Civil Rights & the Supreme Court | Redux
In early 1865, the Union and Confederate armies were locked in mortal combat around the city of Petersburg, VA, and in the humid forests of Georgia. The American Civil War's end was near, and the Lincoln Administration now faced the question of how to restore the Union and end slavery once and for all. The legal framework for equality between the races came with the passage of the three anti-slavery amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and each Confederate state would have to ratify them before they could rejoin the Union. Abraham Lincoln's message to the American people in his second inaugural address was clear: "With malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
President Lincoln's vision of a peaceful and merciful reconstruction died with him on April 15, 1865. Flushed with anger and eager for revenge, the Republican-controlled Congress imposed a military occupation on the South to crush any lingering anti-Unionist sentiments. The years of Reconstruction saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the flight of many freed slaves to the North and their subsequent return as sharecroppers, and the scandalous money-grubbing of Northern politicians and businessmen known as "carpetbaggers" exploiting Southern misery to make a quick buck. Reconstruction ended in 1876 in a deal that settled that year's tumultuous presidential election. As Rutherford Hayes entered the White House and federal troops pulled out of Southern cities and towns, large portions of the Old Confederacy remained unreconstructed. Racist Democrats quickly won majorities in many Southern legislatures and instituted policies that had lasting consequences for racial equality and justice for African Americans.
"Jim Crow" and the Supreme Court
Southern Democrats mobilized their white voters against freed slaves by promising new laws to segregate their states. They approached this goal in two ways. First, the Ku Klux Klan (founded by the former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest) would terrorize the Republican minority and any brave Freedman who tried to vote in state or local elections. Second, the Democrats planned to enact laws that separated the races in all public spaces. These became known as "Jim Crow laws," named for a pre-Civil War racist caricature of African Americans by the actor Thomas D. Rice. Most former Confederate states had these Jim Crow laws in place by the early 1880s.
The federal government tried and failed to break the Jim Crow laws on several occasions. Both the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed legal equality for all Americans regardless of race, but the Southern states repeatedly cited the Tenth Amendment's guarantee of state sovereignty as a justification for their racist laws. (The South had used the same argument to protect slavery before the Civil War.) In 1890, Louisiana passed a law segregating passengers on trains, and both black and white activists of the Citizens' Committee of New Orleans then mobilized to challenge this measure in court. One of their leaders, Homer Plessy, bought a ticket on a train departing New Orleans and sat in a whites-only carriage. A conductor told him that he would have to move to a "colored-only" car; he refused and was arrested.
A Louisiana court heard Plessy's case, and his lawyer cited the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments as evidence that he had the right to sit in whatever rail car he wished. The court disagreed, and Plessy was convicted of breaking the state's Separate Car Act. The Louisiana Supreme Court refused to hear the case, so Plessy's attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1892. Four years later, the nation's highest court heard the case Plessy v. Ferguson in Washington, DC. The defendant was John Howard Ferguson, the judge in Plessy's original case.
The United States Supreme Court had a difficult history on issues of race. It had the power of judicial review and could rule on the constitutionality of federal, state, and local laws. Until the 1850s, the court had used this power sparingly and allowed Congress to legislate on important social issues facing the country. In 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney broke with this tradition and authored the most shameful decision in the court's history: Dred Scott v. Sandford. In it, Taney upheld a circuit court decision that African Americans were not citizens of the United States and that slaveowners had the right to bring their "property" into a free state--effectively legalizing slavery across the United States. Therefore, much was at stake for the Supreme Court's reputation when Plessy v. Ferguson came before the bar.
The court heard oral arguments on April 13, 1896, and issued its ruling on May 18th. Justice Henry Brown wrote the majority decision, and six other justices joined him. The Court ruled that states could segregate public spaces as long as they provided equal facilities for both races. The lone voice of opposition in the case was Justice John Harlan, later known as the "Great Dissenter," and his fiery statement about the Constitution being "color-blind" and labeling the ruling as on the same level as the hated Dred Scott eventually laid the groundwork for Plessy's ultimate reversal.
Now armed with the Supreme Court's blessing, Southern states increased their oppression of black Americans, restricting their rights and freedoms each year. Many passed anti-miscegenation laws that forbade interracial marriages. Even some federal government agencies adopted segregationist policies. The Federal Housing Administration forced African Americans into specific neighborhoods in many cities to minimize their voice in congressional elections. President Woodrow Wilson, now a hero to modern progressives, allowed the civil service to separate its workforce by race and signed a 1917 law to segregate the U.S. Armed Forces. The 350,000 black Americans who served during the First World War were led by white officers, and the law prevented black soldiers from commanding white troops under any circumstances. This policy continued during the Second World War, in which only five African Americans served as officers in an army that numbered over sixteen million. No black soldiers received the Medal of Honor despite several acts of unimaginable heroism until 1997, more than a half-century after the war's end.
The Civil Rights Era
The world learned of the horrors of government-sponsored racism in the Holocaust firsthand from defendants and witnesses at the 1945 Nuremberg trials. Americans listened to veterans' stories of concentration camps they had liberated, and many in the United States began questioning their country's policies toward its minority citizens. In 1948, amidst a storm of criticism from racists in his own party, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 and desegregated the Armed Forces. The president, a Southerner by birth, believed that merit should determine command rather than skin color.
The movement for civil rights grew in strength during the late 1940s, and as America entered the relatively peaceful and prosperous 1950s, it became clear that it was time for a change. In 1951, a class action lawsuit in Topeka, KS, evolved from a case between an African American welder named Oliver Brown and the city's Board of Education. Brown's daughter Linda had been denied admission to an elementary school because she was black. The lawsuit in Kansas sparked other cases in South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. District and circuit courts refused to permit school integration in every case, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear all five under the umbrella of Brown v. Board of Education.
Racial tensions were running high in the United States as the Supreme Court met to hear the case. Brown's defense was led by Thurgood Marshall, the chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (who was later appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson). The court could not reach a decision when it first heard the case in the spring of 1953. Brown's lawyers tried again two months later, but Justice Felix Frankfurter delayed a decision again while trying to convince the pro-Southern Chief Justice Fred Vinson to rule in the plaintiff's favor. When Vinson died in September, President Dwight Eisenhower installed Earl Warren as the new Chief Justice, leading Frankfurter to comment that his former superior's death was proof of God's existence. Warren, who supported desegregation, wrangled the other justices to his side, and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Oliver Brown's favor on May 17, 1954--a moment both justices and outside observers have called the greatest in the Supreme Court's history.
Brown v. Board of Education required all states to desegregate their schools immediately. It was a massive victory for the cause of civil rights and legal equality between the races. However, the court did not provide a mechanism for desegregation, but it ordered schools to comply with the ruling "with all deliberate speed" a year later. Brown's impact was immediate and galvanized the civil rights movement to push for greater equality. When Rosa Parks defied a segregationist law by sitting in a bus seat reserved for whites and was arrested in Birmingham, AL, the public outcry to implement the court's decision grew even louder. In November 1960, amidst a national election to choose his successor, President Eisenhower took measures into his own hands and sent United States marshals into the South to desegregate public schools forcibly. Five marshals escorted the six-year-old Ruby Bridges into her new elementary school in Little Rock, AR, as angry mobs of both white and black Americans screamed abuse at the little girl. At last, the court's ruling was being enforced.
The Supreme Court's Legacy
The civil rights era culminated with Dr. Martin Luther King's speech in August 1963 in Washington proclaiming his dream of a color-blind society (echoing Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson) and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Legal equality for African Americans had become a reality at last. Of course, work remained (and remains) to be done in the area of social equality and putting an end to racism on both sides in the United States.
The American people affirmed the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education as the civil rights movement marched onward. As waves of progressive change swept across the United States in areas beyond race relations, the court looked back to Brown and began to see itself as an agent of social change. In 1964, the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law banning the use of contraceptives in Griswold v. Connecticut and affirmed a right to marital privacy for all Americans. Three years later, it ended anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia and asserted its right to rule on the question of marriage in the United States. The trend continued until the end of the century and is still seen in major court rulings today. In each case, the Court used Brown v. Board of Education in impact litigation decisions and used the power of judicial review to bring about social change. Although some may question the court's use of this power for progressive ends, it cannot be argued that the cause of civil rights and equality for all Americans transformed both the Supreme Court and the country as a whole.
