Earlier this year, Allen’s legal challenge reached the United States Supreme Court to determine whether Allen could proceed with his civil action under Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
What Allen placed before our conservative led U.S. Supreme Court, was the potential for raising the evidentiary standard that every subsequent litigant in the United States — that’s any of us filing a discrimination case — would need to prove.
Thanks to Allen, from this day forward, any African-American or ethnic minority, when attempting to enforce Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, will be required to prove that the “but for” reason for their denial of a contract was their ethnicity no matter how egregious the otherwise discriminatory conduct they suffered may have been.
In other words, thanks to Allen’s case, in order to receive enforcement under the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the racial discrimination suffered by plaintiff must rise to the level of being virtually the only cause for the denial of a contract or contractual rights, as opposed to one of the causes for the denial.
Many in the civil rights community, too, attempted to convince Allen not to pursue his litigation to the point of the U.S. Supreme Court fearing the very outcome that has now transpired.
