Custom Essay - Protection of Law

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Protection of Law

... For a long time equality has been one of the main principles of a democratic society. Those problems were number one for American government. The principals on which equality was based in America were signed in the Constitution. John Adams said about equality in education, “Education for every class and rank of people down to the lowest and the poorest.” It proves that from the very beginning education in the country is considered to be for all. But was it really so? Everybody understood that the increase of the number of educated people leads to the growth of a country’s economy. Education is closely connected with political, economical and cultural life of a country. So, education and the problems, it had faced, changed with the development of the state. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1816)

But racial desegregation has always been one of the main problems in America. For sure, today America is moving towards the ideals of equality and justice in all spheres of life, declared in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution. But it is difficult to change the attitudes of some Americans in respect to race relations, as racial segregation has been extended across the country for many years.

The author of the words about equality of all citizens in the eyes of our creator was Thomas Jefferson, but he did not consider black slaves equal citizens in culture. His attitude towards his slaves was contradictory. On one side he saw the institution of slavery as an evil. On the other side he continued the practice of slave ownership.

The nation had to suffer a bloody Civil War and over one hundred years of racial discrimination to come at a time when more equal education became available to all Americans.

After the Civil War millions of formally enslaved African-Americans wanted to be full and equal citizens of the large society. They began to realize their significance as citizens of their country and started protesting. For example, in 1872, Susan B. Anthony went to the polls in Rochester, NY but she was arrested and fined 1000$. She refused to pay them citing the Fourteenth Amendments about equal rights of citizens of the United States which was adopted in 1868.

Let’s take another example when Homer Plessy refused to move from a seat for whites, so he was arrested too. On June 7, 1892, a 30-year-old colored shoemaker named Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the "White" car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy was only one-eighths black and seven-eighths white, but under Louisiana law, he was considered black and therefore required to sit in the "Colored" car. Plessy went to court and argued, in Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The judge at the trial was John Howard Ferguson, a lawyer from Massachusetts who had previously declared the Separate Car Act "unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states". In Plessy's case, however, he decided that the state could choose to regulate railroad companies that operated only within Louisiana. He found Plessy guilty of refusing to leave the white car. Plessy appealed to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, which upheld Ferguson's decision. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard Plessy's case and found him guilty once again. Speaking for a seven-person majority, Justice Henry Brown wrote:

"That [the Separate Car Act] does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery...is too clear for argument...A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races -- a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color -- has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races...The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. ...

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