HKB
Segregation
Laws designed to segregate persons of different races in the location of their homes, in the public schools and on public conveyances have been a prolific source of litigation under the equal protection clause. An ordinance intended to segregate the homes of white and colored races is invalid.[1159] Private covenants forbidding the transfer of real property to persons of a certain race or color have been held lawful,[1160] but the enforcement of such agreements by a State through its courts would constitute a denial of equal protection of the laws.[1161] A statute providing for separate but equal accommodations on railroads for white and colored persons has been held not to deny equal protection of the law,[1162] but a separate coach law which permits carriers to provide sleeping and dining cars only for white persons, is invalid notwithstanding recognition by the legislature that there would be little demand for them by colored persons.[1163] Fifty years ago the action of a local board of education in suspending temporarily for economic reasons a high school for colored children was held not to be a sufficient reason for restraining the board from maintaining an existing high school for white children, when the evidence did not indicate that the board had proceeded in bad faith or had acted in hostility to the colored race.[1164] A child of Chinese ancestry, who is a citizen of the United States, is not denied equal protection of law by being assigned to a public school provided for colored children, when equal facilities for education are offered to both races.[1165]
Although the principle that separate but equal facilities satisfy constitutional requirements has not been reversed, the Court in recent years has been inclined to review more critically the facts of cases brought before it to ascertain whether equality has, in fact, been offered. In Missouri v. Canada[1166] it held that the State was denying equal protection of the law in failing to provide a legal education within the State for Negroes comparable to that afforded white students. Pursuant to a policy of segregating Negro and white students, the State had established a law school at the State university for white applicants. In lieu of setting up one at its Negro university, it authorized the curators thereof to establish such a school whenever in their opinion it should be necessary and practicable to do so, and pending such development, to arrange and pay for the legal education of the State's Negroes at schools in other States. This was found insufficient; the obligation of the State to afford the protection of equal law can be performed only where its laws operate, that is to say, within its own jurisdiction. It is there that equality of rights must be maintained. In a later case the Court held that the State of Oklahoma was obliged to provide legal education for a qualified Negro applicant as soon as it did for applicants of any other group.[1167] To comply with this mandate a State court entered an order requiring in the alternative the admission of a Negro to the state-maintained law school or non-enrollment of any other applicant until a separate school with equal educational facilities should be provided for Negroes. Over the objection of two Justices the Supreme Court held this order did not depart from its mandate.[1168] After a close examination of the facts, the Court concluded, in Sweatt v. Painter,[1169] that the legal education offered in a separate law school for Negroes was inferior to that afforded by the University of Texas Law School and hence that the equal protection clause required that a qualified applicant be admitted to the latter. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents[1170] the Court held that enforced segregation of a Negro student admitted to a State university was invalid because it handicapped him in the pursuit of effective graduate instruction.
POLITICAL RIGHTS