This project is a legal history of the U. S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Employment Section, the federal agency which had exclusive litigation authority to prosecute cases involving a pattern or practice of employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from 1964 until 1974, when ELS began to share that authority with the EEOC.  

The ELS was led for decades by Mr. David L. Rose, who began working at DOJ in 1957 and created a civil rights organization of dedicated lawyers who showed just how much “a small group of people with a shared purpose can do” (in the words of Mr. Rose). They worked tirelessly to racially integrate the American workforce, taking on such major industries as steel, trucking, construction, airline, gaming, public utilities, and more. In 1974, with the Congressional transfer of authority to the EEOC over private employers, the ELS shifted focus to public employers (though it continued to share some private employer cases with EEOC). The Section then worked to integrate the nation’s state and local governmental workforces, including major police and fire departments, by race and sex. ELS lawyers began with statewide and urban locations, such as the State of Alabama and the City of Chicago, then “rolled like Sherman” through the nation’s suburbs, including places like Cicero, Illinois. Not only did the Section’s lawyers play a unique leadership role in diversifying the American economy and workforce; they created a transformative body of civil rights law in the process. The DOJ Civil Rights Division, Employment Section lawyers helped craft the concept of disparate impact in early cases, writing the U. S. government’s brief in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., for example; and they breathed life into the idea of a pattern or practice of discrimination through a ground-breaking use of statistical evidence, combined with testimony from individual victims of discrimination relating their real-world experiences and hardships.    

Dave Rose trained inexperienced young lawyers to become great civil rights advocates by pairing them with senior lawyers, who spent countless hours in the field developing the facts in what Assistant Attorney General John Doar (awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama) called the “immersion method.” The law was built from the ground up, based on the facts and the needs of the people—and not the other way around. Working together this way, Section lawyers developed unique expertise in prosecuting and winning these complex cases. As they did so, they also built an extraordinary sense of camaraderie that left a lasting mark on the lives of almost all who worked there.  

As an alum of the Section who has close ties to David L. Rose and his family and other former ELS alums, and as a law professor with deep expertise in employment discrimination law including its early history, I am thrilled to take on this project.

— Vicki Schultz
Director, Living Civil Rights Law Project