Source: http://uscivilliberties.org/legislation-and-legislative-action/3754-equal-protection-of-law-xiv.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 00:42:39+00:00

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No such objection was raised to the inclusion in the first section of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment that ‘‘[n]o State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’’ Today, equality is universally embraced as a value of American society, but different people have vastly different ideas of what it means and what the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection requires.
all persons born in the United States . . . citizens of the United States . . . that] such citizens, of every race and color . . . shall have the . . . equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.
Unfortunately, the Thirty-ninth Congress’s debates offer little help as to exactly what equal protection meant. The general consensus among scholars is that in addition to putting the 1866 Act on firmer constitutional ground, it was intended to ensure that, were the Democrats to regain power, they would have to amend the Constitution to undo the protections for the freedmen. This said, the most prominent historian of the Fourteenth Amendment, Charles Fairman, summed up the problem facing later generations seeking to plumb the depths of meaning of the equal protection clause by observing that ‘‘in the main the [authors of the Freedom Amendments] did not discern the obduracy of problems lying on the shady side of victory.’’ Americans of the twenty-first century continue to be divided and uncertain as to what equal protection means.
Unlike the Bill of Rights, which waited until the twentieth century for judicial interpretation, the Fourteenth Amendment and in particular the first section were interpreted a scant five years after ratification, or as Justice Samuel F. Miller wrote in the opinion of the Court in The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), ‘‘in the light . . . of events, almost too recent tobe calledhistory,butwhichare familiar tousall . . . .’’ Speaking for a five-member majority, Miller dismissed the butchers’ claims that by granting the Crescent City Slaughter-House Company a monopoly the Louisiana legislature had deprived them of the equal protection of the laws.
[N]o one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in them all [that is, The Freedom Amendments], lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have even be suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freedman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.
[t]he existence of laws . . . which discriminated with gross injustice and hardship against [African Americans] as a class, was the evil to be remedied . . . . It is so clearly a provision for that race and that emergency, that a strong case would be necessary for its application to any other.
measures enacted to impose segregation under the banner of ‘‘separate but equal,’’ actions that would undo all the advances that the former slaves had gained during Reconstruction. For its part, the equal protection clause was used sporadically to allow the Court an additional check on state economic legislation with which it disagreed, although in this area the Due Process Clause played a much more important role. Other than these exceptions, the equal protection clause slipped into the same degree of irrelevance to which the Court in The Slaughterhouse Cases had relegated the Fourteenth Amendment’s ‘‘privileges and immunities’’ clause.
Matters stood pretty much unchanged until the 1930s. Then, the struggle between the Court and the New Deal, culminating in the so-called ‘‘switch in time that saved nine,’’ produced a Court that adopted a very different role than any of its predecessors. Although Congress had rejected President Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to appoint additional judges and thus secure a majority of justices willing to uphold challenged New Deal legislation, the Court in 1937 appeared to give way, first upholding a state minimum wage law and later, the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. Commentators, accordingly, generally refer to Roosevelt as having lost the battle over expanding the size of the Court, but winning the war to save the New Deal.
For the Court, this was a time of adjustment from the ‘‘Old Court’s’’ concern with property to the ‘‘New Court’’ and its protection of civil rights and liberties. In 1938, in an otherwise unremarkable case, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone traced the basic outlines of this new role. Frequently dubbed a ‘‘double standard,’’ the famous footnote four of United States v. Carolene Products (1938) set forth a highly deferential standard for legislation dealing with economic matters. In contrast, a far more rigorous test was established for legislation that dealt with noneconomic individual rights.
[A] narrower scope for operation of the presumption of constitutionality [is appropriate for] legislation [that] appears on its face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitution, such as the first ten amendments . . ., or which restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation, [or] review of statutes directed at particular religions . . . or national, . . . or racial minorities . . . [or] prejudice against discrete and insular minorities . . . .
World War II brought other changes to American society that raised further questions about segregation. The war effort required a total mobilization of the population, and one consequence was that jobs formerly monopolized by white men were now open to blacks and to women. This development attracted a growing stream of southern blacks moving to northern cities where they were able to vote and gain some share of political power. The racist ideology preached by Hitler and the discovery of the horrors of theHolocaust raised further discomfiting questions about America’s own policies on race. The gradual breakup of the European colonial empires and the contest for the hearts and minds of these new nations with the Soviet Union gave a new urgency to re-examining the prewar racial status quo.
Two victories soon validated the NAACP’s 1930 decision to attack segregation in education. Even before these, however, the Vinson Court signaled a significant change in its 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer.
members of the racial groups which number 85 percent of the population . . . and include most of the lawyers . . . with whom petitioner will inevitably be dealing . . . we cannot conclude that the education offered . . . is substantially equal to that which he would receive if admitted to the University of Texas Law School.
Buoyed by these victories, Marshall and his team at the Legal Defense Fund prepared to make their long-planned frontal attack on public education at the elementary and secondary levels. Their decision to concentrate on graduate and professional education had been a tactical one. They realized that since this involved fewer students, it was likely to produce less of a backlash than an attack on public schools. They also thought that by challenging separate but equal at law schools, they would have a more sympathetic hearing from the justices.
Still they realized that the Court of the 1950s was itself an institution that might be hesitant to wade into this highly explosive area. The Court’s prestige had not fully recovered from the scars suffered in its battle with Roosevelt. The Court was also more conservative. The Truman appointees had tilted the Court away from the very liberal tint it had taken on in the 1940s. This combination had created a Court that largely embraced the judicial role known as selfrestraint, a notion that Holmes had championed and which had been enthusiastically embraced by Justice Felix Frankfurter. According to C. Herman Pritchett, the Vinson Court took ‘‘[t]he strong legislature–weak judiciary formula which Holmes developed for the . . . purpose of controlling judicial review over state economic legislation,’’ and extended it to legislation that touched directly upon guarantees of individual liberties found in the Constitution.
Despite these concerns, the NAACP undertook to mount a series of challenges to public school segregation. Five state cases were combined in what has come to be known as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), arguably the Court’s most important decision of the twentieth century. Each had been carefully selected to force the Court finally to address squarely whether ‘‘separate but equal’’ was still good law. First argued in 1952, the Court took the unusual step of ordering a second set of arguments set for October 1953. Clearly, the justices realized the political implications of a decision setting aside a precedent that not only had survived since 1896 but had been repeatedly invoked by the Supreme Court, a fact that South Carolina’s attorney, John W. Davis, vigorously reminded the Court. Before the second round of argument, Chief Justice Vinson died and President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated California Governor Earl Warren to succeed him. Although scholars disagree as to how the Court would have voted in 1953, they seem universally to credit Warren with ensuring that the Court would speak with one voice in Brown. The Warren opinion seems to have been as much directed at the general public than to academics or lawyers. One of the chief justice’s biographers noted that more than any thing else, Warren was guided by a desire for fairness, and if anything was not fair it was segregation.
After reviewing the Court’s previous rulings on educational segregation, Warren proceeded to address the particular issues in elementary and secondary education.
To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone . . . . We concluded that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘‘separate but equal’’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
The unanimity that Warren had worked to achieve in Brown was maintained throughout his tenure (1953–1968) despite little support from the political branches of government and dogged opposition by public officials form the old Confederacy. Warren’s successor, Warren Earl Burger, was not so successful in this regard. Although he held the Court together in the first of the busing cases, Swann v. Charlotte- Mecklenburg School District (1971), the unanimity ended two years later in another busing case, Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver (1973) from which Justice William Rehnquist dissented, and further deteriorated in Milliken v. Bradley (1974) with the issue of de jure versus de facto segregation producing a five-to-four split, a margin that would be repeated frequently in subsequent cases involving race.
Early opinions, such as The Slaughterhouse Cases and Strauder, had emphasized that the equal protection clause was designed for ‘‘the newly emancipated negroes.’’ Paragraph three of Carolene Products’s footnote four returned to this theme and provided a basis upon which the concept of ‘‘suspect categories’’ developed and the requirement that such classifications be subjected to ‘‘strict scrutiny,’’ serve a ‘‘compelling state interest,’’ and be ‘‘narrowly tailored’’ to the achievement of that interest.
all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny.
None of the early education cases made mention of suspect categories or strict scrutiny, but in finally addressing the sensitive subject of state antimiscegenation statutes (Loving v. Virginia ), the Warren Court invoked strict scrutiny to strike down a statute that punished blacks and whites equally.
The requirement that legislation challenged under the equal protection clause be reasonable or rational, the standard used in Yick Wo and Plessy, was now reserved only for situations that did not involve fundamental rights or suspect categories, the ‘‘New Court’’ applying it, for example, to economic classifications. These received deferential scrutiny; it was sufficient that government was able to establish a legitimate goal for its legislation and to demonstrate that the means employed had a rational relationship to the goal.
In addition to race and ethnicity, the late Warren Court appeared interested in expanding the number of suspect categories adding illegitimacy. The Burger Court seemed to add alienage. Subsequently, however the Burger Court cut back on both.
More significant during the Warren Court was the use of ‘‘strict scrutiny’’ in reviewing equal protection claims that involved rights identified as fundamental, such as the rights to vote in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966), and access to courts in Douglas v. California (1963).
Equal protection, despite Holmes’s observation, is surely no longer a forgotten section of the Constitution.
Abraham, Henry J. ‘‘Some Post-Bakke-and-Weber Reflections on ‘Reverse Discrimination.’’’ In Taking the Constitution Seriously: Essays on the Constitution and Constitutional Law, edited by Gary L. McDowell. Dubuque, IA: Kendall-Hunt, 1981.
Cottrol, Robert J., Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware. Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
Fairman, Charles. Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864–88, Part One. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Graglio, Lino A. Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.
Kelly, Alfred H., Winfred A. Harbison, and Herman Belz. The American Constitution: Its Origin and Development. Vol. 2, 7th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Klarman, Michael J. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
Lee, Francis Graham. Equal Protection: Rights and Liberties under the Law. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Reams, Bernard D. Jr., and Paul E. Wilson. Segregation and the Fourteenth Amendment in the States. Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein, 1975.
Wilkinson, J. Harvie. From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

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