Desegregation

SINCE RECONSTRUCTION after the American Civil War, civil rights advocates have worked toward racial parity in the United States. When the Civil Rights Amendments were passed after the Civil War, it appeared that the country was on the road to fulfilling the promise of equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Thirteenth Amendment (1864) completed the abolition of slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) guaranteed equal protection and due process of the laws for all Americans; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) extended suffrage to African American males. However, the effectiveness of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was stymied after the contested election of 1876 when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction if Southerners would support him over Samuel B. Tilden, the Democrat who had won the popular election.

Because of its power to interpret the Constitution, the Supreme Court has played a major role in the history of desegregation in the United States. In 1857, in Dred Scott v. Sanford(60 U.S.393), The Supreme Court determined that slaves had no right to citizenship, because they were property. In effect, the Fourteenth Amendment overturned Dred Scott. Then in 1880, in Strauder v. West Virginia (100 U.S. 303), the court held that the Fourteenth Amendment was specifically created to ensure that African Americans had the same civil rights as whites. Despite this assurance, many states passed “Jim Crow” laws that legalized the practice of “separate but equal.” Such laws allowed legal separation of the races in education, transportation, public facilities, public accommodations, and housing. Separatist mania led to such travesties as the Florida law that required separate storage facilities for textbooks for black and white students, and the South Carolina law that prohibited black and white textile workers from looking out the same window.

In 1892, civil rights activists challenged the practice of segregation in transportation in New Orleans, Louisiana. Homer Plessy was chosen to bring the suit because he was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black. When Plessy sat in a whites-only section of a railcar, he was arrested. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537), the Supreme Court upheld the separate but equal doctrine. As the sole dissenter, Justice John Harlan wrote that separate but equal was “inconsistent with the guaranty given by the Constitution to each state of a republican form of government.”

It took another 40 years for the Supreme Court to swing toward Harlan's position. In 1938, in United States v. Carolene Products (304 U.S. 144), Justice Harlan Stone published what has been called the most significant footnote in the history of the Supreme Court, opening the door for desegregation by acknowledging that the Fourteenth Amendment had some application to the states. Stone suggested that “legislation which restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation” should be “subjected to more exacting judicial scrutiny under the general prohibitions of the Four-teenth Amendment than are most other types of legislation.” Over the next several decades, the courts began to chip away at legal discrimination, declaring that classes created on the basis of race were inherently “suspect” and would be henceforth examined with “strict scrutiny.”

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