Editing Equal Protection Clause (section)

==Gilded Age interpretation and the ''Plessy'' decision==
In the United States, 1877 marked the end of Reconstruction and the start of the [[Gilded Age]]. The first truly landmark equal protection decision by the Supreme Court was ''[[Strauder v. West Virginia]]'' (1880). A black man convicted of murder by an [[all-white jury]] challenged a [[West Virginia]] [[statute]] excluding blacks from serving on juries. Exclusion of blacks from juries, the Court concluded, was a denial of equal protection to black defendants, since the jury had been "drawn from a panel from which the State has expressly excluded every man of [the defendant's] race."  At the same time, the Court explicitly allowed [[sexism]] and other types of discrimination, saying that states "may confine the selection to males, to freeholders, to citizens, to persons within certain ages, or to persons having educational qualifications. We do not believe the Fourteenth Amendment was ever intended to prohibit this. ... Its aim was against discrimination because of race or color."<ref>Kerber, Linda.  ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=YAIo1k6SSKcC&pg=PA133 No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship]'', p. 133 (Macmillan, 1999).</ref>

[[Image:The Fuller Court.jpg|thumb|left|270px|The Court that decided ''Plessy'']]The next important postwar case was the ''[[Civil Rights Cases]]'' (1883), in which the constitutionality of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1875]] was at issue. The Act provided that all persons should have "full and equal enjoyment of ... inns, [[common carriers|public conveyances]] on land or water, theatres, and other places of public amusement." In its opinion, the Court explicated what has since become known as the "[[State action (United States constitutional law)|state action doctrine]]", according to which the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause apply only to acts done or otherwise "sanctioned in some way" by the state. Prohibiting blacks from attending plays or staying in inns was "simply a private wrong". [[Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States|Justice]] [[John Marshall Harlan]] dissented alone, saying, "I cannot resist the conclusion that the substance and spirit of the recent amendments of the Constitution have been sacrificed by a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism." Harlan went on to argue that because (1) "public conveyances on land and water" use the public highways, and (2) innkeepers engage in what is "a quasi-public employment", and (3) "places of public amusement" are licensed under the laws of the states, excluding blacks from using these services ''was'' an act sanctioned by the state.
A few years later, Justice Stanley Matthews wrote the Court's opinion in ''[[Yick Wo v. Hopkins]]'' (1886).<ref>''Yick Wo v. Hopkins'', {{ussc|118|356|1886}}.</ref> In it the word "person" from the Fourteenth Amendment's section has been given the broadest possible meaning by the U.S. Supreme Court:<ref name="FindLaw201311234Annotation18">{{cite web|title=Annotation 18 - Fourteenth Amendment: Section 1 – Rights Guaranteed: Equal Protection of the Laws: Scope and application state action|url=http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment14/annotation18.html#t94|publisher=FindLaw for Legal Professionals - Law & Legal Information by FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters business|access-date=23 November 2013}}</ref>

<blockquote>These provisions are universal in their application to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality, and the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws.</blockquote>

Thus, the clause would not be limited to discrimination against African Americans, but would extend to other races, colors,<!-- colors? --> and nationalities such as (in this case) [[Alien (law)|legal aliens]] in the United States who are Chinese citizens.

In its most contentious Gilded Age interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause, ''[[Plessy v. Ferguson]]'' (1896), the Supreme Court upheld a [[Louisiana]] [[Jim Crow law]] that required the [[racial segregation|segregation]] of blacks and whites on [[Rail transport|railroads]] and mandated separate railway cars for members of the two races.<ref>For a summary of the social, political and historical background to ''Plessy'', see {{cite book |title=The Strange Career of Jim Crow |last=Woodward |first=C. Vann |author-link=C. Vann Woodward |year=2001 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York |isbn=978-0-19-514690-5 |pages=6 and pp. 69–70 }}</ref> The Court, speaking through Justice [[Henry B. Brown]], ruled that the Equal Protection Clause had been intended to defend equality in [[civil rights]], not equality in [[social rule|social arrangements]]. All that was therefore required of the law was reasonableness, and Louisiana's railway law amply met that requirement, being based on "the established usages, customs and traditions of the people." Justice Harlan again dissented. "Every one knows," he wrote,

{{quote|that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons&nbsp; ... [I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no [[caste]] here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.}}

Such "arbitrary separation" by race, Harlan concluded, was "a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the [[equality before the law]] established by the Constitution."<ref>For a skeptical evaluation of Harlan, see {{cite journal |last=Chin |first=Gabriel J. |year=1996 |title=The ''Plessy'' Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases |journal=Iowa Law Review |volume=82 |page=151 |issn=0021-0552 |ssrn=1121505 }}</ref> Harlan's philosophy of [[constitutional colorblindness]] would eventually become more widely accepted, especially after [[World War II]].