ABSTRACT
Civil rights activists and sympathizers recognized that many Americans did not subscribe to Dworkin's theory. It smacked too much of rejecting the possibility of distinguishing between truth and error, and it seemed to make the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mean what it would have said had it been written by left-liberal egalitarians. Reynolds believed that the great majority of the Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act subscribed to the core notion that no person should gain any advantage or suffer any hardship because of racial discrimination. The supporters of civil rights in Congress understood that some black leaders favored race-conscious benign discrimination, but the congressional sponsors knew that civil rights legislation would not pass unless it renounced all forms of racial preference. In 1970 Willie Griggs and twelve other black laborers at the steam station claimed that Duke's use of the high school and testing requirements violated the Civil Rights Act.
