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Dred Scott was a slave who lived with his master in Illinois from 1833-1843, where slavery was illegal. When they returned to their home state of Missouri, he sued for his freedom because he had lived in Illinois for so long. The court ruled that slaves counted as property under the 5th Amendment and any law taking away slaves from their masters was therefore unconstitutional. Also, slaves aren’t us citizens because “their ancestors where imported”.
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Slavery is illegal in the United States, except int the cases of “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. This to me means slavery is allowed in the prison system. The law was passed before the civil war, less than 3 months before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. It was passed before the Southern states had rejoined the union so it would pass more easily, though it took a around a year for it to pass in the house after it had passed in the senate.
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The 14th Amendment gave citizenship to all people born in the United States. This was so African Americans, who could’ve previously been denied citizenship because their ancestors were “imported”, could automatically gain citizenship by virtue of being born here. It also penalized states who restricted voting by reducing there representation in congress and banned those who “engaged in insurrection” to hold military, civil, or public office.
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The 15th Amendment gave African American men the right to vote. While it doesn’t explicitly list African American men it does say,” 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.” So, the men could not be denied the right to vote for being black or a slave.
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Louisiana enacted a law where railroads had to have separate railway cars for blacks and whites. The Comite des Citoyens in New Orleans wanted to repeal the act, as did railways who were upset they now had to buy extra cars. Homer Plessy, who was seven eights white, agreed to participate in a demonstration where he refused to leave a white train car. Plessy’s lawyers argued the case violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The law was upheld because “separate treatment was not unequal”
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Introduced to congress in 1878, the bill was finally passed in 1919 and ratified in 1920. While some of the colonies has originally offered suffrage to women, each state had banned or severely limited it by 1807. The women’s suffrage movement lasted for decades with American Women’s going to jail and on hunger strikes for the right to vote.
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This case sued the Board of Education in Topeka Kansas but was also a consolation of similar cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington D.C. African American children across the country applied to public schools and being denied entry, justified because they were “separate but equal. The courts unanimously sided with the students, saying that separate but equal facilities for minorities was inherently unequal and violated the 14th amendment.
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Taxes placed on voting to keep poor people (African Americans who had been disenfranchised since slavery) from voting. Banned in the voting rights act and 24th Amendment.
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Affirmative action is when a government enacts policies or practices to include groups based on gender, race, creed or nationality because they’ve previously excluded. This is seen today in jobs and colleges. Court cases surrounding this includes Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and the Harvard Admissions Scandal.
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Many southern states were taxing people before they could vote, often as a way to discriminate against black voters who didn’t have nearly as much money. The 24th Amendment banned poll taxes so there would no longer be a barrier to voting.
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The Civil Rights Act was created in response to massive resistance to desegregation and the murder of Medgar Evers. Petitioned by John F Kennedy and signed into law in the year after his assignation by Lyndon B Johnson, the bill outlaw’s discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, especially in hiring and firing.
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(Start Date 1896) White primaries were primary elections where only white people could vote. Since the primary election picks the final candidate, it kept more liberal democratic Candidates who would push for racial equality out of local and national governments. Minorities could still vote for the party of their choice in the final election, but by that point few of the candidates would support their cause.
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A week after the violence in the March of Selma, President Johnson announced he had written a new bill to send to Congress, which passed. It banned poll taxes and literacy tests, which had been used to keep Black People from voting.
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After the death of her adopted son, Sally Reeds ex-husband Cecil was automatically award to the rights to their son’s estate due to the Idaho Probate Code which stated males would be preferred to females in administering estates. The court unanimously sided with Sally saying the law “is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment”.
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(Pictured: Women Advocating Ratification Now)
The Equal Rights Amendment is a proposed bill of the constitution that still hasn’t passed in the House of Representatives. It would provide equal legal rights regardless of sex by ending the legal distinctions between men and women. This could change how courts treat cases surrounding divorce, property, employment, and more. -
White man, Allan Bakke, applied to and was rejected from the University of California Medical School twice. The school had reserved 16 spots in the class of 100 for qualified minority students. Bakke’s qualifications were higher than any of the minority students who had been admitted. He sued saying it violated the 14th Amendment. In an 8-1 decision the court sided with Blakke saying using race as a criteria for entrance was allowed but that ridged racial quotas were unconstitutional.
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Michael Hardwick was caught by a police officer having sex with a man in his own bedroom. He was charged with sodomy in the state of Georgia. The case got appeal all the way up to the supreme court. In a ruling of 5 to 4 the courts ruled states could ban sodomy because it was not a right explicitly mentioned in the constitution.
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Law that protects people with disability from discrimination. It requires employers provide reasonable accommodations for disable employees, protects against discrimination for those trying to participate in government, and lead to the public expansion for disabled accessibility. This includes wheel chair ramps, public transportation that is wheel chair accessible, and braille on signs.
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Houston police were responding to a reported weapons disturbance and walked in on John Lawrence engaged in a consensual sexual act with another man in his own apartment. They were arrested and convicted of deviate sexual intercourse because it was illegal to perform certain sex acts with someone of the same sex. In a 6 to 3 decision the Court ruled that the Texas Law violated the Equal Protection clause and the government could not justify being that involved in the rights of individual citizens
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Same sex couple in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee sued their state agencies because they had banned same sex marriages. The judge ruled 5 to 4 that the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to same sex marriage because it’s “inherent to the concept of individual autonomy”. It also protects their rights to have children and recognizes having two mothers or fathers.
