Civil Rights. Equal Protection of the Laws. State Officials Enjoined from Engaging Contractors Who Hire Exclusively through Unions Practicing Racial Discrimination. Ethridge v. Rhodes, 268 F. Supp. 83 (S. D. Ohio 1967)

1968 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 690
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Equal Protection

The Concept of Race and Equal Protection Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Botts
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Per Se

As equal protection law develops, the Supreme Court’s concept of race moves from sociocultural/sociohistorical to biological. Concurrently, (1) the academic concept of race moves in the opposite direction, (2) the Court’s understanding of why racial discrimination is problematic changes from how racial discrimination reinforces the badges of slavery to the idea that racial discrimination is problematic per se, and (3) whites begin to become successful at using equal protection law to protect them from “racial discrimination.” One explanation is that this is another example of the divestiture of the rights of blacks since the end of the civil rights movement.

American Federalism and the Civil Rights Act of 1875

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-328
Author(s):  
S. G. F. Spackman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Legislative History ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Publicly Supported ◽  
American Federalism

Charles Sumner's Supplementary Civil Rights Bill, which after a tortuous legislative history became law as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, was intended to spell out in specific terms the procedural guarantees of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and so to outlaw racial discrimination in public accommodation, entertainment and transport, in juries, churches and publicly supported schools and charities. The measure was not only the culmination of Sumner's life-long efforts on behalf of the Blacks, but also the only comprehensive attempt made by Congress during Reconstruction to secure racial equality. Yet the purpose of the Act was undermined even before its passage by die racial ambivalence and political calculations of its supporters, while the challenge it made to traditional concepts of American federalism was defeated in 1883 by the Supreme Court's decision that it was unconstitutional. The nature and extent of this challenge, however, becomes apparent only in the context of the pressures that shaped Republican legislation.

Plessy’s Long Shadow

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Law

The supreme court’s 1896 Decision in Plessy v. Ferguson served to bring the law into a dismal harmony with the nation’s view of race in life. The Court decided that segregation in public facilities through “separate but equal” accommodations for black citizens would satisfy the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. The years since the sporadically enforced policies of Reconstruction ended in 1876 had been hard for those former slaves and their offspring whose slavery had legally ended with the passage of the Thir­teenth Amendment in 1865. To ensure their rights to due process and the equal protection of the law, the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 provided that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, . . . are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Despite legislation intended to provide enforcement of these rights, the laws were poorly enforced and most were subsequently declared unconstitutional. Corrupting law but relying on intimidation and violence, southern governments stripped blacks of political power. Given meaningful if unspoken assurances that the federal government would not protect black civil rights, conservative southerners regained power utilizing racial fear and hatred to break up competing populist groups of poor black and white farmers. In addition to the disenfranchisement of blacks, whites sought to secure their power through intensive anti-Negro propaganda campaigns championing white supremacy. Literary and scientific leaders published tracts and books intended to “prove” the inhumanity of the Negro. In this hostile climate, segregation laws that had made a brief appearance during Reconstruction were revived across the South, accompanied by waves of violence punctuated by an increase in lynchings and race riots. In an effort both to protest the indignity of segregation and challenge its validity, Homer Plessy, acting for a New Orleans civil rights group, attempted to ride in a railroad car reserved for whites. He was arrested and convicted of violating Louisiana’s 1890 segregation law. On appeal, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the Fourteenth Amendment required absolute equality of the two races before the law, adding: “but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”

Rights, Dignity, and Public Accommodations

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-619
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Moral Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Public Rights ◽  
History Of

In this essay I consider why debates over applying anti-discrimination norms to public accommodations have long been, and remain today, such a resilient presence in the history of the United States. I use as my starting point the most famous iteration of this phenomenon, the national debate sparked by the 1960 sit-in movement and culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations across the nation. The battle over racial discrimination and public accommodations in the early 1960s illuminates the moral issue at the heart of the issue, the lines of argument that characterize the debate over how to define legal rights in this area, and the ways in which different legal institutions have resolved, or failed to resolve, the issue. I then move backward time, highlighting the continuities between this episode and the struggle over race and public accommodations during Reconstruction. The history of the civil rights era provides a useful framework to analyze the terms of debate from a century earlier, and it provides particular insights into the significance of the concept of public rights that Rebecca Scott has so effectively brought to our attention.

The Sit-In Movement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Leading Edge ◽  
Black College ◽  
School Students ◽  
A Chain

One of the most significant protest campaigns of the civil rights era, the lunch counter sit-in movement began on February 1, 1960 when four young African American men sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Refused service, the four college students sat quietly until the store closed. They continued their protest on the following days, each day joined by more fellow students. Students in other southern cities learned what was happening and started their own demonstrations, and in just weeks, lunch counter sit-ins were taking place across the South. By the end of the spring, tens of thousands of black college and high school students, joined in some cases by sympathetic white students, had joined the sit-in movement. Several thousand went to jail for their efforts after being arrested on charges of trespass, disorderly conduct, or whatever other laws southern police officers believed they could use against the protesters. The sit-ins arrived at a critical juncture in the modern black freedom struggle. The preceding years had brought major breakthroughs, such as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling in 1954 and the successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956, but by 1960, activists were struggling to develop next steps. The sit-in movement energized and transformed the struggle for racial equality, moving the leading edge of the movement from the courtrooms and legislative halls to the streets and putting a new, younger generation of activists on the front lines. It gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the most important activist groups of the 1960s. It directed the nation’s attention to the problem of racial discrimination in private businesses that served the public, pressured business owners in scores of southern cities to open their lunch counters to African American customers, and set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations across the nation.

Multiracials and Civil Rights

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Katerí Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
The Public ◽  
Racial Privilege ◽  
Unique Manner ◽  
Racially Mixed

Commanding greater public attention is the idea that discrimination against multiracial (racially-mixed) people is a distinctive challenge to the enforcement of civil rights law. This perspective is based upon the belief that multiracials experience racial discrimination in a unique manner that makes it necessary to reformulate traditional civil rights law. Multiracials and Civil Rights, based upon a close examination of many multiracial discrimination legal cases in a variety of equality law contexts, demonstrates the fallacy and danger of that conjecture. The book elucidates the distinction between the presumed exceptional space that multiracial persons are rhetorically imagined to occupy in the public discourse, and the binary non-white versus white realities they actually experience when targeted for discrimination. Rather than point to a need for a shift away from the existing civil rights laws, the cases instead indicate the need for further support of the current structures. The book concludes that multiracial discrimination cases are helpful in highlighting the continued need for attention to white supremacy and for fortifying the focus of civil rights law on racial privilege and the lingering legacy of bias against non-whites.

scholarly journals The Meanings of Black Power: A Comparison of White and Black Interpretations of a Political Slogan

1970 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel D. Aberbach ◽  
Jack L. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
American Cities

Angry protests against racial discrimination were a prominent part of American public life during the 1960's. The decade opened with the sit-ins and freedom rides, continued through Birmingham, Selma, and the March on Washington, and closed with protests in hundreds of American cities, often punctuated by rioting and violence. During this troubled decade the rhetoric of protest became increasingly demanding, blanket charges of pervasive white racism and hostility were more common, and some blacks began to actively discourage whites from participating either in protest demonstrations or civil rights organizations. Nothing better symbolized the changing mood and style of black protest in America than recent changes in the movement's dominant symbols. Demonstrators who once shouted “freedom” as their rallying cry now were shouting “black power”—a much more provocative, challenging slogan.The larger and more diverse a political movement's constituency, the more vague and imprecise its unifying symbols and rallying cries are likely to be. A slogan like black power has no sharply defined meaning; it may excite many different emotions and may motivate individuals to express their loyalty or take action for almost contradictory reasons. As soon as Adam Clayton Powell and Stokely Carmichael began to use the phrase in 1966 it set off an acrimonious debate among black leaders over its true meaning. Initially it was a blunt and threatening battle cry meant to symbolize a break with the past tactics of the civil rights movement.

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