The impact of the Supreme Court on issues related to equality is hard to overstate. When the executive and legislative branches have failed to protect citizens from discrimination, the highest court in the land has stepped in and, in most cases, expanded the impact of the Constitution to protect additional groups and individuals. But it has not always been this way in U.S. history. The Supreme Court's first time tackling the question of what constitutes equal protection of civil rights resulted in restricting rather than expanding the rights of African Americans. Learn about that case and the cases that followed by watching the video below.
In 1892, Homer Plessy sat down in a “whites only” train car in Louisiana. At the time, Louisiana had a law requiring separate train cars for white people and people of color—even mixed-race citizens who, like Plessy, were as white, genetically, as they were black. Plessy was arrested when he refused to move to the train car designated for people of color. He was sentenced and fined by a local judge.
In response, Plessy filed a lawsuit against the State of Louisiana, claiming that mandatory segregation of railroad passengers was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. Homer Plessy’s lawsuit eventually reached the Supreme Court. In a 7-1 decision, the court ruled in favor of Louisiana, affirming that separate but equal facilities for white and black Americans did not violate equal protection laws. The Court further determined that segregation by itself was not discriminatory.
How could the Supreme Court make such a ruling? At the time, unfortunately, most white Americans—and a few African Americans—accepted segregation not only as the way things were but the way they should be. The Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson reflected how the Constitution was widely interpreted by the people in power at the time the case was decided.
Sixty years later in 1954, the Supreme Court heard another case related to segregation--Brown v. the Topeka, Kansas Board of Education. Like many other states including all of them in the South, Kansas had laws requiring the racial segregation of schools. When the families of four African American children attempted to enroll them in white schools that were better equipped and more fully staffed, the children were denied entrance on the basis of their race.
This time, however, the Supreme Court overturned the Plessy decision, ruling that the principle of “separate but equal” was detrimental to the education and personal growth of African American children. Because of the real damage it inflicted on children of color, reasoned the Court, school segregation was inherently unconstitutional and violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision in Brown v. the Board of Education ended segregation in public schools and affirmed a major shift in many Americans’ opinions on race issues.
In 1956, the Supreme Court made a similar decision in favor of Rosa Parks, who brought a case opposing laws that required segregation in public transportation. And in 1964, the Court extended protection against discrimination to public accommodations such as hotels and restaurants. That same year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which codified as law the precedents set by the Supreme Court. Additional cases followed, effectively making segregation laws of any kind illegal in the United States.
Today the Supreme Court has affirmed that the “equal protection clause” in the Fourteenth Amendment applies to other categories in addition to race, including nationality and gender. Americans’ ideas about equality have come a long way since 1892, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution is likely to continue evolving as well, reflecting changes in our attitudes toward each other and toward the rights we all should enjoy.
Question
What was the basis of the Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation?
