6.2: Race

Beginning with the first slave ship to land in Virginia in 1619, roughly ten million people of African descent were brought to or born in America as slaves. They were forced to labor under excruciating circumstances, brutally mistreated, and denied virtually all political and legal rights. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, slavery divided the country. Several northern states had enacted laws to abolish or gradually phase out slavery, while agriculturally dependent southern states practiced it with alacrity. About half of the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a new constitution—including some of those who spoke most vociferously against slavery during the convention—either were or had previously been slaveowners.

For several decades, “free” states and “slave” states maintained an uneasy truce. During the first half of the 19th century, new states were admitted to the Union in pairs—one free, one slave—to preserve balance between the two factions, and dual federalism mostly left slavery up to the states to decide. Neither trend proved sustainable. With California’s admission in 1850, free states began to outnumber slave states. At the same time, the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford encroached on free states’ ability to exclude slavery from their territory.

It took four bloody years of fighting and a victory for the Union (the North) over the Confederacy (the South) in the Civil War to end slavery. In the aftermath, Congress passed and the states ratified three constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crimes. The Fourteenth established equal protection under the law for all citizens. The Fifteenth prevented the denial of suffrage (the right to vote) on the basis of race.

These amendments made whites and blacks equal according to the letter of the law, but that equality was not immediately realized. Southern states, which had supported slavery and joined the Confederacy during the Civil War, were reluctant to upend the racial hierarchy that privileged whites at the expense of blacks. However, laws that directly defied the new amendments were likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court as blatantly unconstitutional.

To get around these new restrictions, Southern states passed Jim Crow laws to preserve the race-based social order of whites over blacks. Instead of directly barring blacks from voting, some states imposed a literacy test, requiring citizens to prove they could read before they were allowed to vote. (See Figure 6.1 below for sample questions from one such test.) To avoid disenfranchising illiterate whites, states with literacy tests also included a grandfather clause allowing citizens to skip the tests if their ancestors had the right to vote prior to a certain date. This date varied from state to state, but it was always before, during, or just after the Civil War, when whites could vote but blacks could not. The combination of literacy tests and grandfather clauses prevented many blacks from voting, though neither policy directly referenced race.

Figure 6.1: Sample questions from a 1963 Louisiana literacy test, with typos as they appeared in the original document (Source: Civil Rights Movement Archive)

Literacy tests and grandfather clauses show how the effect of a law can depend on the context in which it is enforced. To someone unfamiliar with American history, these laws would seem completely unrelated to race. Yet, combined with the racial inequality in the United States at the time, they proved to be powerful tools of discrimination and suppression. The letter of the law rarely tells the whole story of what it will do once enacted.

In addition to denying blacks political influence by suppressing their right to vote, Jim Crow laws enforced segregation, dividing blacks and whites into separate schools, hospitals, restrooms, and other facilities. The 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (involving a mixed-race shoemaker who refused to leave a whites-only railroad car) permitted segregation so long as the facilities were “separate but equal.” In practice, the separate but equal doctrine was a farce. Public accommodations for blacks were often underfunded and poorly maintained compared to those for whites. Half a century later, the court overturned Plessy in its 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared racial segregation unconstitutional in schools. In 1964, the court went further in Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States by banning racial segregation in all public accommodations.

Social movements played a vital role in the fight for racial equality. Boycotts, civil disobedience, and nonviolent demonstrations organized by Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders brought national attention to discriminatory state and local laws and pressured Congress to step in. This pressure ultimately resulted in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which together formed a strong foundation for national government involvement in civil rights protection.