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The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903
Walker & Company
January 2011
On Sale: January 18, 2011
256 pages
ISBN: 0802717926
EAN: 9780802717924
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
A potent and original examination of how the Supreme Court
subverted justice and empowered the Jim Crow era. In the following years following the Civil War, the 13th
Amendment abolished slavery; the 14th conferred citizenship
and equal protection under the law to white and black; and
the 15th gave black American males the right to vote. In
1875, the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the
nation's history granted all Americans "the full and equal
enjoyment" of public accomodations. Just eight years later,
the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, overturned the Civil
Rights Act as unconstitutional and, in the process,
disemboweled the equal protection provisions of the 14th
Amendment. Using court records and accounts of the period,
Lawrence Goldstone chronicles how "by the dawn of the 20th
century the U.S. had become the nation of Jim Crow laws,
quasi-slavery, and precisely the same two-tiered system of
justice that had existed in the slave era." The very human story of how and why this happened make
Inherently Unequal as important as it is provocative.
Examining both celebrated decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson
and those often overlooked, Goldstone demonstrates how the
Supreme Court turned a blind eye to the obvious reality of
racism, defending instead the business establishment and
status quo--thereby legalizing the brutal prejudice that
came to definite the Jim Crow era.
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