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Equal Protection Clause

The Plessy decision was not all bad for civil rights. For example, in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Lloyd Gaines was a black student at Lincoln University of Missouri, one of the historically black colleges in Missouri. He applied for admission to law school at the all-white University of Missouri, since Lincoln did not have a law school, but was denied admission due solely to his race. The Supreme Court, applying the separate-but-equal principle of Plessy, held that a State offering a legal education to whites but not to blacks violated the Equal Protection Clause.

In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Court showed increased willingness to find racial discrimination illegal. The Shelley case concerned a privately made contract that prohibited "people of the Negro or Mongolian race" from living on a particular piece of land. Seeming to go against the spirit, if not the exact letter, of The Civil Rights Cases, the Court found that, although a discriminatory private contract could not violate the Equal Protection Clause, the courts' enforcement of such a contract could; after all, the Supreme Court reasoned, courts were part of the state.

The companion cases Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, both decided in 1950, paved the way for a series of school integration cases. In McLaurin, the University of Oklahoma had admitted McLaurin, an African-American, but had restricted his activities there: he had to sit apart from the rest of the students in the classrooms and library, and could eat in the cafeteria only at a designated table. A unanimous Court, through Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, said that Oklahoma had deprived McLaurin of the equal protection of the laws:

"There is a vast difference—a Constitutional difference—between restrictions imposed by the state which prohibit the intellectual commingling of students, and the refusal of individuals to commingle where the state presents no such bar."

The present situation, Vinson said, was the former. In Sweatt, the Court considered the constitutionality of Texas's state system of law schools, which educated blacks and whites at separate institutions. The Court (again through Chief Justice Vinson, and again with no dissenters) invalidated the school system—not because it separated students, but rather because the separate facilities were not equal. They lacked "substantial equality in the educational opportunities" offered to their students.

All of these cases, as well as the upcoming Brown case, were litigated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It was Charles Hamilton Houston, a Harvard Law School graduate and law professor at Howard University, who in the 1930s first began to challenge racial discrimination in the federal courts. Thurgood Marshall, a former student of Houston's and the future Solicitor General and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, joined him. Both men were extraordinarily skilled appellate advocates, but part of their shrewdness lay in their careful choice of which cases to litigate, selecting the best legal proving grounds for their cause.

PEER REVIEW BY EMILY ANDERSON

The Equal Protections clause was one of my favorite things to talk about in AP Gov! Y'all have done an awesome job so far at covering the importance of this amendment and how it changed society. A few things you could look to include are some other landmark court cases that use this clause to make their arguments like Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges. The Americans with Disabilities Act was also passed using the 14th amendment as it's foundation. Of course, Brown v. Board of Education and Mapp v. Ohio would be good cases to discuss as well. I like how y'all have discussed how the EPA plays a role in each of these decisions. It makes the article very informative and easy to read.