Professor R. Ben Brown's Law and History Site, Chemerinsky "Supreme Court's Successes and Failures", Parents Involved v. Seattle School District, J.S.

People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.”, In the heat of dispute about a divisive case on affirmative action, it is understandable that Roberts bristled at being called out of touch with reality. The Southern delegation insisted that the charge be deleted; the colonists themselves were implicated in the slave trade, and inclusion of this claim might have made it more difficult to justify the continuation of slavery once the ties to England were severed. . Id., at 24-25.

The combined actions and inactions of the State and Federal Governments maintained Negroes in a position of legal inferiority for another century after the Civil War. 76-811, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, I repeat, for next to the last time: the decision in this case depends on whether you consider the action of the Regents as admitting certain students or as excluding certain other students.

In the words of C. Vann Woodward: "By narrow and ingenious interpretation [the Supreme Court's] decisions over a period of years had whittled away a great part of the authority presumably given the government for protection of civil rights." The landmark case combined five NAACP-sponsored complaints from across the country, all filed by parents of Black children who had been forced to attend segregated schools.

It has been said that this case involves only the individual, Bakke, and this University. I do not believe that anyone can truly look into America's past and still find that a remedy for the effects of the past is impermissible. It is plain that the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended to prohibit measures designed to remedy the effects of the Nation's past treatment of Negroes. The legacy of years of slavery and of years of second-class citizenship in the wake of emancipation could not be so easily eliminated.”, As a result, Marshall wrote, a decade after the civil-rights movement, “The position of the Negro today in America is the tragic but inevitable consequence of centuries of unequal treatment.

To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to ‘wish away, rather than confront’ racial inequality.

In upholding a Louisiana law that required railway companies to provide "equal but separate" accommodations for whites and Negroes, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment was not 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." Congress responded to the legal disabilities being imposed [438 U.S. 265, 391]   in the Southern States by passing the Reconstruction Acts and the Civil Rights Acts. Despite the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Negro was systematically denied the rights those Amendments were supposed to secure. altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect . Jim Crow laws created 'slavery by another name. Such a result would pervert the intent of the Framers by substituting abstract equality for the genuine equality the Amendment was intended to achieve. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., wrote the controlling Bakke opinion, in which he held that racial and ethnic classifications were inherently suspect. That Negroes were deliberately excluded from public graduate and professional schools - and thereby denied the opportunity to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the like - is also well established. In Murray v. Pearson, Marshall attacked the longstanding doctrine established in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which allowed states to exclude people from public facilities because of their race, provided they had access to a “separate but equal” facility. .

disproportionately policed, prosecuted, convicted, disenfranchised, and imprisoned. I cannot even guess the number of state and local governments that have set up affirmative-action programs, which may be affected by today's decision. That gulf was brought about by centuries of slavery and then by another century in which, with the approval of this Court, states were permitted to treat Negroes "specially.". (Here's why filling a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year is so complicated. The black unemployment rate thus was more than twice as great as that for whites during 1977. Had the Court in that decision and others been willing to "do for human liberty and the fundamental rights of American citizenship, what it did .

When the Negro child reaches working age, he finds that America offers him significantly less than it offers his white counterpart. One of the most powerful parts of the dissenting portion of Justice Marshall's opinion in Bakke is a 206-word description of the state of black America in the late 1970s. Supplemental Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 16 (emphasis added).

Marshall faced harsh opposition from Southern senators furious about his legal activism for civil rights.