2 - The Transformation of Civil Rights – The Jim Crow Years

Summary

John Marshall Harlan deserves a prominent place in any history of civil rights in the United States. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, when eight justices of the United States Supreme Court saw no constitutional violation in a Louisiana law requiring racial segregation in railcars, Justice Harlan stood alone in declaring the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment a barrier to the malicious spread of Jim Crow. The words of his dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) have echoed through the years. “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” he wrote. “In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.