Birmingham's Employment Discrimination War: A Clarion Call for Strict Meritocracy in Government Employment
![handle is hein.journals/airfor38 and id is 201 raw text is: Birmingham's Employment Discrimination
War : A Clarion Call for Strict Meritocracy in
Government Employment
LIEUTENANT COLONEL R. PHILIP DEAVEL, USAF*
Contrary to the allegations of some opponents of this
Title, there is nothing in it that will give any power to any
Commission or to any court to require hiring, firing or
promotion of employees in order to meet a racial quota
or to achieve a certain racial balance. That bugaboo has
been brought up a dozen times; but it is nonexistent. In
fact, the very opposite is true. Title VII prohibits
discrimination. In effect, it says- that race, religion and
national origin are not to be used as a basis for hiring
and firing.
- Senator Hubert H. Humphrey
I. INTRODUCTION
This article reviews a long series of federal court cases dealing with
allegations of discrimination by the city of Birmingham, Alabama, between
1974 and the present. The cases culminate in two decisions issued by separate
panels of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in 1994
-- In Re Birmingham Reverse Discrimination Employment Litigation,2 and
Ensley Branch, N.A.A.C.P. v. Seibels.3 The decisions jointly take the city of
Birmingham to task for having used two civil rights consent decrees entered
into in 1981 as the justification for a personnel system whose overriding
objective was racial balancing of the work force through the use of precisely
defined quotas. The use of racial balancing and the quotas that enforced the
system were found to have created a pattern and practice of discrimination
*Lieutenant Colonel R. Philip Deavel (B.S., Suffolk University; J.D., University of
Mississippi; LL.M. (Labor Law), The George Washington University National Law Center) is
the Chief Civil Law Division, United States Air Force Judge Advocate General School,
Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He is a member of the Mississippi Bar.
1. 110 CONG. REC. 6549 (1964).
2. 20 F.3d 1525 (11th Cir. 1994) [hereinafter BRDEL II].
3. 1994 U.S. App. LEXIS 23275 (1lth Cir. 1994) [hereinafter Ensley II].
Employment Discrimination War - 197](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/airfor38&div=9&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Birmingham's Employment Discrimination War: A Clarion Call for Strict Meritocracy in Government Employment
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