New Jim Crow

Black men and women holding high office in the United States are under attack, together with the country's most important anti-discrimination laws.

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The assault - a joint project of US President Donald Trump's administration and the Supreme Court's conservative majority - harkens back to a late-19th-century push to reverse the racial equality that the Civil War had promised, and that the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the US Constitution guaranteed.

Eleven years after the end of the Civil War, Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes pledged that, if elected, he would withdraw federal troops from the defeated South. The promise helped propel him to victory in the 1876 election, and once in office, he fulfilled it. The predictable result was the creation of the Jim Crow regime of racial apartheid throughout the former Confederacy.

In 1883, the Supreme Court nearly unanimously struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination on the basis of race in public accommodations. The Act was unconstitutional, Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote in his majority opinion, because it treated African-Americans as the "special favorite of the laws," rather than as ordinary citizens.

With these actions, Yale historian C. Vann Woodward later observed, the US "virtually repudiated" its commitment to equality. By 1890, the "courts had rendered the Constitution helpless," the Republican Party had "forsaken the cause it had sponsored," and a "tide of racism was mounting in the country unopposed."

But the Supreme Court was not finished. In its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, the Court upheld Louisiana's law segregating railroad passengers by race, establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine to affirm the constitutionality of the discrimination. In his lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan called out the ruling's hypocrisy, writing that the "thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations ... will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done."