Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
Page Number: 19

Cite as:  600 U. S. ____ (2023) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

Fourteenth Amendment” apply “to all persons,” we unani-
mously declared six years later;  it is “hostility to . . . race 
and  nationality”  “which  in  the  eye  of  the  law  is  not  justi-
fied.”  Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 368–369, 373–374 
(1886); see also id., at 368 (applying the Clause to “aliens
and subjects of the Emperor of China”); Truax v. Raich, 239 
U. S. 33, 36 (1915) (“a native of Austria”); semble Strauder, 
100 U. S., at 308–309 (“Celtic Irishmen”) (dictum).

Despite  our  early  recognition  of  the  broad  sweep  of  the 
Equal  Protection  Clause,  this  Court—alongside  the  coun-
try—quickly failed to live up to the Clause’s core commit-
ments.  For  almost  a  century  after  the  Civil  War,  state-
mandated segregation  was in many parts of  the Nation  a 
regrettable  norm.  This  Court  played  its  own  role  in  that 
ignoble history, allowing in Plessy v. Ferguson the separate
but equal regime that would come to deface much of Amer-
ica.  163 U. S. 537 (1896).  The aspirations of the framers of
the  Equal  Protection  Clause,  “[v]irtually  strangled  in
[their] infancy,” would remain for too long only that—aspi-
rations.  J. Tussman & J. tenBroek, The Equal Protection 
of the Laws, 37 Cal. L. Rev. 341, 381 (1949).

After Plessy, “American courts . . . labored with the doc-
trine [of separate but equal] for over half a century.”  Brown 
v.  Board  of  Education,  347  U. S.  483,  491  (1954).    Some 
cases in this period attempted to curtail the perniciousness
of  the  doctrine  by  emphasizing  that  it  required  States  to
provide black students educational opportunities equal to—
even if formally separate from—those enjoyed by white stu-
dents.  See, e.g., Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U. S. 
337, 349–350 (1938) (“The admissibility of laws separating 
the  races  in  the  enjoyment  of  privileges  afforded  by  the
State rests wholly upon the equality of the privileges which 
the laws give to the separated groups . . . .”).  But the inher-
ent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from
inequality—soon  became  apparent.    As  the  Court  subse-