by Vinayak Maheswaran

Created on: November 05, 2007

This article is in reference to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Equal Protection of the fourteenth Amendment from 1896 to 1954. It supports the view that human rights exists in the US.
This was the part of the Fourteenth Amendment emphasizing that the laws must provide equivalent "protection" to all people. The phrase "all men are created equal" is at the heart of American political culture. Yet the concrete struggle for equal rights under the Constitution has been America's most bitter battle.

A belief in equality would mean that all Americans should have the same salary and property. However this is not how it equality is interpreted. It is the equality of opportunity and not the equality of results or equal rewards. The Bill of Rights may not mention equality but it does not limit guarantees to specified groups within society.
The Fourteenth Amendment forbids the states from denying its citizens "equal protection of the laws". The ratification of the amendment saw it win out in the courts. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court refused to extend the amendment to remedy more subtle kinds of discrimination. Women won the right to vote in 1920, but the Equal Rights Amendment had not been ratified.
The Supreme Court had developed three levels of scrutiny called standards of review. The Court has ruled that most classifications that are reasonable and bear a rational relationship to some legitimate governmental purpose are constitutional. The Court has also ruled that racial and ethnic classifications are inherently suspect. The Supreme Court provided a constitutional justification for segregation in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson.
This decision was a ruling that a Louisiana law requiring "equal but separate accommodations for the White and colored races" was unconstitutional. However, in later decisions the Court paid more attention to the "separate" than the "equal" part of this principle. Later on in the first part of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court began to prohibit few of the most extreme cases of segregation paving the way for a new era of civil rights.
In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decided that school segregation in Kansas was inherently unconstitutional and this marked the end of legal segregation in the United States. This also marked an ending of virtually every form of legal discrimination against minorities. The civil rights umbrella is a large one, but most groups that were ignored by the Supreme Court were starting to get special attention by 1954.

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