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Equal Protection Clause
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==Between ''Plessy'' and ''Brown''== [[Image:EqualJusticeUnderLaw.jpg|right|thumb|The [[United States Supreme Court|U.S. Supreme Court Building]] opened in 1935, inscribed with the words "[[Equal justice under law|Equal Justice Under Law]]" which were inspired by the Equal Protection Clause.<ref>Feldman, Noah. ''Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices'', p. 145 (Hachette Digital 2010).</ref>]]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 the 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 of the United States|Chief Justice]] [[Fred M. Vinson]], said that Oklahoma had deprived McLaurin of the equal protection of the laws: {{quote|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 school]]s, 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 [[United States Solicitor General|Solicitor General]] and [[Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court|Associate Justice of the Supreme Court]], joined him. Both men were extraordinarily skilled [[appellate court|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.<ref>See generally {{cite book |title=Origin of the Civil Rights Movements: Black Communities Organizing for Change |last=Morris |first=Aldon D. |year=1986 |publisher=Free Press |location=New York |isbn=978-0-02-922130-3 }}</ref>
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