Civil Rights Act of 1991 - Impetus For The Act

Impetus For The Act

Congress had amended Title VII once before, in 1972, when it broadened the coverage of the Act. It was moved to overhaul Title VII in 1991 and to harmonize it with Section 1981 jurisprudence, by a series of Supreme Court decisions:

• Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164 (1989), which held that an employee could not sue for damages caused by racial harassment on the job, because even if the employer's conduct were discriminatory, the employer had not denied the employee the "same right . . . to make and enforce contracts . . . as is enjoyed by white citizens," the language that Congress chose when passing the law in 1866.

• Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, 490 U.S. 642 (1989), which made it more difficult for employees to prove that an employer's personnel practices, neutral on their face, had an unlawful disparate impact on them by requiring that they identify the particular policy or requirement that allegedly produced inequalities in the workplace and show that it, in isolation, had this effect.

• Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (1989), which held that the burden of proof shifted, once an employee had proved that an unlawful consideration had played a part in the employer's personnel decision, to the employer to prove that it would have made the same decision if it had not been motivated by that unlawful factor, but that such proof by the employer would constitute a complete defense for the employer.

• Martin v. Wilks, 490 U.S. 755 (1989), which permitted white firefighters who had not been party to the litigation establishing a consent decree governing hiring and promotion of black firefighters in the Birmingham, Alabama Fire Department to bring suit to challenge the decree.

Each of these decisions proved controversial.

President Bush had vetoed a similar bill the year before. He feared racial quotas would be imposed, but later approved the 1991 version of the bill.