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Supreme court us and civil rights
Supreme court us and civil rights
Essays on the history of racial discrimination
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“Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified and permitted racial segregation as not being in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, and other federal civil rights laws". African Americans have a history of struggles because of racism and prejudices. Ever since the end of the Civil War, they struggled to benefit from their full rights that the Constitution promised being that, the US Supreme Court had to make many decisions to impact African-Americans: Loving vs Virginia, Plessy vs Ferguson, and Shelley vs Kraemer. In the case Loving vs Virginia there was a law making it a felony for a white person to marry a black person or the reverse. Richard Loving who was a white man who was in love with Mildred Jetter a, black woman. They was against Virginias laws banning marriage between blacks and whites. After they they got married in Washington D.C , the couple returned to Virginia and was charged for traveling together and sentenced a year in prison. Mildred loving wrote to an attorney for help , she then left the judgment for the Supreme Court. The couple was referred to the ACLU which represented in the landmark Supreme Court case. …show more content…
Clearly, then the Supreme Court ruled that state bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Homer Plessy a mixed man 7/8 white 1/8 black sat in the whites railroad car , when told to get up and move to the blacks car he refused. Which then resulted in immediate arrested and jailed for violating the 1890 Louisiana law that provided for segregated "separate but equal" railroad accommodations. One the other hand the Supreme Court upheld the right for Louisiana to do so. In the Supreme Court decision of the case the court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal. Which continued to harass the court until 1954 when the Supreme Court decided Brown vs the Board of Education. Lastly Homer Plessy lost the case. If Plessy was to sit in the whites car again he was guaranteed to be arrested. On August 11,1945 petitioner Shelley whom is black bought a home in a neighborhood.
The other owners in the neighborhood white , agreed to restrict colored people from buying houses in the neighborhood. Shelley had no knowledge of what the owners had done. He was not pleased with their ignorance.The circuit court declined to enforce the agreement on the basis that not all of the property owners had signed the covenant. Then Shelley appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court, which had no experience of a case like this before. The final decision was that any court may not constitutionally enforce a "restrictive covenant" which she prevents people of any particular race from buying
property. All things considered the US Supreme Court made many decisions to impact African-Americans: Loving vs Virginia, Plessy vs Ferguson, and Shelley vs Kraemer. It became a felony for a white person to marry a black person or the reverse, so the state of Virginia argued that the law punished both black and white. Plessy a black male was arrested for violating the law "separate but equal" he sat in the "whites" railroad car. Owners of homes in a neighborhood signed a covenant which said no home was to be sold to blacks, Shelley who was black bought a home in the neighborhood. School enrollment rate among white children in 1870: 54.4% among non-white children in 1870: 9.9%.
Another similar case was the Dred Scott Decision. Dred Scott, being a black man during the 1820's, was yet again considered inferior to bring his case to the court. From a reader's point of view, Dred Scott's case was very legit. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 made Scott a free man. All of the blacks going through the 35'36 altitude/latitude line were said to be free men. When Dred Scott entered Illinois, he entered thinking he was a free man, until his owner assaulted him upon the return. Dred Scott did his best to bring not one but three assault cases to the court against his "owner", John F. A. Sanford; however, the court dismissed him as inferior to take any participation or even demand a fair trial. The court also called upon the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional because of deprivation of personal property, which in this case was Dred Scott - a property of John Sanford. Eventually the sons of Sanford purchased Scott and his wife, and set them free. Scott died just a year after that.
Mr. and Mrs. Loving were residents of the small town of Central point, Virginia. They were family friends who had dated each other since he was seventeen and she a teenager. When they learned that marriage was illegal for them in Virginia, they simply drove over the Washington, D.C. for the ceremony. They returned to Virginia and were arrested the following month for violating the anti-miscegenation statute, which was declared in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Commonwealth’s Attorney Bernard Mahon obtained the warrant for Richard Loving and “Mildred Jeter”. Mildred’s maiden name was on the warrant because in Virginia a marriage between a white and black was considered void. In October 1958, the indictments of Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter were bought before the court and on January 6, 1959, Richard and Mildred pled not guilty to the charges. Changing their pleas to guilty and waiving their right to a jury trial due to fear and optimism for a favorable punishment, the Lovings took the plea bargain. The Circuit Court judge that was presiding over the case, Judge Leon M. Bazile, did not see favor on them and sentenced them to one year in jail. Yet, at the same time in agreement with the plea bargain, Judge Bazile suspended the sentence for 25 years provided that the Lovings would leave the state of Virginia immediately and not return together for the whole period. There was a catch, for when the 25 year period ends they would still face the prosecution of the court if they ever returned. He concluded his decision with this quote:
Throughout history, segregation has always been a part of United States history. This is showed through the relationships between the blacks and whites, the whites had a master-slave relationship and the blacks had a slave-master relationship. And this is also true after the civil war, when the blacks attained rights! Even though they had obtained rights the whites were always one step above them and lead superiority over them continuously. This is true in the Supreme court case “Plessy v. Ferguson”. The Court case ruled that blacks and whites had to have separate facilities and it was only constitutional if the facilities were equal. this means that they also constituted that this was not a violation of the 13th and 14th amendment because they weren 't considered slaves and had “equal” facilities even though they were separate. Even if the Supreme court case “Plessy v. Ferguson” set the precedent that separate but equal was correct, I would disagree with that precedent, because they interpreted
Cohen appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court on the basis that marriage is a fundamental right, and there is no danger to society if interracial marriages exist. Mr. Cohen also spoke about interracial couples’ constitutional rights to be able to have children, and their rights to inherit land. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Richard and Mildred Loving, which ended the country’s last segregation law, ultimately, setting precedent that marriage is a human right in the United
...ade for Justice, shed light on the hardships experienced by African American men who chose to resist and fight back against inequality and also provided an example of the aforementioned effect suggested by Harlan’s dissent in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Lastly, Booker T. Washington’s Advocates Compromise offered one solution to the issue of segregation and the general prevalence of racial discrimination. All three primary sources were related in its ties to the issue of segregation between the late 1800s and early 1900s. In conclusion, John Marshall Harlan’s dissent was definitely an accurate prediction of the various obstacles that were thrown at the African American people. Harlan was correct in all of his claims; it is only unfortunate that it took the majority over five decades to finally realize that separate and equal facilities do not and cannot exist.
The court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson created nationwide controversy in the United States due to the fact that its outcome would ultimately affect every citizen of our country. On Tuesday, June 7th, 1892, Mr. Homer Plessy purchased a first class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad for a trip from New Orleans to Covington. He then entered a passenger car and took a vacant seat in a coach where white passengers were also sitting. There was another coach assigned to people who weren’t of the white race, but this railroad was a common carrier and was not authorized to discriminate passengers based off of their race. (“Plessy vs. Ferguson, syllabus”).Mr. Plessy was a “Creole of Color”, a person who traces their heritage back to some of the Caribbean, French, and Spanish who settled into Louisiana before it was part of the US (“The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow”). Even though Plessy was only one eighth African American, and could pass for a full white man, still he was threatened to be penalized and ejected from the train if he did not vacate to the non-white coach (“Plessy vs. Ferguson, syllabus). In ...
Blacks were left at the mercy of ex-slaveholders and former Confederates, as the United States government adopted a laissez-faire policy regarding the “Negro problem” in the South. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder, and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second-class” citizenship. Strict legal segregation of public facilities in the southern states was strengthened in 1896 by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Racists, northern and southern, proclaimed that the Negro was subhuman, barbaric, immoral, and innately inferior, physically and intellectually, to whites—totally incapable of functioning as an equal in white civilization.
The legality of racial segregation was the result of a deeply flawed belief held by the majority of Americans that blacks were inherently inferior and would never be treated the same as whites. African Americans had been regarded as property for centuries prior to the Civil Rights Movement, and that mindset had to be changed for the creation of new laws or abolition of old laws to have any ...
Separate but Equal doctrine existed long before the Supreme Court accepted it into law, and on multiple occasions it arose as an issue before then. In 1865, southern states passed laws called “Black Codes,” which created restrictions on the freed African Americans in the South. This became the start of legal segregation as juries couldn’t have African Americans, public schools became segregated, and African Americans had restrictions on testifying against majorities. In 1887, Jim Crow Laws started to arise, and segregation becomes rooted into the way of life of southerners (“Timeline”). Then in 1890, Louisiana passed the “Separate Car Act.” This forced rail companies to provide separate rail cars for minorities and majorities. If a minority sat in the wrong car, it cost them $25 or 20 days in jail. Because of this, an enraged group of African American citizens had Homer Plessy, a man who only had one eighth African American heritage, purchase a ticket and sit in a “White only” c...
The case started in Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda's father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school seven blocks from her house, but the principal of the school refused simply because the child was black. Brown went to McKinley Burnett, the head of Topeka's branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and asked for help (All Deliberate Speed pg 23). The NAACP was eager to assist the Browns, as it had long wanted to challenge segregation in public schools. The NAACP was looking for a case like this because they figured if they could just expose what had really been going on in "separate but equal society" that the circumstances really were not separate but equal, bur really much more disadvantaged to the colored people, that everything would be changed. The NAACP was hoping that if they could just prove this to society that the case would uplift most of the separate but equal facilities. The hopes of this case were for much more than just the school system, the colored people wanted to get this case to the top to abolish separate but equal.
In conclusion, the case of J.D. Shelley v. Louis Kraemer was important to the general population as the Court deemed the race covenant was unenforceable due to violations of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.
The Supreme Court was known for some of the most notorious decisions made in history, many in which included the cases, Marbury v. Madison, Scott v. Sandford, and United States v. Cruikshank. Despite these cases, the court did turn around and change their perspective and helped minorities achieve their civil rights. In 1915, the case of Guinn and Beal v. United States helped African Americans reassure their right to vote. In this case the Supreme Court considered the grandfather clause to be unconstitutional. The grandfather clause was a mechanism t...
Ferguson, several decades later, was the case of Shelley v. Kraemer, which made it so that properties could not be racially restrictive. This case was started when the Shelleys, an African American family bought property from Louis Kraemer, and "were not aware of the restrictive covenant at the time of the purchase" (Shelley v. Kraemer). Immediately following the Shelley family's purchase of the property, Louis Kraemer sued the family, the case being taken to the Supreme Court. It was decided that racially restrictive properties violated the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause, thus making racially restrictive properties illegal and guaranteeing that African Americans could purchase property without facing prejudice based on the color of their skin. Granted the right to be able to purchase property without restrictions, African Americans were closer to being accepted in the United States than ever before.
Supreme Court Justice Henry Brown even stated that even though the 14th Amendment seemed to have an intention to make African Americans and whites “equal before the law” it does not mean that they will be equal in society. “Since the Supreme Court had never considered the constitutionality of racially segregated transportation under the Fourteenth Amendment, the court chose to examine the record for legal precedents.” The ‘separate but equal’ doctrine to become a law, “Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in American constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities
In class, we read the official Supreme Court documents associated with the case Gratz v. Bollinger, including the consenting and dissenting opinions of the court. The case explores the role of Affirmative Action in college admission at the University of Michigan. Essentially, the University of Michigan was awarding a certain number of points to each applicant to their school. During their admissions processes, they would add a certain amount of points to an applicant if the applicant was from an underrepresented ethnic group. The Center for Individual Rights contacted two white students who had been denied from the college and brought their case to court, where they sued the University for racial discrimination. Ultimately, because of a technicality, the plaintiff lacked standing.