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Washington v. Davis | 426 U.S. 229 (1976)
Imagine sitting down to an exam designed to test your professional capabilities, but the first question asks you about the history of the date fruit. This isn’t a trivia question from an episode of Jeopardy, but rather an actual question from an exam once give to police recruits in Washington D.C. The test was known as Test 21. Although the exam was administered uniformly to all recruits, its use of certain cultural language and idioms had a discriminatory effect.
The test disqualified a disproportionately high number of African American applicants. Four times as many African American candidates failed the test than white candidates. The disparate impact resulted in a police department that was eighty percent white, serving a city that was seventy percent black.
In 1970, Davis was rejected by the D.C. police department. Davis brought suit in federal district court, alleging discrimination. Davis argued that the department’s recruiting procedures, specifically Test 21, discriminated against African American applicants by testing irrelevant knowledge more familiar to white people than African American people. This, according to Davis, violated the Equal Protection Clause, as well as the employment discrimination provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The district court held that Davis wasn’t entitled to relief. Although the test produced a discriminatory effect, the court found no evidence of discriminatory intent behind the test. On appeal, the court of appeals reversed. The appeals court held that under Title VII, proof of discriminatory motive wasn’t required. The court also determined that the same standard applied to the constitutional issue, so the lack of discriminatory intent behind Test 21 didn’t bar Davis’s claims.
The appeals court reversed the district court ruling, finding that the test’s disparate impact on African American candidates was enough to establish a constitutional violation. The United States Supreme Court granted the police department’s petition for cert.
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