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14  STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT 

AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

be admitted “ ‘on a racially nondiscriminatory basis.’ ”  Ante, 
at 13.  It distorts the dissent in Plessy to advance a color-
blindness  theory.    Ante,  at  38–39;  see  also  ante,  at  22 
(GORSUCH,  J.,  concurring)  (“[T]oday’s  decision  wakes  the 
echoes of Justice John Marshall Harlan [in Plessy]”); ante, 
at  3  (THOMAS,  J.,  concurring)  (same).  The  Court  also  in-
vokes  the  Brown  litigators,  relying  on  what  the  Brown 
“plaintiffs had argued.”  Ante, at 12; ante, at 35–36, 39, n. 7 
(opinion of THOMAS, J.).

If there was a Member of this Court who understood the 
Brown  litigation,  it  was  Justice  Thurgood  Marshall,  who 
“led the litigation campaign” to dismantle segregation as a 
civil rights lawyer and “rejected the hollow, race-ignorant
conception of equal protection” endorsed by the Court’s rul-
ing today.  Brief for NAACP Legal Defense and Educational 
Fund, Inc., et al. as Amici Curiae 9.  Justice Marshall joined 
the Bakke plurality and “applaud[ed] the judgment of the
Court that a university may consider race in its admissions 
process.”  438 U. S., at 400.  In fact, Justice Marshall’s view 
was that Bakke’s holding should have been even more pro-
tective  of  race-conscious  college  admissions  programs  in
light of the remedial purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment 
and the legacy of racial inequality in our society.  See id., at 
396–402  (arguing  that  “a  class-based  remedy”  should  be 
constitutionally  permissible  in  light  of  the  hundreds  of 
“years of class-based discrimination against [Black Ameri-
cans]”).  The Court’s recharacterization of Brown is nothing
but revisionist history and an affront to the legendary life 
of Justice Marshall, a great jurist who was a champion of
true  equal  opportunity,  not  rhetorical  flourishes  about
colorblindness. 

C 
Two  decades  after  Brown,  in  Bakke,  a  plurality  of  the
Court held that “the attainment of a diverse student body” 
is a “compelling” and “constitutionally permissible goal for