The Alabama legislature—without
a single black vote in favor— passed a law striking down the city’s wage law.
That is curious for Republicans.
Local control is their core principle.
The National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) was struck by this counter-intuitive state law. They
thought it was motivated by a desire to keep blacks poor and marginalized. So,
the group sued, claiming the state law was racially discriminatory.
The federal district court judge
threw the lawsuit out of court. He said the group would need to show “the
clearest proof” that the 2016 state law was passed with a discriminatory
purpose.
If that sounds like an impossible
standard to meet, your thought is shared by a panel of federal appeals judges.
On a 3-0 vote, they reversed the trial court, citing the state's “deep and
troubled history of racial discrimination.”
The evidence showed that Birmingham’s
law would have given 37 percent of its black wage workers a raise, compared to
27 percent of white workers. Currently, black workers in the city make $1.41
less per hour on average than their white counterparts.
Given those numbers, the appellate
court reasoned that the state law striking down the higher minimum wage bears
more heavily on blacks than whites.
Going further, the court wrote: “Today,
racism ... hides, abashed, cloaked beneath ostensibly neutral laws and
legitimate bases, steering government power toward no less invidious ends.”
The case is Lewis v. Governor of
Alabama, 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 17-11009.
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