College Honors Program

The Fear of too Much Justice? Limiting the Equal Protection Clause in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Date of Creation

5-17-2024

Document Type

Campus Access Only

First Advisor

Daina Harvey

Abstract

Public education is more segregated today than in 1970, the first year consistent data are available. Yet, in Brown v. Board of Education II, the Supreme Court opined that segregated schools ought to integrate with “all deliberate speed.” Accordingly, this thesis explores the Supreme Court’s waning desire to affirm a broad and socially oriented understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, as it seemed so poised to do after the various Brown v. Board of Education cases. Specifically, this research elucidates the legal and ideological foundations of the legal opinions which permitted such regression. To accomplish this goal, I analyze opinions in the cases of Palmer v. Thompson, Miliken v. Bradley, Missouri v. Jenkins, and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. These represent landmark limitations on the government’s authority to impose desegregation for social benefit. I interpret the language of the justices and the philosophies guiding their arguments to determine how the Court fails to consider, in the vein of critical race Sociology, the wider context of systemic white supremacy in its rulings, opting instead to adopt a closed off and anti-critical understanding of the Equal Protection Clause.

Comments

Reader: Anthony James Williams

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