Chapter Ten

Civil Rights Part One:

Race and National Origin

Chapter Outline

A. Overview
B. Civil Rights in Early America

C. The Civil War, Reconstruction, and New Amendments
D. The Jim Crow Era and Retrenchment
E. The Civil Rights Movement
F. Evolving Rights in the Modern Era 

A. Overview

As stated in Chapter Four, there is a difference between civil rights and civil liberties. Although these two terms are often used interchangeably, civil liberties are basic freedoms found in the Bill of Rights that protect individuals from government interference, such as freedom of speech, protection from unreasonable searches, and the right to due process in court. The term civil rights pertains to the government’s duty to ensure equal treatment under the law and prohibit discrimination (FindLaw, Civil Rights vs. Civil Liberties).  This chapter focuses on civil rights as they relate to race and national origin. Issues involving gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, and other protected categories will be explored in the next chapter.  

Although many groups in the United States have experienced racial discrimination, most historians agree that African Americans have endured the most severe and sustained forms of racism. Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians have also experienced significant inequities. Pacific Islanders, non-Latino Caribbean groups, and certain European immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Italians, have likewise been targets of unfair treatment tied to national origin (Equal Justice Initiative, 2022).  Due to the space constraints of an undergraduate textbook, this chapter primarily focuses on the rights of African Americans while also noting key events that significantly affected Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and certain immigrant groups. For a comprehensive historical overview of how all major immigrant communities were treated, Coming to America by Roger Daniels is an excellent resource.

B. Civil Rights in Early America

Slavery has existed throughout human history in many different forms.  It was practiced in ancient Rome for centuries, as well as during the early Islamic conquests. Slavery also resulted from Viking raids and the Medieval Crusades. It was an established and accepted part of Aztec society and the Barbary slave trade. Slavery was common in numerous societies because winners of wars and military conflicts would routinely take prisoners of war and force them into unpaid labor. In many of these societies, people entered slavery through other means, such as caste systems, religious persecution, indebtedness, criminal punishment, or extreme poverty (The History Press, 2018).

However, the institution of slavery that developed in the Americas, particularly in what became the United States, had a specific combination of characteristics that set it apart from other systems.  It was hereditary, legalized, and explicitly based on race, enduring for almost 400 years. It was also rooted in the kidnapping and forced trafficking of more than ten million people over thousands of miles, making it unparalleled in its scale, duration, brutality, and structure (Equal Justice Initiative, 2022).

Examining the history of slavery in the United States requires going back to the 1400s. During that time, European powers such as Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, and the Netherlands sought wealth by sailing to different areas around the globe, including Africa and the Americas. Advances in shipbuilding and navigation made long ocean voyages possible and allowed these nations to create maritime routes, establish trade networks, colonize other regions, seize people by force, and transport those they abducted across the Atlantic on a massive scale. Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal sponsored exploration along the African coast in the 1400s, and by the 1500s, Portuguese colonial leaders in Brazil, such as Duarte Coelho, expanded the forced transport of enslaved Africans to supply labor for sugar plantations (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.).

During this same period, Christopher Columbus and other Spanish colonizers enslaved Indigenous people in the Caribbean, particularly on the island of Hispaniola, which is present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Colonizers displaced Indigenous populations from their lands and devastated them through disease, famine, violence, and forced labor. A detailed account of these atrocities can be found in Chapter 1 of A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn .  

As Native populations declined, Europeans increasingly turned to Africa as a primary source of forced labor, a system made possible in part by numerous West and Central African kingdoms that sold prisoners of war and other captives to European slave traders in exchange for goods such as weapons and textiles. This demand for forced labor existed because plantation owners in the South chose not to hire or fairly compensate paid labor, instead relying on slavery to maximize profits. Industries in the North also willingly purchased the products of enslaved labor, despite knowing the exploitation involved in producing the goods. Together, these practices created an economy that prioritized profit and wealth over human rights (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.).

This system took root in North America in 1619, when a ship brought about 20 enslaved Africans to Jamestown, Virginia, where they were sold to English colonists. This event directly connected the colonies to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a global system that operated as a triangular trade route. The first leg involved ships carrying manufactured goods to Africa, the Middle Passage transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, and the third leg returned ships to Europe with goods produced through enslaved labor (Equal Justice Initiative, 2022). 

The 1619 Project, an initiative by The New York Times, identifies this event, rather than 1776, as a critical turning point that shaped the economic foundations, legal systems, racial hierarchies, and political development of the United States. The project emphasizes that slavery and racial inequality are central, not incidental, to the American story (The New York Times, 2019). Critics of The 1619 Project, however, argue that while slavery is a central part of American history, it should not replace 1776 as the nation’s founding framework or be treated as the primary explanation for American institutions and values (Wood et al., 2019).

Regardless of one’s interpretation of the role of slavery in the founding of the United States, the nation’s founding documents did not ensure any rights for enslaved people. The Articles of Confederation did not mention slavery, and when the United States Constitution was first ratified, it the referenced enslaved people only three times.  In all three instances, it condoned the institution of slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise, found in in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3,  required that representation in the House of Representatives be based on “the whole Number of free Persons” plus “three fifths of all other Persons.”  Article I, Section 9, Clause 3, known as the Slave Trade Clause, stated that Congress was not allowed to ban the importation of people into the United States before the year 1808.  And the Fugitive Slave Clause, found in Article IV, Section 2, required enslaved people who escaped to free states to be returned to their enslavers.

Almost two decades after the Constitution was ratified, Congress responded to political pressure to address the Transatlantic Slave Trade by using the power provided in the Slave Trade Clause. In 1807, it passed the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves. The Act, which went into effect on January 1, 1808, did not ban slavery itself. It only made further importation of enslaved people illegal. It followed years of debate in Congress and reflected multiple political forces, including pressure from abolitionists, fears of slave uprisings, and the economic interests of slaveholders. (Library of Congress, Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, n.d.).

In 1825, the Supreme Court of the United States had to consider how the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves operated in an international context. That year, it decided The Antelope, a case involving a ship carrying hundreds of Africans that had been seized by a privateer and later intercepted by a U.S. ship enforcing federal law. The Court had to determine the legal status of these Africans when their importation was illegal under U.S. law but remained legal under the laws of the nations whose ships and citizens had originally carried them. The Court acknowledged that “the African slave trade is contrary to the law of nature,” a historic statement about the immorality of slavery. Nevertheless, the Court held that the slave trade was legal in other nations and recognized the property claims of the enslavers. It ordered some of the Africans to be returned to them and ruled that the United States could not impose its anti-slavery laws on foreign vessels.

Almost two decades later, the Court decided Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), holding that federal fugitive slave laws were superior to state personal liberty laws. The Supreme Court ruled that states could not interfere with the recapture of enslaved people who had escaped from slave states into free states. The decision strengthened the power of slave catchers and limited state efforts to protect free Black residents. It remained binding precedent until slavery was abolished.

This history forms the backdrop to the first time African American people sought relief through the courts. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), an enslaved man named Dred Scott argued that he had become free because he had lived with his enslaver in free territory. He asked the Supreme Court to recognize his freedom. The Court not only denied his claim but issued one of the most devastating rulings in American history. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Black people, whether free or enslaved, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and therefore could not be citizens under the Constitution or bring cases in federal court. 

The Dred Scott ruling also struck down the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, while banning slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase. The Court contended that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in these areas and that doing so violated enslavers’ Fifth Amendment property rights. By declaring Congress powerless to restrict slavery’s expansion, the Dred Scott decision inflamed national tensions and moved the country closer to the Civil War. It also established the precedent that Black Americans, enslaved or free, were considered non-citizens under federal law and had no standing to seek relief in federal courts (Equal Justice Initiative, 2022).

Meanwhile, Native Americans, Asians, and Latinos also faced discrimination and violence during this era, although their experiences were shaped by different factors. Native Americans endured warfare, forced displacement, and repeated treaty violations by the federal government, culminating in the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears in the late 1830s. Latinos living in the Southwest experienced political upheaval and widespread loss of land rights as the United States expanded westward, particularly after the Mexican-American War and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Asian immigration was limited during this period, but early Chinese migrants, especially on the West Coast, already faced hostility, exclusion, and discriminatory local laws (National Archives, n.d.; Library of Congress, n.d.; Smithsonian Institution, n.d.).

C. The Civil War, Reconstruction, and New Amendments 

The tensions fueled by the Dred Scott decision pushed the United States toward a full political crisis. Eleven Southern states seceded from the Union following Abraham Lincoln’s election. Their secession created a direct standoff between the states claiming independence, which joined together as the Confederacy, and the federal government asserting its constitutional authority. These events set the stage for armed confrontation between the two sides. The Civil War began in April of 1861 when tensions between the Union and the Confederacy escalated into armed conflict at the Battle of Fort Sumter in South Carolina (Library of Congress, Timeline of Civil War, n.d.). 

The Civil War lasted four years and resulted in an estimated 620,000–750,000 military deaths.  Modern demographic analysis suggests the total may be as high as 850,000 (Hacker, 2011). In addition, tens of thousands of enslaved and recently freed African Americans died from violence, disease, starvation, and harsh conditions in camps. Some historians now argue that including the deaths of the enslaved raises the total Civil War death toll to well over one million. The war ended in 1865 when the Confederacy was militarily defeated, its government collapsed, and Union forces occupied Southern territory (Downs, 2012).

When the Civil War ended and the Confederacy surrendered, the legal status of millions of formerly enslaved people began to change. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared that people enslaved in the Confederate states were free, but it did not apply to those in the Union’s border states or in areas of the South already under Union control.  Because Lincoln issued the proclamation as a wartime measure, its effect was limited to regions “in rebellion.” These unequal laws, the devastation of the Southern landscape, and the need to bring the eleven formerly Confederate states back into the Union led the nation into a period called Reconstruction (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, n.d.) .

The Reconstruction period, which lasted from 1865 to 1877,  refers to when the United States worked to reintegrate the Southern states, rebuild the region, and define the rights of formerly enslaved people. This was done through new laws, federal oversight, and the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The process of drafting and ratifying all three amendments took five years in total, an exceptionally fast pace given their sweeping constitutional changes (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, n.d.). 

As in prior chapters, the original text of the amendments is quoted below.  A plain-English explanation of the amendments follows. Later sections in this chapter explain how the courts have interpreted and applied these amendments. 

The Reconstruction Amendments

Amendment XIII

• SECTION. 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

• SECTION. 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

This amendment may seem like it needs no plain-English explanation, but it actually does. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery, but it still allows an exception for involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.  This part of the Thirteenth Amendment remains controversial today because it means inmates in jails and prisons can legally be forced to work for little or no pay.  This exception clause has been the subject of significant debate and critique. The documentary 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay, argues that the exception allowing involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime created a loophole that enabled systems of racial control to continue after the abolition of slavery, particularly through mass incarceration and what the film describes as the “prison industrial complex.” According to the film, these practices function as a modern form of coerced labor that disproportionately affects African Americans (DuVernay, 2016). This interpretation is controversial, and critics argue that the film oversimplifies the history of criminal law, incarceration, and labor practices. They also argue it stretches the constitutional meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment. Students interested in this debate are encouraged to watch 13th and to read scholarly and journalistic critiques that challenge its claims and historical accuracy.

Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment empowered Congress to pass enforcement legislation, which it did by enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1866.  This Act was signed into law before the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were even ratified.  It was the first federal law to define citizenship and to guarantee basic civil rights for all Americans. It declared that all people born in the United States, except Native Americans at that time, were citizens and were entitled to the same fundamental rights as white Americans, including the rights to make contracts, own property, and access the courts. Congress passed the Act specifically to counter the Black Codes, but Southern resistance and widespread noncompliance made enforcement difficult, ultimately leading Congress to secure these protections more firmly through the Fourteenth Amendment.

Amendment XIV

SECTION. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 1 begins by guaranteeing birthright citizenship, meaning that anyone born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction is automatically a U.S. citizen and a citizen of the state where they live. It also states that no state may make or enforce laws that take away the privileges or immunities of U.S. citizens. This amendment also includes two major protections that apply to any person, not only citizens: states may not deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and they may not deny any person the equal protection of the laws.

SECTION. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

This part of the Fourteenth Amendment says that seats in the U.S. House of Representatives must be divided among the states based on their total population, counting everyone who lives there except Native Americans, who were not taxed at the time. It also says if a state takes away the right to vote from adult male citizens age 21 or older, or restricts their voting rights for any reason other than rebellion or a crime, then that state will lose a proportional share of its representation in Congress.  

SECTION. 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

This section says certain people are barred from holding government office. It applies to anyone who once swore an oath to support the U.S. Constitution, like a member of Congress, a federal or state official, or a member of the military. If that person later took part in a rebellion or insurrection against the United States, or helped its enemies in any way, they cannot serve in Congress, cannot be an elector for President or Vice President, and cannot hold any federal or state office. The amendment also gives Congress a way to remove this ban. If two-thirds of both the House and the Senate vote to lift the restriction, the person can regain eligibility for office. This section has become newly relevant in recent years because courts and lawmakers have debated whether it applies to events like the January 6, 2021 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.  

SECTION. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Put simply, the U.S. must pay all its lawful debts, especially those related to defeating the Confederacy, but neither the federal government nor any state can pay Confederate debts or compensate former slaveholders for losing enslaved people. This section was added to make sure the Confederacy could never be financially restored and to stop slaveholders from claiming they were owed money after emancipation.

SECTION. 5. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

This language gives Congress the authority to pass laws to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. Many major civil rights laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, were passed under this enforcement power.

Amendment XV

SECTION. 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

SECTION. 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Fifteenth Amendment says neither the federal government or the states can deny someone the right to vote because of their race or because they were previously enslaved. At the time it was passed in 1870, this protection applied only to males. Even though the amendment banned racial discrimination in voting, many states developed new methods to prevent Black men from exercising this right. These methods included poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, intimidation, and violence. As previously noted, Congress later used its enforcement power to pass laws such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to stop these practices.

Although the Reconstruction Amendments promised freedom and new legal rights for formerly enslaved people, those protections were not immediately realized.  As noted earlier, even while the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were being drafted, Southern states enacted Black Codes that restricted nearly every aspect of life for newly freed people. Black Codes were state laws designed to control the movement, labor, and basic freedoms of African Americans in order to preserve a system as close to slavery as possible.  For example, Mississippi’s 1865 Vagrancy Act required African Americans to show written proof of employment and allowed arrests for unemployment, often forcing individuals into unpaid or underpaid labor. Other Black Codes limited job opportunities or required long term labor contracts. When Reconstruction ended in 1877 and federal troops withdrew, white-controlled state governments regained full power, dismantled many remaining protections, and eventually replaced the Black Codes with the Jim Crow laws (National Archives, n.d.; Mississippi Black Code, 1865).

D. The Jim Crow Era and Retrenchment

Beginning in the 1870s, Southern states began enacting Jim Crow laws. The term “Jim Crow” likely originated from a 19th-century minstrel-show character based on a derogatory and racist caricature of African American speech and dance.  These state and local mandates formed a sweeping system of rules that enforced racial segregation and were promoted by white leaders known as “Redeemers", a political coalition of Southern Democrats who sought to regain control after Reconstruction and roll back the civil and political rights newly gained by African Americans (Library of Congress, Jim Crow Era, n.d.).

Jim Crow laws mandated separate facilities for Black and white people in nearly every aspect of public life, including schools, transportation, housing, restaurants, hospitals, parks, restrooms, and drinking fountains. One prominent example was Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, which required segregated railroad cars. These laws operated alongside voting restrictions, such as literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and strict residency and record-keeping requirements. These measures disenfranchised Black citizens and preserved unequal political and economic advantages for white Americans that lasted for generations (National Park Service, n.d.).

Before the Supreme Court ruled on the legitimacy of Jim Crow laws, it decided Yick Woo v. Hopkins (1886). In that case, the Court struck down San Francisco’s discriminatory enforcement of a neutral laundry-permit ordinance that had been used almost exclusively to shut down Chinese-owned businesses. The Court held that unequal enforcement of a neutral law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. More importantly, they ruled that these protections apply to all persons in the United States, not just citizens. Some legal scholars at the time believed the Yick Woo decision signaled a future in which the Supreme Court would no longer condone racial discrimination, but that prediction did not come true for almost 70 years. Instead, American jurisprudence saw a series of Supreme Court decisions and acts of Congress that continued to uphold discriminatory practices (Chin, 1998).

This trend began with Elk v. Wilkins (1884), a case in which the Court ruled that Native Americans who left their tribes and lived among the general population were not automatically citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Justices made clear that citizenship required the consent of the U.S. government and that Congress had to grant it explicitly. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating and barred all Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens. The Ping decision established the “plenary power” doctrine, which gives Congress sweeping authority to exclude non-citizens from entering the country. And in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the Court held that Congress may deport non-citizens without a jury trial and characterized deportation as a civil rather than criminal process (Haney López, 2006).

Although they were later nullified by subsequent laws, two acts of Congress from this period further demonstrated the government’s acceptance of discriminatory policies. The Dawes Act of 1887 ended communal tribal landholding by Native Americans by dividing reservations into individual allotments for Native families. The Act also involved selling the remaining “surplus” land to white settlers, resulting in massive Native land loss. The Curtis Act of 1898 extended these policies to the Five Civilized Tribes, dissolving many of their tribal courts and governments and further weakening tribal sovereignty (Library of Congress, Dawes Act and Curtis Act, n.d.).

These federal policies, combined with discriminatory state laws, set the stage for the Supreme Court to formally sanction segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man of mixed Black and white ancestry, boarded a whites-only railroad car in Louisiana as part of a planned challenge to the state’s segregation law. He openly told the conductor he was Black, refused to move to the “colored” car, and was arrested. Plessy argued that the law violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments because it treated Black passengers as inferior citizens, but when his case reached the Supreme Court, the justices ruled against him. They declared that Louisiana’s segregation law was constitutional, claiming that separating Black and white people did not violate equal protection as long as the facilities were “separate but equal.” This decision gave formal legal approval to segregation, allowing Jim Crow laws to spread further across the South and shape American life for more than half a century. 

D. The Jim Crow Era and Retrenchment - continued 

Following Plessy v. Ferguson, the nation’s attitudes regarding race combined with wartime fears during World War I started to prompt a new series of federal immigration laws. The Immigration Act of 1917, also called the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, expanded earlier restrictions by banning immigration from most of Asia beyond China. It was shaped by wartime nationalism and suspicion toward immigrants who were viewed as potential political or security risks. The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act, went even further by creating strict national-origin quotas that favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, sharply limiting those from Southern and Eastern Europe, and completely banning immigration from nearly all Asian countries. Together, these laws reflected how wartime fears and racial attitudes produced some of the most restrictive and openly exclusionary immigration policies in U.S. history (Library of Congress, Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1924, n.d.).

The climate of racial exclusion that shaped immigration policy in the 1910s and 1920s experienced a temporary shift during the Great Depression and World War II, but only for certain groups and largely for strategic reasons. During this period, Congress, responding to political pressure, reversed some of the earlier damage to Native American sovereignty by passing the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This Act ended allotment, the policy that divided tribal land into individual plots for Native families and sold the remaining “surplus” land to non-Native settlers. It also restored communal landholding and supported tribal self-government. Additionally, international alliances during World War II, particularly the U.S. partnership with China after it was attacked by Japan, pressured the United States to revisit immigration laws affecting Chinese nationals. This led to the Magnuson Act of 1943, which repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and permitted limited Chinese immigration and naturalization (Library of Congress, Indian Reorganization Act of 1934; Magnuson Act of 1943, n.d.).

Although these mid-century reforms signaled a retreat from earlier discriminatory policies, they did not reflect a broad shift in civil liberties. An entirely different political climate emerged after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Although the United States granted more rights to Native Americans and eased restrictions on Chinese immigrants, it soon targeted Japanese Americans as security threats, issuing Executive Order 9066 and authorizing their forced removal and incarceration in internment camps. In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court upheld this policy, accepting the government’s wartime justifications even though the internment was based on race and lacked evidence of individual wrongdoing.

The Korematsu decision is now widely condemned, but it marked one of the first times the Court applied what would later be known as strict scrutiny, the highest level of review for government actions that classify people by race, although it did not use the words "strict scrutiny" yet.  The Court did say that racial classifications are “immediately suspect,” and that they "must be subjected to the most rigid scrutiny.”

Under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, courts eventually developed a three-tiered system for evaluating whether laws that treat groups differently are constitutional. This system asks how closely the government’s purpose and its chosen method must be examined, depending on the type of classification involved. This system consists of:

• Rational basis review, the most deferential level, applies when a law does not involve a protected class or a fundamental right. The government only needs to show that the law is reasonably related to a legitimate public purpose.

• Intermediate scrutiny applies when the government uses classifications such as gender. The government must show that the law is substantially related to an important governmental objective.

• Strict scrutiny, the most demanding standard, applies when the government classifies people based on race or infringes on a fundamental right. In these cases, the government must prove that the law serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest (Chemerinsky, 2019.)

In the years after World War II, the United States began moving into a period characterized by significant shifts in constitutional law and expanding debates about individual rights.

E.  The Civil Rights Movement

By the early 1950s, racial segregation in public schools and in many other areas of daily life had been deeply entrenched in the United States for generations. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) became the landmark case that directly challenged this system and reshaped the constitutional meaning of equality. Its ruling that “separate” was inherently unequal eventually helped dismantle segregation in other parts of American society, especially when reinforced by later civil rights legislation.

However, a lesser-known case decided just two weeks before Brown also deserves attention. It signaled that the Supreme Court recognized discrimination affecting groups beyond African Americans. In Hernandez v. Texas (1954), the Court held that Mexican Americans constituted a distinct class protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. The case arose after Pete Hernandez, a Mexican American farm worker, was convicted by an all-white jury in a Texas county where no person of Mexican descent had served on a jury for more than 25 years. The Court unanimously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment protects all racial and ethnic groups, not only Black and white Americans, and that systematically excluding Mexican Americans from juries violated equal protection guarantees. 

Only two weeks later, the Court decided Brown v. Board of Education.

E. The Civil Rights Movement - continued 

The victory in Brown v. Board of Education was significant, but it required a second ruling, Brown v. Board of Education II (1955), to address how desegregation would actually be carried out. In that follow-up decision, the Supreme Court ordered states to implement school desegregation “with all deliberate speed.” Many states delayed compliance or engaged in open resistance of the Court's mandate. In some places, like Arkansas, the Little Rock Nine had to be escorted into school by federal troops to ensure their safety and enforce the Court’s ruling.  Similar federal interventions occurred in a half dozen other communities across the South. Although it was uncommon for the Supreme Court to issue a second decision to ensure its rulings are followed, massive resistance to desegregation made this additional step necessary (Library of Congress, School Desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement, n.d.).

As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s, Congress took steps toward addressing racial discrimination for the first time since Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and authorized the Justice Department to bring lawsuits against states that suppressed Black voting, marking the first federal civil rights law enacted in more than eighty years. The Act was largely symbolic because its enforcement mechanisms were weak, and many states continued to block Black voters through intimidation, literacy tests, and local obstruction. However, these limitations demonstrated that far stronger protections were needed  (National Archives, Civil Rights Act of 1957, n.d.).

Those needs were met seven years later with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most significant legislative victory achieved by civil rights advocates. The law prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in several major areas of American life. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. worked tirelessly to secure its passage by organizing marches, lobbying lawmakers, and building national pressure to end legal discrimination. The Act banned discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters. It also outlawed segregation in public facilities, authorized federal enforcement of school desegregation, cut off federal funding to programs that practiced discrimination, and prohibited employment discrimination. It further created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce these protections (Miller Center, n.d.).

The 1964 Act addressed the weaknesses of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which the Supreme Court had overturned because Congress lacked authority to regulate discrimination by private actors. Congress avoided the state action barrier by grounding the 1964 law in its constitutional authority under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, justifications made clear in the Act’s legislative history and later acknowledged in Supreme Court decisions upholding its constitutionality  (Miller Center, n.d.).

The next challenge for civil rights advocates was tackling the voting barriers that continued to prevent Black Americans and other groups from political participation. This led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This legislation outlawed discriminatory practices such as literacy tests, understanding tests, and other devices that states had long used to suppress minority voting.  It also required federal oversight, known as “preclearance,” in jurisdictions with documented histories of racial discrimination. Under this system, those states and counties had to obtain federal approval before changing any voting rules or procedures. The Voting Rights Act dramatically increased voter registration and turnout among Black Americans and remains one of the most effective civil rights laws ever enacted. Later Supreme Court decisions weakened parts of the Act, raising new questions about how voting rights should be protected today.  Those questions will be addressed in Chapter 14. 

The year 1965 also saw the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments, commonly known as the Hart–Celler Act. This law eliminated the discriminatory national-origins quota system that had long favored immigrants from northern and western Europe and replaced it with a system based on family reunification and employment-based criteria. The Act opened the door to large-scale immigration from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean, permanently reshaping the demographic makeup of the United States (National Archives, Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, n.d.).

As Congress reshaped the nation’s immigration laws, the Supreme Court was also confronting other longstanding forms of racial discrimination. In Loving v. Virginia (1967) the Supreme Court struck down state laws that banned interracial marriage. At the time, sixteen states still enforced anti-miscegenation laws, statutes that made marriages between people of different races illegal. The case involved Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Loving, a Black woman, who had married legally in Washington, D.C. , but they were arrested when they returned to their home in Virginia. They were convicted under Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act and ordered to leave the state for 25 years. The Lovings challenged their convictions, and in 1967 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that marriage is a fundamental right and that racial classifications designed to preserve a racially segregated social order could not withstand constitutional scrutiny.

The civil rights movement continued to expose discrimination beyond schools, workplaces, and voting, and Congress turned its attention to unequal treatment in housing. Decades of practices such as redlining and racially restrictive covenants contributed to deeply segregated neighborhoods across the United States. Redlining occurred when banks and federal agencies refused to insure mortgages in neighborhoods where Black or other minority residents lived. Racially restrictive covenants were private agreements that prevented homeowners from selling their property to nonwhite buyers. Together with other forms of discriminatory lending, these practices denied minority families equal access to housing and economic opportunity. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, color, religion, or national origin. Congress enacted the law just one week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Act marked a major step toward dismantling segregation in American neighborhoods (Mapping Inequality Project, n.d.).

Fifteen years of civil rights advocacy resulted in numerous legal victories for African Americans.  Yet, America still did not treat them equally. Before moving onto more recent civil rights, please view the slideshow from my family’s visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. It provides an overview of key events and developments from the civil rights period. You may be asked questions about its content on a future quiz!
 

F. Evolving Rights in the Modern Era 

The civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s coincided with a broader shift toward strengthening tribal sovereignty and protecting the rights of Native Americans. The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 applied many core Bill of Rights protections to tribal governments while still recognizing their sovereign status. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 expanded tribal authority by recognizing the rights of tribes to operate federal programs themselves, including schools, healthcare systems, and law-enforcement services. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 protected the rights of Native peoples to practice traditional religions, access sacred worship sites, and use ceremonial objects. And the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) gave tribes authority over foster care and adoption decisions involving Native children, addressing the widespread and harmful removal of Native youth from their families and communities (National Park Service, The Struggle for Sovereignty n.d.). 

Progress for Native Americans occurred alongside broader national efforts to eliminate discrimination, including in the workplace. One of the most significant of these efforts was the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. Although the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had been created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the agency initially had very limited authority. It could receive discrimination complaints, investigate them, and attempt to resolve cases through voluntary conciliation, but it lacked the power to enforce the law or bring lawsuits on behalf of workers. If negotiations failed, the EEOC could only refer cases to the Justice Department, which could choose whether to take action. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 changed this framework by giving the EEOC authority to sue employers directly for discrimination and improved enforcement procedures for federal employees. These reforms transformed the EEOC from a largely advisory body into an active civil-rights enforcement agency and significantly expanded workplace protections nationwide (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, n.d.).

As the rights of Americans expanded in the workplace, new questions about fairness and equal treatment also emerged in education, particularly in the context of Affirmative Action. Merriam-Webster defines Affirmative Action as “the use of policies, legislation, programs, and procedures to improve the educational or employment opportunities of members of certain demographic groups (such as minority groups, women, and older people) as a remedy to the effects of long-standing discrimination against such groups.” The constitutionality of Affirmative Action reached the Supreme Court in 1978. 

The landmark case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) involved Allan Bakke, a white applicant to the UC Davis medical school who challenged the university’s admissions policy. The policy reserved 16 out of 100 seats for applicants from designated minority groups as part of a special admissions program intended to expand diversity and remedy the effects of past discrimination. Bakke was rejected twice, despite having grades and test scores higher than some students admitted through the special program. He sued, arguing that the quota system discriminated against him based on race and violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the Court issued a fractured opinion, two major conclusions emerged. First, quotas were unconstitutional. Systems like the UC Davis practice of setting aside a fixed number of seats for specific racial groups violated equal protection. Second, the Court held that race could still be considered as one factor among many in an individualized, holistic admissions process. As a result, Bakke was both a victory and a limitation for civil rights advocates. It prohibited strict racial quotas but preserved the ability of schools to consider race as part of efforts to promote diversity. 

The Supreme Court issued several later decisions refining how Affirmative Action could operate, but the core Bakke principle allowing race to be considered as one factor in admissions remained in place for over forty years until the Court sharply changed course.  In 2023, the Supreme Court fundamentally reshaped the legal landscape of university admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. In these consolidated cases, the Court held that colleges and universities may no longer consider race as a factor in their admissions decisions, ruling that the race-conscious policies used by Harvard and UNC violated the Equal Protection Clause. The majority decision stated that such programs relied on racial classifications in ways the Constitution does not permit and lacked sufficiently measurable objectives to justify their use. This decision marked a major departure from prior decisions and effectively ended Affirmative Action policies nationwide.

Even as the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of race-conscious policies in college admissions, a broader social and legal movement emerged to address other forms of racial discrimination that persisted in workplaces and educational institutions. The CROWN Act (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) prohibits race-based hair discrimination by providing legal protection to those who wear protective hairstyles, such as braids, locs, twists, Afros, and Bantu knots. The Act was first enacted in California in 2019, and it is now adopted by 28 states.  The CROWN Act reflects an evolving understanding of how racial bias can operate through cultural and appearance-based standards, even after formal legal equality has been established. The CROWN Act's official website provides additional background on the movement, the law’s legal framework, and current federal and state efforts to expand the Act. 

An analysis of evolving rights based on race and national origin would be incomplete without also examining recent changes affecting undocumented people and understanding that immigration rights tend to expand or contract depending on the political climate and the priorities of national leaders.  Starting this analysis requires briefly going back about forty years in time for context.  In Plyler v. Doe (1982), the Supreme Court held that states cannot deny free K–12 public education to undocumented children because doing so violates the Equal Protection Clause.  A few years later, Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which created a major legalization program, often referred to as “amnesty", that allowed millions of undocumented immigrants who met specific requirements to obtain legal status.  Both of these developments occurred during the Reagan administration, and while it would be an oversimplification to describe Ronald Reagan as  “pro-immigrant,” he did sign the IRCA and often spoke favorably about immigration, including in his farewell address, where he remarked that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American” and warned that “if we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.” (Library of Congress, n.d.; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, n.d.).

Fast forward to a decade later, public attitudes toward immigration had shifted considerably. Concerns about unauthorized immigration, initiatives such as California’s Proposition 187, and a growing national focus on crime and security created political pressure for far stricter immigration laws. In 1996, Congress responded by passing the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which expanded the range of deportable offenses, made many deportations mandatory, limited judicial review, and created faster “removal” procedures (IIRIRA, 1996). A few years later, after the 9/11 attacks, the federal government reorganized the entire immigration system, replacing the Immigration and Naturalization Service with three new agencies: ICE, CBP, and USCIS.  ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) carries out interior enforcement and deportations, CBP (Customs and Border Protection) oversees border security and entry into the United States, and USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) administers immigration benefits such as visas, green cards, and naturalization. These agencies were placed under the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These changes occurred under two different presidents from different political parties, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, yet they reflected a broader period in which public fears about job competition, crime, and terrorism shaped the nation’s approach to immigration policy (Homeland Security Act of 2002) .

By 2012, the intense immigration crackdowns of the 1990s and early 2000s had begun to ease, creating space for policies that offered limited relief to certain undocumented residents. That year, the Obama administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program through executive action. DACA does not provide lawful status or a path to citizenship, but it allows eligible undocumented individuals who were brought to the United States as children to receive temporary protection from deportation and work authorization, both renewable every two years. To qualify, applicants must have arrived before age 16, lived continuously in the United States since 2007, been under age 31 in 2012, be enrolled in school or have completed high school or military service, and have no significant criminal convictions. Although limited in scope and duration, DACA reflected a modest shift toward recognizing the humanitarian concerns surrounding young people who had long-established lives in the United States. (Napolitano, 2012). The program was created during a time period when Congress was deeply divided over immigration reform; however, the progressive stance of the Obama administration regarding immigration prompted it to act independently and provide limited relief to a narrow group of undocumented residents who had become known as “Dreamers.”

After President Obama’s term ended, Donald Trump was elected and took office in 2017. Trump adopted a sharply different philosophy on immigration and issued numerous executive orders that dramatically expanded enforcement, resulting in significantly reduced protections for undocumented immigrants. His first-term directives focused on accelerating construction of barriers along the southern border, increasing immigration detention capacity, and broadening interior enforcement so that nearly all undocumented immigrants could be targeted for removal. The administration also implemented travel bans, intensified cooperation between local police and ICE, reduced refugee admissions, and increased vetting for immigration benefits and naturalization. These actions eliminated many previous limits on immigration enforcement and contributed to widespread workplace and neighborhood raids. Most of these first-term immigration policies remained in place after court challenges, except for portions of the original travel ban, which were struck down before the administration issued a revised version that the Supreme Court later upheld. The sanctuary-city penalty provisions of EO 13768, which sought to withhold federal funds from jurisdictions that limited cooperation with ICE, were struck down in court and never reinstated (Executive Order 13767, 2017; Executive Order 13768, 2017; Proclamation 9844, 2019; Executive Order 13769, 2017).

During Trump’s second term, which began in January of 2025, the administration has continued an aggressive approach toward immigration enforcement. Several new executive orders have expanded detention capacity for detainees, increased the number of immigration enforcement personnel, resumed border wall construction, broadened efforts to pressure or penalize jurisdictions labeled as “sanctuary” cities, and prioritized the removal of virtually all undocumented immigrant.s (Executive Orders 14165 and 14287). The administration has also issued a separate set of “citizenship integrity” orders, which has increased scrutiny in naturalization cases and expanded background checks and vetting for individuals applying for immigration benefits.  (Executive Orders 14160 and 14161). In addition, Trump issued a renewed emergency declaration at the border, which redirected more federal funds toward enforcement.  This has resulted in intensified and ongoing ICE raids throughout the country (Proclamation 10886).

Lawsuits challenging the administration’s second-term executive orders as of November 2025 are too numerous to cover in full, but one key case is Trump v. CASA (2025). In that case, the Supreme Court reviewed the Trump administration’s revised public charge rule, which made it more difficult for immigrants to obtain green cards if they had used, or were likely to use, certain public benefits. CASA de Maryland and several other public interest groups argued that the rule discriminated against low-income immigrants, conflicted with federal immigration law, and unlawfully expanded executive authority. The Court upheld the rule, concluding that the executive branch has broad discretion under the Immigration and Nationality Act to define who qualifies as a public charge and found no equal protection violation because the rule applied to all non-citizens regardless of national origin. The most consequential part of the decision, however, was the Court’s holding that federal district court judges may not issue injunctions extending beyond their own geographic jurisdiction, unless Congress clearly authorizes it.  This part of the CASA ruling has overturned decades of practice in which nationwide injunctions were commonly used in immigration, civil-rights, voting-rights, and environmental cases. As a result, people who believe their civil rights have been violated now must sue individually or attempt to meet the complex and burdensome requirements of class action litigation, rather than benefiting from a single injunction that protects everyone in the same situation.

Less than two months later, the Supreme Court heard Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo (2025). In that case, the Supreme Court granted the federal government’s request to pause a district court order that had blocked ICE and DHS from conducting immigration stops in Los Angeles based solely on factors such as race, speaking Spanish, location, or type of work. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence argued that immigration officers may rely on race among other factors and consider the “totality of circumstances” to form reasonable suspicion of unlawful presence. Justice Sotomayor dissented, arguing that the government’s mass raids violated the Fourth Amendment and that the stay allowed unconstitutional seizures of Latino residents to continue.

Legal advocates argue that Trump v. CASA and Noem v. Vásquez Perdomo appear to conflict with earlier Supreme Court decisions that recognized strong constitutional protections for non-citizens. For example, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Court held that the Equal Protection Clause protects all persons, regardless of citizenship, striking down discriminatory enforcement of a San Francisco ordinance against Chinese immigrants. After Wong Wing v. United States (1896) confirmed that non-citizens are entitled to core due-process protections in criminal proceedings, the Court continued to recognize additional constitutional safeguards. In Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the Court acknowledged that deportation, although technically a civil process, still requires basic procedural fairness.  And in SFFA v. Harvard (2023), the court said that treating individuals differently based on race violated equal protection guarantees. Although these cases established robust constitutional protections for non-citizens, the durability of those principles remains uncertain, and future litigation will determine whether the Court continues to narrow or reaffirm these long-standing rights.

Conclusion

The struggle for racial equality in the United States has not followed a linear path.  African Americans and other groups have consistently struggled to have their rights recognized by the government, and other groups have consistently tried to maintain the status quo. The Supreme Court, Congress, and the Executive Branch have shaped civil rights in different ways and have contributed to evolving interpretations of equality as well as competing visions of how the nation should apply the law. These patterns make clear that civil rights in the United States are never static and always require continued vigilance and advocacy.

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