On May 24, 1968, NLRB member Howard Jenkins strolled with President Lyndon Johnson through the White House Rose Garden. A personal meeting with the president was a rare honor. Decades later, Jenkins recalled the president’s praise for Jenkins’s 1964 Hughes Tool opinion, issued on the same day Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Hughes Tool decertified a racially segregated union and, for the first time, found discrimination to be an unfair labor practice. Equally important, Jenkins had argued that the Constitution required this outcome. As they walked among the spring blooms, Jenkins assured the president that “if the Board had faced up [earlier] to its obligation to properly interpret the Constitution” and the National Labor Relations Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act would have been unnecessary. In Jenkins’s opinion, the NLRA held even more promise than Title VII, although he did not share this with the president.

Commentators agreed with Jenkins that the NLRB might be superior to Title VII. One author lauded the board’s well-established administrative machinery, experienced staff, and swifter, more economical approach. The Board had “sharper enforcement teeth than Congress has provided minority workers in recent civil-rights legislation,” another observed. The NLRB’s general counsel provided free legal services and the Board, unlike the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, held public hearings, all of which could draw complaints away from the EEOC, he predicted. Indeed, African Americans were reportedly “claim[ing that] their demands for equal job opportunities have been frustrated under both the law [Title VII] and agency [EEOC] specifically created by Congress to deal with race bias.” One government official even predicted that the Board “could put the [EEOC] ... out of business.”