Throughout the history of the United States, the Supreme Court has had the power to both uphold discrimination and dismantle it. A look back at some of the Court’s landmark cases regarding civil rights shows how the Constitution has been interpreted and rights have been expanded, challenged and denied over time.
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Dred Scott, Harriet Robinson Scott and their daughters Eliza and Lizzie Scott were enslaved African Americans living in Missouri. In 1833, they moved with their enslaver to Illinois, which was a free state due to the Missouri Compromise of 1820. They lived there for 10 years until moving back to Louisiana in 1843.
Scott sued his enslaver, John Emerson, on the grounds that he and his family had been held as enslaved people in a free territory for extended periods, which made them free, before returning to a slave state. Emerson held that no African American or descendant of slaves could be a citizen based on Article III of the Constitution. In 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against Scott, citing that the state did not have to follow free states’ laws, and that Scott should have filed in Illinois.
Emerson died in 1843, leaving his estate to his widow, Irene Emerson. While Scott’s initial Missouri freedom suit was in litigation, Irene Emerson moved to Massachusetts and transferred ownership of the Scott family to her brother, John F. A. Sanford (the case was titled Sandford, rather than Sanford, due to a clerical error in the Supreme Court). In 1853, Scott sued again for his and his family’s freedom under federal law. The case was argued before the Court in February 1856 and, in March of the following year, ruled as a 7-2 decision in favor of Sanford.
The Court held that an African American who was a descendant of enslaved people, whether they themselves were free or enslaved, could not be a United States citizen and therefore could not sue in federal court. Further, the majority held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that, under the Fifth Amendment, enslaved persons were property, and any law that would deprive their enslavers of that property was unconstitutional.
The Dred Scott decision became one of the most notorious cases of the Supreme Court and further divided the country on the grounds of slavery, directly fueling the Civil War.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, a Black man, boarded a “whites-only” train car in Louisiana. The state’s Separate Car Act had been enacted two years prior, which mandated that white and Black people couldn’t share the same train cars. Plessy was seven-eighths white and one-eighth Black, which made him legally Black under Louisiana state law. Because he was working with the Comite des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), a group working to repeal the act, he deliberately told the conductor his race, which he was then charged for.
In court, Plessy’s lawyers argued that the act was unconstitutional under the 13th and 14th Amendments. Judge John Howard Ferfuson denied the request to dismiss the charges due to unconstitutionality, which Plessy then appealed to the Supreme Court.
The case was argued before the Court on April 13, 1896, and a month later, the justices ruled 7-1 in favor of Ferguson, holding that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act was constitutional. The case was foundational in establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine, which held that racial segregation was constitutional due to the notion that separate treatment did not imply the inferiority of African Americans. The “separate but equal” doctrine had an immense impact on the United States for over half a century, until it was partially overturned with Brown v. Board of Education (see below) and fully overturned with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, commonly referred to as Brown v. Board, was a consolidation of cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Washington D.C. that involved racial segregation in public schools. In each case, African American students had been prohibited from attending public schools due to state laws that allowed segregation in public education, which had previously been ruled constitutional in concurrence with Plessy v. Ferguson.
The long-standing doctrine of “separate but equal” had been applied to these schools, where racially segregated public facilities were legal as long as the separate facilities were equal. In May 1954, the Supreme Court decided in a unanimous decision that racial segregation in public schools did, in fact, violate the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment, reasoning that the separation of racial minorities instilled a sense of inferiority that was detrimental to the education and personal growth of African American children.
Though the “separate but equal” doctrine was overturned in the field of public education, it was still present in many other aspects of American life. Segregation was gradually dismantled in multiple lawsuits following Brown v. Board and was finally made fully illegal in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Loving v. Virginia (1967)
In 1958, Virginia residents Mildred Loving (then Jeter), a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, married in the District of Columbia. When they returned home, they were sentenced to a year in jail after being found guilty of violating the state’s anti-miscegenation statute, which prohibited interracial marriage, cohabitation and sexual relations.
The Lovings filed a motion to vacate their convictions on the grounds that the state’s statute was unconstitutional, but it was denied. They appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which ruled against them, and then to the Supreme Court of the United States.
In a unanimous decision, the Court ruled that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and that it had no purpose other than “invidious racial discrimination.” Further, the Court ruled that the statute violated the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.
“Under our constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in his majority opinion.
Shaw v. Reno (1993)
After the 1990 census, North Carolina was deemed able to go from 11 districts to 12. The 12th district was drawn in a snake-like shape that seemed to favor creating a “majority-minority” district where Black citizens were the majority.
Ruth O. Shaw was a white citizen in North Carolina’s 12th district who sued the state, alleging that the redistricting was racial gerrymandering and violated the Equal Protection Clause. North Carolina Attorney General Janet Reno argued that the district would allow racial minority groups to have a voice in elections.
In a divisive 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the shape of the 12th district was unusual enough to separate voters based on race and that redistricting based on race should be held to a standard of strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.
