Jobs have been crucial to freedom in modern societies based on producing and acquiring property. The famed August 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in its title emphasized the crucial connection in the United States. Exploitation and exclusion of black labor, reaching back to slavery and advancing through Jim Crow segregation and beyond, long stripped blacks of chances to choose their work and compete fairly for jobs. That denial bottomed the discrimination that historically impoverished blacks.

The struggle for workplace equity achieved a landmark in the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Company. The case arose in 1966 when Willie S. Griggs and thirteen other black janitors in north-central North Carolina sued their employer, the Duke Power Company's Dan River plant in Draper. The employees challenged their employer's requiring them to have a high school diploma or specified grade on a general intelligence test to get promoted or transferred. The men complained that Duke essentially denied them opportunities because of their race.

Indisputably, Duke's policy disqualified blacks at a substantially higher rate than whites for any job above menial labor. The legal question at trial was whether Duke's requirements represented bona fide occupational qualifications or discriminatory preferences in employment conditions that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger's opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court found Duke's challenged requirements not “significantly related to successful job performance” and more importantly struck down as illegal “artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification” (401 U.S. 424, 430–31 [1971]).

In contrast to most literature on Griggs extolling its place in developing the legal doctrine of disparate impact, historian Robert Samuel Smith's work aims to develop the prequel, as it were. He seeks to reach back and down to trace the case's long roots and growth from the broad black community's insistent, grassroots campaign for workplace dignity, equity, and opportunity in the Jim Crow South.

In seven chapters revised from his 2002 Bowling Green State University dissertation that Donald G. Nieman directed, Smith weaves the Griggs plaintiffs' personal story into the black community's broader civil rights movement throughout the South and particularly in North Carolina. His interviews with Griggs participants add invaluable oral history on the case, era, and place. He adopts Willie “Lee” Rufus Boyd to illustrate and narrate a vision of indigenous, local working-class blacks persistently pressing with sustaining energy to make law just and meaningful in statutes, in court, and in the workplace.

A longtime labor activist born in rural North Carolina in 1922, Boyd grew from a sharecropping background through the South's World War II transition to industrial labor to lead his fellow janitors to sue Duke in Griggs. Boyd stood, Smith writes, “as one template of the black, southern voices of resistance” (3). He was what Smith describes as a “client-activist” and “organic intellectual,” using Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci's phrase. Boyd was both a foot soldier and local leader in the black South's grassroots civil rights community that, Smith insists, made the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund's courtroom activism possible and successful.

The origin and development of Griggs demonstrate that civil rights-era labor radicalism deserves more attention than it has received on the roadmap of legal activism, Smith argues. Blacks' fight against the encrusted culture of discrimination in the southern workplace deserves attention alongside the commonly highlighted public-school desegregation flowing from the historic 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, he insists.

The policy-shaping courtroom battles that unseated Jim Crow were very much about jobs. Schools were unarguably an important battleground. Yet in Smith's view the workplace was more important. And in the litigation wars, clients were more important than lawyers in his view. Clients were the real people on whom cases rose and fell; they most directly lived the process and results.

Smith's heroic narrative honors the agency of blacks such as Lee Boyd who pushed resolutely for equal employment opportunity in the South's emerging industrial workplace. While zealously advocating his corrective approach, however, Smith overreaches at times. His snippets of Title VII's legislative history fail to bear the weight of his argument that southern black workplace activism significantly engineered the provisions through congressional debates. Nor does he supply sufficient support that black workplace activism furnished the substance to shore up what he describes as structural deficiencies in the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He might also have considered the broader context of action by blacks and others beyond the South, as exhibited for example in Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008).