The City Council in Birmingham, home to the state’s largest black population, voted to raise the city’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from the federal minimum of $7.25 following a campaign by civil rights and social service organizations and strikes by local fast-food workers as part of the Fight for $15 movement. Then, just days before the raise was to take effect, the state legislature rushed through a bill nullifying the authority of cities to adopt any local wage ordinances.

The State of Alabama argued that states frequently regulate the authority of cities and maintained that its actions had nothing to do with race. A district court initially dismissed the fast-food workers’ lawsuit saying the plaintiffs could not prove racial discrimination.

But last month, the Atlanta-based United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit noted the racial history of Alabama, the white-led state action to overturn Birmingham’s ordinance, and the state law’s discriminatory effect on the city’s majority-black population. The court held that Birmingham workers had presented a valid legal claim and compelling allegations of discrimination, and the ruling reinstated the lawsuit to allow the plaintiffs to prove their case, stressing that racial discrimination could take many forms.

“Today, racism is no longer pledged from the portico of the Capitol or exclaimed from the floor of the constitutional convention,” the court wrote in its unanimous decision. “[I]t hides, abashed, cloaked beneath ostensibly neutral laws and legitimate bases, steering government power toward no less invidious ends.”