How has the equal protection clause historically been enforced?
• After the Civil War, the US government, dominated by the Republican Party, forced the Democratic-dominated South to allow blacks civil rights. • Many African Americans voted and even won office in the years immediately after the Civil War. • Republicans eventually dropped their support for Civil Rights and the white Southerners began to persecute and terrorize the black population under a system we refer to as “Jim Crow.” • The U.S. Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional on the grounds that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to the states and not to private businesses. IV. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that state segregation statutes were constitutional as long as the states followed the “separate but equal doctrine.” Organizing for Equality • In response to the Plessy decision, W.E.B. Dubois and others set up the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to try to chip away at Plessy. • In 1938, the Supreme Court rejected a Missouri plan that paid
