment.
Warmer, therefore less dense, air sits on top of colder, therefore
denser, air. With this,
the atmosphere in the stratosphere is very difficult to disturbed
(thus stratified). This is
mainly because of the ozone layer, a layer that contains a
relatively high concentration
of ozone, that exists within the stratosphere. As you learned in

�Geograph110_6_Greenhouse Effect III�, ozone in the
stratosphere absorbs mainly
incoming shortwave energy. This is good for us because the
ozone layer blocks ultra
violet light and other shortwave energy that are harmful to
living organisms. This
absorbed incoming energy keeps the stratosphere warmer with
increases in altitude.
The Atmosphere Screens Earth from Harmful Solar Radiation
Shorter wavelength
gamma and X-ray
radiation and large
amounts of infrared
radiation are
completely absorbed
by the atmosphere.
The ozone layer
absorbs the most
harmful ultraviolet
wavelengths. Only
radio waves, visible
light, and some
ultraviolet radiation
reach Earth�s surface

relatively unimpeded.
Portion of the electromagnetic spectrum
A schematic image showing incoming and outgoing radiation
and their interference
within the atmosphere. Purple bars represent incoming
shortwave energy and red
bars are outgoing longwave energy. As you can see, the
majority of shorter
wavelength energy is absorbed within the atmosphere and never
reaches the
surface. Also, part of the outgoing back radiation is absorbed in
the atmosphere
due to greenhouse gases.
Solar Radiation
Infrared radiation: Wavelengths longer than 780 nm.
Quickly absorbed and converted to heat in the upper few meters
of a body of
water.
Ultraviolet radiation: (< 380 nm)
Forms only a small fraction of total radiation.
Usually rapidly scattered and absorbed, except in the clearest
body of water.
Visible spectrum :(400-700nm)
� Penetrates deeper into the sea.

ParJcularly important for
animals with vision.
� Approx. the same wavelength
as used by plants for
photosynthesis, so oLen called
photosyntheJcally acJve
radiaJon (PAR).
Absorption
Spectra of
Greenhouse Gases
The shapes of the
blackbody
spectra of Earth
and the sun
Percentage of
radiation
absorbed through
the atmosphere
Here is a re-cap of what we leaned:

• The radiation emitted by a blackbody has a characteristic
wavelength
distribution that depends on the body’s absolute temperature
(the Earth’s
blackbody radiation = infrared wavelength).
• “Percentage of radiation absorbed through the atmosphere”,
absorption of
100 % means that no radiation penetrates the atmosphere. CO2,
O3, N2O,
CH4, H2O are the media that absorb associated wavelength
energy – and we
now know that these media are called greenhouse gases!
Outgoing spectrum of the Earth
with an atmosphere
This figure shows the Blackbody spectrum for objects with
temperatures
ranging from 300 K (surface temperature) on a hot summer day,
down to 220
K, about the coldest it gets in the atmosphere, up near the
troposphere at
about 10-km altitude. The jagged-looking curve (denoted as
“Atmosphere”) is
a model-generated spectrum of infrared light escaping to space
from the top
of the atmosphere. This is jagged-looking, because CO2, water
vapor, ozone,

and methane absorb specific wavelengths of outgoing energy
emitted from
the ground.
MODTRAN MODEL
Please visit the following interactive Modtran Model site,
developed by David Archer
of Chicago University to explore the Earth’s outgoing spectrum.
hGp://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/
http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/
So what would the Earth’s surface
temperature look like from space if
the Earth had no atmosphere?
Outgoing spectrum of the Earth
With an atmosphere
270 K
Without an atmosphere, more energy will be radiated due to an
absence of
the greenhouse effect. In fact, the outgoing spectrum will look
like a
blackbody spectrum at 270 K (= -3 C�, 26.6 F), between the

260 K and 280 K
spectra shown in this figure.
Greenhouse Effect
What is the hottest planet in the solar system?
H2, He, O2
CO2, N2, H2O, SO2
The ho&est planet in the solar system?
Mercury – closest to the Sun – is not the ho&est. Very thin
atmosphere composed of
H2, He, O2 - no greenhouse gases. The temperature is 426C
during the day, -173C in
the shadow.
The atmosphere of Venus is very thick. It is composed of CO2
gas (96%), with some
nitrogen (3%) and a very small amount of water vapor
(0.003%). Venus also has a
thick layer of sulfuric acid clouds. Although Venus is much
further away from the
Sun, due its thick atmosphere made up of greenhouse gases,
Venus remains the
same temperature no ma&er where you go on the plant; at the
North Pole, day or
night: 461C
Mercury is hot, but Venus is ho&er (greenhouse effect)!

A greenhouse gas is classified as any gas that:
A. traps visible rays and thereby promotes
global warming.
B. traps gamma rays and thereby reduces global
warming.
C. traps infrared rays and thereby promotes
global warming.
D. traps infrared rays and thereby reduces
global warming.
Answer is C!
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas,
Volume 11, Issue 3
DOI 10.1215/15476715-2687682 © 2014 by Labor and
Working-Class History Association
19
The Civil Rights Act of 1964:
The Difference a Law Can Make
Nancy MacLean

What difference can a reform make? That’s a timely question in
the United States
today. Many previous victories of progressive social movements
now face mortal threat
from determined opponents, among them the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 and the
right of workers to organize collectively, to select just two. The
fiftieth anniversary of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 offers historians an opportunity to
remind the public of
how a legislative milestone, even one containing many
compromises, improved the
quality of life for millions of ordinary Americans and ennobled
our culture. Rather
than minimize the significance of the law, as some are wont to
do, scholars should
highlight the vast advances it enabled — while also drawing
attention to the obstacles
that kept it from achieving its full promise.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the premier legislative
victories of
American social movements; it also illuminates how a historic
reform can advance
activism and alter movement strategy. The product of long
struggle by African
Americans and progressive white allies, particularly Jewish
activists, the bill addressed
many areas of public life. It sought to end segregation and
discrimination in are-
nas including workplaces, courts, polls, government agencies,
municipal facilities,
schools, and public accommodations such as restaurants, motels,
and transportation.
The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decisions
had no bite, for exam-

ple, until the civil rights act added teeth. Its Title VI, w hich
enabled the withdrawal
of federal funds from districts that continued to discriminate,
sparked the first school
desegregation efforts that went beyond tokenism.
But the section of the act that prohibited discrimination on the
job — Title
VII — had the most far-reaching and enduring impact. Civil
rights activists had made
fair employment legislation their top legislative priority for two
decades after Con-
gress, cowed by an alliance of southern segregationists and
northern business interests,
failed to continue the World War II Fair Employment Practices
Committee won by
labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington
movement. The combined
power of these potent enemies of labor rights and racial reform
defeated dozens of
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postwar efforts to prevent employment discrimination and made
Title VII the most
hotly contested element of this hard-won act. It passed only
after a historic 534-hour
filibuster.
Today few remember what a radical achievement this was.
Indeed, without
Lyndon Johnson’s singular legislative genius, it would not have
passed. The act ele-
vated human rights above property rights in America for the
first time since eman-
cipation ended slavery without compensation to those who
owned and traded men,
women, and children. Property rights had trumped all other
claims from the defeat
of Reconstruction through the New Deal, owing to the Supreme
Court’s interpre-
tation of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporate
personhood rather than
actual African American persons. Where discrimination was
concerned, property
owners continued to reign all powerful in national law until
1964. Corporations and
other employers were free to refuse to consider African
Americans, Jews, Latinos,
Asian Americans, and women of all backgrounds for any or all
jobs.
The extent of the change can be gauged by the vitriol of the
act’s opponents.
The southern segregationists and right-wing business interests
who were joining
together in the nascent conservative movement fought hard to
defend, as some put it,
“the precious right to discriminate.” They were losing a power

they had long taken
for granted as vouchsafed to them by the “original intent” of the
Constitution. Out-
raged, many came together in a quest to take over the party of
Lincoln and remake
it in their image. In the wake of the passage of the civil rights
act, they rallied to the
1964 presidential candidacy of Arizona Republican US Senator
Barry Goldwater,
the anti-union, free-market apostle who said in explanation of
his vote against the
legislation, “Our right of property is perhaps our most sacred
right.”1
Much to the horror of such opponents, the civil rights act
heralded a new
America. The federal government now affirmed a commitment
to end discrimi-
nation and provided tools for aggrieved citizens to secure equal
opportunity. They
could file complaints with the new Equal Employment
Opportunities Commission
(EEOC) and sue employers for violating their right to fair
treatment. The movement
organizations that fought for the reform’s passage helped them
to do so. The legend-
ary labor secretary of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored Peo-
ple (NAACP), Herbert Hill, reminded the organization’s
branches that “Title VII is
not self-enforcing,” as he traveled the country to teach black
workers about this new
resource and how they could use it to fight discrimination.
Public officials were wholly unprepared for the number of
complaints workers

filed: some nine thousand in the EEOC’s first year, which
climbed to seventy-seven
thousand by 1975. “It was difficult to do anything before the
Civil Rights Bill was
passed,” explained a North Carolina worker; “there wasn’t
anything to do, you were
scared to talk.” But with it, he and other workers filed not just
complaints but ulti-
1. For a fuller account of all the processes described here and
the sources for quotations in the text, see
Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the
American Work place (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2006).
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mately class-action lawsuits — another new departure from the
old legal regime,
which empowered collective action in the courts as never
before. Between 1965 and
1971, more than twelve hundred such lawsuits were filed
against what one attorney
called “labor apartheid.” When they won costly back-pay
settlements, corporations
began adopting more proactive efforts at inclusion. The new
climate created by pas-
sage of the act also gave a boost to the decades-old effort to end

discrimination by fed-
eral contractors, which led to potent and effective affirmative
action remedies. These
combined measures enabled black workers to gain access to
once-closed employment
and promotion as never before, even in some industries as
recalcitrant as southern
textiles, long lily-white.
As it enabled victims of racial and religious discrimination to
challenge
wrongdoing, Title VII of the act also empowered American
women as nothing had
since 1920, when they won the right to vote after more than
seventy years of strug-
gle. Contemporary women activists were most focused on
workplace matters, and
Title VII provided them with an unprecedented lever for change.
They used it with
an alacrity and ingenuity that took all observers by surprise.
The prospect of equal
employment — and the EEOC’s initial reluctance to act on sex
discrimination — gave
rise in 1966 to the largest and most lasting organization of the
new women’s move-
ment, the National Organization for Women (NOW). Over the
next few years
its members lobbied government, sued in court, and organized
at the grass roots
throughout the country to win fair treatment for women in every
line of work from
the skilled trades to the professions. They pried open door after
door long slammed
in women’s faces — among them, tenured faculty positions in
the nation’s colleges and
universities. Led by African American visionaries such as Pauli

Murray and Eleanor
Holmes Norton, feminists increasingly allied with civil rights
groups in legal coali-
tions to end racial and gender discrimination. They also
broadened understanding
of the nature of discrimination, as evidenced by the Supreme
Court’s recognition of
sexual harassment as illegal employment discrimination in
1985.
The civil rights act also encouraged Mexican American activis ts
to rethink
their strategies of empowerment. “Whether Mexicans are whites
or people of color,”
the veteran activist Bert Corona observed near the time of its
passage, “has been a
thorny issue for years.” The issue was above all a political one:
whether to form coa-
litions with African Americans, in particular, on the basis of
nonwhite identity or
pursue advancement through assimilation and respectability, as
white immigrants
from Europe had. The legal construction of race prior to the
Civil Rights Act of 1964
encouraged Mexican Americans to lay claim to whiteness in
order to have any hope
of escaping discrimination. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo had effectively
made Mexicans in US territory “white” by recognizing them as
citizens at a time
when naturalization law made whiteness a prerequisite of
citizenship. As a result, for
more than a century, Mexican Americans’ main line of defense
against being subject
to the same abysmal treatment as African Americans was to
hold the US government

accountable for treating them as “white,” sometimes with
backing from the Mexican
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government. As long as discrimination against minorities was
legal, this leverage was
their only hope of protection. By providing better tools to battle
discrimination, the
1964 act enabled Mexican Americans to pursue a strategy that
was also more likely
to lead to cooperation with other minorities. Changing the legal
ground on which
Mexican American and African American political activists
encountered one another
created new possibilities for national and local alliances to
advance progressive poli-
tics more generally.
These wide-ranging efforts, in turn, enabled others. The rights
struggles of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ)
Americans and of peo-

ple with disabilities built on the groundwork laid by the civil
rights act, as activists
in these causes emulated the arguments and tactics of African
Americans, Mexican
Americans, and women of all groups. The passage of the 1990
Americans with Dis-
abilities Act, the opening of the military to lesbians and gay
men, and the prospect of
marriage equality all would have been unthinkable without the
passage of the civil
rights act and the transformation in culture it expressed and
furthered.
It is a truism among political scientists and legal scholars that
reforms have
about a fifteen-year window to do their work before their
opponents find ways to
circumvent them. That was true — with uncanny precision — of
the civil rights act.
Advocates of equal employment made significant headway right
through the 1970s,
when both racial and sex segregation on the job broke down as
never before, but
the effort ground to a crawl after the election of Ronald Reagan
to the presidency in
1980. Reagan was a movement conservative who first came to
national attention for
the powerful 1964 speech he gave in support of Barry
Goldwater, the only Republi-
can senator to have voted against the civil rights act and the
spokesman for the effort
to drive moderates from the GOP. Once in office Reagan’s
people set about systemat-
ically undermining the fight against discrimination, from
underfunding the agencies
charged with ending it, to appointing leaders hostile to their

missions, to backing and
even soliciting “reverse discrimination” lawsuits designed to
roll back previous legal
victories. After 1980, nearly all studies find a cessation of black
advances in particular.
The tougher atmosphere for equal employment advocates after
1980 was
not simply due to conservative opposition, even as that should
never be understated
because it was continuous and increasingly powerful over time.
One challenge was
that Title VII’s supports and companion measures weakened
gravely over the years.
The law was never envisioned as a panacea; most activists saw
it as part of a larger
toolkit to create greater fairness in American life. The labor
movement, the nation’s
prime force for economic justice, was at its peak strength during
the fight for the civil
rights act, in which it played an indispensable role. Since then,
however, its members
have seen their power chipped away by economic change, fierce
employer opposition,
weak leadership, waning liberal commitment to trade unions,
and the effective loss
of the right to strike. The mass membership advocacy groups
that helped win and
enforce the act in its first decade — preeminently the NAACP,
the American Jew-
ish Committee, and NOW — are also weaker and less attentive
to workplace and

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working- class issues.2 So, too, are the liberal religious bodies
that proved so pivotal in
lobbying for the civil rights act and helping to create a far -
reaching values-based con-
sensus against discrimination.3
The economy itself was also a big challenge: after the mid-
1970s, it altered in
ways that were only barely visible in 1964. Then, manufacturing
still dominated the
economy. In unionized sectors such as auto, steel, and
meatpacking, workers with
a high school education or less might find jobs that paid living
wages and provided
health care and pensions. Some activists, particularly labor
activists, understood in the
1960s the threat that “automation” posed to the unskilled;
leaders such as A. Philip
Randolph enlisted it in their case for the complementary remedy
of full-employment
legislation. However, no one could foresee how radically the
prospects for all workers
have worsened as corporations shifted production overseas and
the low-wage service
industry has come to generate most new job openings. So, too,
contingent work has
spread, as employers have shirked the kinds of defined-benefit
pensions and health-
care commitments that were common in the civil rights era. The

race to the bot-
tom in private employment, in turn, is affecting the public
sector, long the beacon of
black advance, as politicians decry the “advantages”
government workers now have,
by default, and seek to cut their jobs and benefits.
These changes in political economy — economic restructuring
in a context
of weakening working-class power and conservative
ascendency— confront today’s
activists with trials more daunting than those of fifty years ago.
America’s surging
inequality, unmatched in the industrialized world, is surely the
biggest issue. How to
make work pay and create more economic security for all? How
to address the large
numbers exiled from a shrinking labor force and consigned, in
effect, to incarcera-
tion? How to provide young people from impoverished
communities with the quality
of education they need for today’s world? How to reduce the
stranglehold the wealth-
iest 1 percent now have on our democracy, a grip that has
rendered it dysfunctional?
The answers are not obvious, given the balance of class power
in American life today.
So, in the end, how should we assess Title VII and the larger
Civil Rights Act
of 1964? Some observers will point to how the legislation fell
short: the limitations
put in to win passage; the groups to whom it offered no
protection, such as domes-
tic workers, those in small workplaces, and undocumented
workers; its incomplete

fulfillment of its core promise of an end to discrimination; its
weakening applica-
tion over time; and its incapacity to address today’s most
profound political-economic
challenges.
This is where a historical perspective has so much to contribute,
because all
of this can be true enough — and yet, the overall achievement
still formidable. Those
2. See, for example, Dara Strolovitch, Affirmative Advocacy:
Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group
Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
3. See James Findlay, Church People in the Struggle: The
National Council of Churches and the Black
Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), and Robert Wuthnow, The
Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998).
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who designed the US Constitution put powerful roadblocks in
the way of significant
reform that might challenge property rights, among them states’
rights and the over-
representation of rural interests in the Senate and the Electoral
College. Politicians
later added still more obstacles, such as the filibuster and
seniority as a basis for com-
mittee chairmanships. Recall, too, that the Civil Rights Act of
1964 passed before the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended the racial dictatorship that
passed for democracy in
the states of the former Confederacy.
Given all this, the audacity and accomplishment of the activists
who won this
landmark law and enhanced its capacity through their creative
application of it are
what stand out the most to me. They opened the nation’s
workplaces to all as never
before. In the process, they created a national consensus that
employment discrimi-
nation is wrong — a consensus now so powerful that even the
most right-wing aspi-
rants for office dare not openly advocate it as so many did,
routinely, fifty years ago.
However much remains to be done, those are transformations to
be savored. In this
era of pervasive cynicism, citizens need to know what a
difference a hard-won reform
can make.

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Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas,
Volume 11, Issue 3
DOI 10.1215/15476715-2687664 © 2014 by Labor and
Working-Class History Association
37
Title VII in Economic-Historical Perspective
Gavin Wright
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 fully deserves its status as a
watershed achievement
in American political and social history, and Title VII merits
full marks as a land-
mark in national economic history. Enforcement of Title VII
generated major eco-
nomic gains for African Americans, advances that for the most
part have been sus-
tained over time. In drawing lessons from this historical record,
however, it must be
recognized that the successes reflected a specific set of channels
in a particular his-
torical context. The primary driving forces were grass-roots
mobilization for racial
justice and pressure from all three branches of the federal
government. Most of the
gains were realized in the South, reflecting the low starting
point in that region’s
transition from decades of Jim Crow segregation as well as the

organizational cohe-
sion descended from the civil rights movement. It is far from
clear that the same or
similar approaches can be effective in confronting racial and
class inequalities in the
twenty-first century.
The role of political mobilization was important from the
beginning. Early
drafts of the Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill did not
even include a fair
employment section, perhaps because the issue was already
being addressed by the
President’s Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity
(overseeing compliance
by federal contractors under John F. Kennedy’s 1961 executive
order) and by voluntary
efforts under the Plans for Progress program launched in the
same year. This omis-
sion was reversed in response to vigorous lobbying by several
groups allied in the civil
rights coalition. These advocates well understood that progress
under existing pro-
grams was painfully slow at best. Although the resulting act
prohibited employment
discrimination on the basis of race or color (as well as religion,
sex, and national ori-
gin), many contemporary observers expected little of
significance from Title VII. Not
only did the text contain glaring loopholes (such as protection
for “bona fide” seniority
or merit systems), but the newly created Equal Employment
Opportunity Commis-
sion (EEOC) had limited powers of enforcement. Because the
EEOC could neither
issue “cease-and-desist” orders nor initiate lawsuits, it was

described by discrimination
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expert Michael Sovern in 1966 as a “poor, enfeebled thing . . .
[with] the power to con-
ciliate but not to compel.”1
Nonetheless, passage of Title VII had a galvanizing effect on
black job seek-
ers. Emboldened by a sense of legal standing (as well as
strength in numbers), black
men and women began to apply for jobs in the southern textiles
industry from which
they had long been excluded. The EEOC actively encouraged
this assertiveness.
Although textile firms initially resisted and dragged their feet,
within a few years
they came to see the advantages of an expanded labor supply.
The New York Times
reported in 1969: “Virtually all of the large [textile] companies
have begun to preach
a doctrine of equal, color-blind employment.”2

Outside of textiles, progress was slower and more litigious, as
workers invoked
Title VII to challenge segregated “lines of progression.” In the
higher paying paper
industry, many applications for job transfers were filed almost
immediately after the
act came into effect on July 2, 1965. When the transfers were
not approved, workers
sued, supported by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) Legal Defense Fund. In a landmark 1968 case, the US
Justice Department
sued Crown-Zellerbach, a major paper employer based in
Bogalusa, Louisiana, along
with its leading union. The outcome was a court determination
that even a super-
ficially neutral seniority system could be illegal if it hindered
rectification of long-
standing barriers to black advancement opportunities. This
decision led in turn to the
Jackson Memorandum of 1968, negotiated by the Office of
Federal Contract Compli-
ance, in which International Paper and its southern unions
accepted the principle that
blacks could advance to their “rightful place” on the
companywide seniority ladder.3
Another landmark decision was Griggs v. Duke Power (1971),
which estab-
lished the “disparate impact” test for discrimination in
promotion criteria. On March
1, 1966, fourteen janitors from the all-black Labor Department
at Duke Power’s Dan
River plant signed a letter of complaint about the absence of
promotion opportuni-

ties. The letter requested “promotion [for janitors] when
vacancies occur” into any of
four specified job classifications. The instigator, a former
tobacco sharecropper named
Willie Boyd, had been active in the NAACP for years and
closely followed passage
of Title VII. The company informed the men that standards were
being raised and
that they were welcome to take the test required for promotion.
The group then for-
warded their complaint to the EEOC, which tried to resolve the
matter through con-
ciliation. When this effort also proved fruitless, the workers
turned to the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund, which assisted them in filing suit on
September 9, 1966. After
setbacks in appeals courts, the Supreme Court ruled
unanimously — five years after
the initial complaint — that tests having a disparate impact on
minorities could be
1. Timothy J. Minchin and John A. Salmond, After the Dream:
Black and White Southerners since 1965
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 75.
2. Roy Reed, “Industry in South Was Negro Labor,” New York
Times, May 19, 1969.
3. Timothy J. Minchin, The Color of Work: The Struggle for
Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry,
1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2001).

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invalid regardless of intent, unless shown to be demonstrable
measures of job perfor-
mance. As a result of the decision, the high school graduates in
Duke’s Labor Depart-
ment were promoted, and education and testing requirements
were waived for the
others. Willie Boyd ultimately became the first black supervisor
over white men at
the Dan River plant.4
More fundamentally, Griggs and related rulings gave new
credibility to EEOC
guidelines and impelled a much more thoroughgoing change
than firms had antici-
pated. Veteran labor lawyer and legal scholar Alfred W.
Blumrosen writes: “Griggs
infused Title VII with extraordinary power. . . . Without
Griggs, the statute might
have warranted little more than a text note in law case courts.”
Citations to the case in
federal courts rose steadily through the 1970s, reaching a peak
in 1980 before declin-
ing in the next decade. The Griggs principle went well beyond
what could have been
predicted in 1964, but as Blumrosen concludes: “There was no
‘plain meaning’ to
Title VII.”5 It acquired specific meaning only through the
ongoing efforts of work-
ers, activists, and lawyers, supported by the courts. Congress

added to the impact by
passing the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, finally
giving litigation
power to the EEOC and extending Title VII coverage to state
and local governments.
Did this extended struggle to make Title VII operational have
any signifi-
cant effect in the real world? Emphatically yes. Figure 1
displays the black share of
white-collar and blue-collar occupations by region, as compiled
from EEO-1 reports
from large employers. The picture clearly shows a sharp upward
surge in black occu-
pational status after 1965, in all regions but especially in the
South. Prior to the act,
black occupational shares were increasing slowly in the North
and West (from 1950
and perhaps earlier, according to US Census Bureau figures) but
stagnant or declin-
ing within the South. Thus the strong positive growth in
southern states after 1965
seems clearly attributable to Title VII.
Most early gains were in southern blue-collar occupations. The
South was a
tempting target for Title VII, because discrimination was
perpetuated there through
explicit segregation systems. Most of these were dismantled
between 1965 and 1980,
with significant benefits for black southerners. James Heckman
and his collaborators
show that relative black income gains during this era were
overwhelmingly southern,
reflecting primarily a shift from “laborer” into higher-paying
“operative” and “crafts-

man” positions.6 Advances were not limited to the South, but
elsewhere progress
slowed to a crawl after 1980, roughly coincident with the
drastic cutbacks in funding
4. Robert Samuel Smith, Labor and Civil Rights: Griggs versus
Duke Power and the Struggle for Equal
Employment Opportunity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2008).
5. Alfred W. Blumrosen, “The Legacy of Griggs: Social
Progress and Subjective Judgments,” Chicago-
Kent Law Review 63 (1987): 1–3; and Modern Law: The Law
Transmission System and Equal Employment
Opportunity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993),
337.
6. Richard J. Butler, James Heckman, and Brook Payner, “The
Impact of the Economy and the State
on the Economic Status of Blacks,” in Markets in History, ed.
David Galenson (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1989); and John J. Donohue III and James
Heckman, “Continuous versus Episodic Change:
The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on the Economic Status of
Blacks,” Journal of Economic Literature 29
(1991): 1603–43.
on 29 March 2018
L A
BO

R 1
1. 3
40
and staffing at the EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract
Compliance Programs
at that time.
What is perhaps most surprising is that growth in the black
share of
white-collar employment continued long after the post-1980
political transition, but
almost exclusively in the South. We do not yet know all of the
reasons for this pattern,
but the list of likely contributing factors includes long-term
gains in black educational
attainment, economic growth in southern cities with large black
populations and
political representation, “networks effects” associated with
historically black southern
communities, and the impact of black representation in
corporate management on
recruitment and retention of new black employees.7 We can say
with more confidence
that these gains were not driven by increasingly forceful
applications of Title VII to
private employers in the South, because, with rare though
important exceptions (such
as Texaco and Coca-Cola), racial employment discrimination
cases sharply declined
relative to other types of employment issues as of the 1980s.8
7. Zoë Cullen and I are currently engaged in a study addressing
this question, drawing on EEOC data.

8. John J. Donohue III and Peter Siegleman, “The Changing
Nature of Employment Litigation,”
Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 983–1083; and “The Evolution
of Employment Discrimination Law in the
1990s,” in Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research,
ed. Laura Beth Nielsen and Robert L. Nelson
(Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer 2005).
Figure 1. Black share of white-collar and blue-collar
occupations, south and elsewhere, 1966–2009.
Source: EEOC EEO-1 reports. Observations for 1966–70 are
taken from the annual EEOC publication
Job Patterns for Minorities and Women in Private Industry.
Blue-collar occupations include both
operative and skilled crafts, excluding laborer and service jobs.
on 29 March 2018
W r i g h t / T i t l e V I I i n E c o n o m i c - H i s t o r i c a
l P e r s p e c t i v e 41
What then are we to make of the legacy and current status of
Title VII in
light of this brief historical survey? The legislation was clearly
prompted by the race
issue, and in this realm, it has been a great success, generating
lasting gains for Afri-
can Americans through major reductions in racial exclusions
and inequities, with few
signs of significant inefficiencies in the process. But even

during the era of its great-
est achievements, and certainly since then, Title VII has been
soaked in paradox: it
prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or color, yet
progress has not come pri-
marily from ignoring race but by taking race systematically into
account. Title VII’s
main accomplishments have occurred in a region where racial
consciousness remains
strong. The uneasy partnership between universalist rhetoric
and race-conscious
mobilization has been historically productive, but it is difficult
to see this same for-
mula as the major vehicle in current and future struggles against
economic inequal-
ity. Racial prejudice and subtler forms of discrimination no
doubt continue, but they
have been overwhelmed by structural changes in the US labor
market that could not
have been foreseen in 1964.
The principles of Title VII are still important and should clearly
be retained.
They were effectively extended to women in the original
legislation and by subse-
quent court ruling to sexual harassment. Later legislation
extended protected status
to age, pregnancy, and disabilities, and we may soon see a
further extension to sexual
orientation. Individuals in all of these categories deserve
protection against discrim-
ination in employment and on the job. But with a majority of
the labor force now
in protected status, Title VII can hardly serve as the basis for
the racial, ethnic, and
gender- based coalition that our times require.

Antidiscrimination laws will not raise
the living standards or life prospects of large numbers of low -
income Americans, as
they did during the civil rights era.
It should not be discouraging to acknowledge that reform
strategies that were
effective in one historical era do not carry over readily to
another time. We can still
look to history for inspiration. In building coalitions across
racial, ethnic, and gen-
der lines, we can hardly do better than to draw upon the
inclusive values of the civil
rights movement.
on 29 March 2018
on 29 March 2018
History 167cb
Capitalism and Class
Instructor: Nelson Lichtenstei n
Five Page Paper Due February 28, 2022

Write a five-page paper seeking to answer the following
questions.
1.To what degree did the emergence of a large union movement
in the middle decades
of the 20th century advance the civil rights and general
economic well-being of
African-Americans and Latina/os during those same decades. To
what extent did these
new unions and the new laws that helped sustain them prove
problematic for the civil
rights movement; and conversely, to what degree did the
emergence of a powerful
“rights consciousness” in the 1960s and afterward diminish the
appeal of trade unionism
and collective bargaining? Consider the nature of the Wagner -
era labor law and also
that of the civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s.
Create an argument and back it up with examples from the
readings and the lectures.
Use more than one source from the various assigned readings.
The paper is due on
Gauchospace at 11 p.m. on February 25. Double space and put
footnotes at the bottom
of the paper.
A successful essay demonstrates an understanding of the
arguments put forward by the
author of the books and essays you have read and chosen to cite.
But avoid long
quotations and instead use example and narrative, mainly in
your own words, to explain
the meaning of the historians or historical figures you have
read. And of course, if you

think the authors or sources disagree on some points, tell us that
as well. Indeed,
understanding such conflicts of interpretation should make for a
very good essay.
Do not use social science notation! Instead use the kind of
footnotes or endnotes that
the author of State of the Union deploys.

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