The cases also touch on the Voting Rights Act, the need to provide English classes for immigrant children and, more tangentially, discriminatory mortgage lending.
The most emotionally charged case is from the New Haven, Conn., firefighters, whose complaints define the real-life quandary that sometimes accompanies government efforts to ensure racial equality.
The firefighters accuse city officials of violating civil rights laws and the Constitution by throwing out a promotions test on which they performed well but no blacks scored high enough to be eligible. The city responds that relying on test results with such wide racial discrepancies could have violated federal law and left them open to being sued by minorities.
The court will hear the arguments, along with the others, in the midst of an evolving national conversation about the role of race and diversity and in the wake of the historic presidential election.
"Each of these cases goes to the ability of our society to achieve opportunity, fairness and ultimately to our ability to be the democracy that we aspire to be," said John Payton, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "We've made tremendous progress as a society, and some of that progress is having in place anti-discriminatory" laws to ensure it continues.
His organization calls for the court in each case to affirm a vigorous role for government in recognizing the need for race-conscious vigilance.
