The Supreme Court has an opportunity to reaffirm or reshape thenation’s civil rights laws as it faces a rare confluence of cases overthe next two weeks, including a high-profile challenge brought by whitefirefighters who claim they lost out on promotions because of the”color of their skin.”
The cases also touch on the Voting Rights Act, the need to provideEnglish classes for immigrant children and, more tangentially,discriminatory mortgage lending.
The most emotionally charged case is from the New Haven, Conn.,firefighters, whose complaints define the real-life quandary thatsometimes accompanies government efforts to ensure racial equality.
The firefighters accuse city officials of violating civil rightslaws and the Constitution by throwing out a promotions test on whichthey performed well but no blacks scored high enough to be eligible.The city responds that relying on test results with such wide racialdiscrepancies could have violated federal law and left them open tobeing sued by minorities.
The court will hear the arguments, along with the others, in the midstof an evolving national conversation about the role of race anddiversity and in the wake of the historic presidential election.
“Each of these cases goes to the ability of our society to achieveopportunity, fairness and ultimately to our ability to be the democracythat we aspire to be,” said John Payton, president and director-counselof the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “We’ve made tremendousprogress as a society, and some of that progress is having in placeanti-discriminatory” laws to ensure it continues.
His organization calls for the court in each case to affirm avigorous role for government in recognizing the need for race-consciousvigilance.
But Edward Blum, a visiting fellow at the American EnterpriseInstitute, envisions a chance for the court to acknowledge the stridesthat the country has made, even if it decides each case narrowly.
The court could “send a signal to government units that race andethnicity should play a smaller and smaller part in their decisions,”Blum said.
He said he thinks the court took the firefighter case “because itwants to make a statement. And of all the cases involving race andethnicity, I think this is the easiest for the court to answer.”
The justices are deeply divided about government policies involvingrace, even if Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has shown no suchambivalence. His view was evident quickly, when in a first-term dissenthe lamented the “sordid business” of dividing individuals by race.
Others on the court seem just as firm, but on both sides of theissue. That often leaves Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, generallyskeptical of race-based policies, as the target for opposing lawyers.
It also means the court’s decisions are often nuanced, narrowed bythe facts of the case and the intricacies of the law at hand, ratherthan laden with the broad pronouncements that often accompany publicand political discussions of race.
“People see Supreme Court decisions as deciding these greatquestions for the country,” said Washington lawyer Virginia A. Seitz,who has defended race-conscious policies before the court. “But lawyerssee it another way, and I think the court sees it another way.”
Still, the case of the firefighters, who have dubbed themselves theNew Haven 20 and even have a Web site and T-shirts, provides the courta particularly human example of what they say is governmentintervention that goes so far to protect minorities that itdiscriminates against whites.
“It’s all hot-button,” Payton acknowledges.
The lead plaintiff, Frank Ricci, is a veteran firefighter who saidin sworn statements that he spent thousands of dollars in preparationand studied for months for the exam. Ricci said he is dyslexic, so hehad tapes made of the test materials and listened to them on hiscommute.
The firefighters’ longtime attorney, Karen Lee Torre, did not allowher clients to talk to reporters — other than for a segment onconservative commentator Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News — but Riccisaid in a sworn statement, “I relied in good faith on the promise thateffort and not race would determine who would be promoted.”