Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-476_c185.pdf
Page Number: 43

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

11 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

In time, the civil rights movement of the mid-20th cen-
tury  again  demanded  racial  equality  in  public  places.    In 
1963, two decades after then–Howard University law stu-
dent Pauli Murray organized sit-ins at cafeterias in Wash-
ington, D. C., a diverse group of students and faculty from
Tougaloo College sat at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jack-
son, Mississippi.  For doing so, they were violently attacked 
by a white mob.  See A. Moody, Coming of Age in Missis-
sippi 235–240 (1992).  Around the country, similar acts of
protest against racial injustice, some big and some small,
sought  “to  create  such  a  crisis  and  foster  such  a  tension”
that the country would be “forced to confront the issue.”  M. 
King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Apr. 16, 1963.  That 
year, Congress once more set out to eradicate “discrimina-
tion  . . .  in  places  of  accommodation  and  public  facilities,” 
Heart of Atlanta Motel, 379 U. S., at 246, notwithstanding 
this Court’s previous declaration of a federal public accom-
modations law to be unconstitutional. 

Congress believed, rightly, that discrimination in places
of public accommodation—“the injustice of being arbitrarily
denied equal access to those facilities and accommodations
which are otherwise open to the general public”—had “no 
place”  in  this  country,  the  country  “of  the  melting  pot,  of
equal rights, of one nation and one people.”  S. Rep. No. 872,
at  8–9  (quoting  President  Kennedy,  June  19,  1963).  It 
therefore  passed  Title  II  of  the  Civil  Rights  Act  of  1964,
which declares: “All persons shall be entitled to the full and 
equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, 
advantages, and accommodations of any place of public ac-
commodation . . . without discrimination . . . on the ground
of  race,  color,  religion,  or  national  origin.”    42  U. S. C. 
§2000a.  In enacting this landmark civil rights statute, Con-
gress  invoked  the  holding-out  rationale  from  antebellum 
common  law:  “one  who  employed  his  private  property  for 
purposes of commercial gain by offering goods or services to
the public must stick to his bargain.”  S. Rep. No. 872, at