William_T._Bianco,_David_T._Canon]_American_Polit

172172 Chapter 5 | Civil Rights

their actions disrespected the flag and the military personnel who serve the country.

However, some players continued their protest throughout the season.^55 For the 2018

season, NFL owners required that protesting players remain in the locker room for the

national anthem.

The legacy of the civil rights movement has been not only to help change unjust laws

but also to provide a new tool for political action across a broad range of policy areas.

By putting pressure on political leaders through direct, nonviolent protest, millions of

Americans have had their voices heard.

The Courts

The Supreme Court has played an important role in defining civil rights, including

those pushed for by the social movements just discussed. In the mid-twentieth

century, the justices moved away from the “separate but equal” doctrine, required the

desegregation of public schools, and upheld landmark civil rights legislation passed by

Congress. More recently, they have expanded civil rights for women and the LGBTQ

community, but they also have endorsed a color-blind position that some see as a

movement away from protecting civil rights.

Challenging “Separate but Equal” in Education In the 1930s, the NAACP,

which was established to fight for equal rights for black people, started a concerted

effort to nibble away at the “separate but equal” doctrine. Rather than tackling

segregation head-on, the NAACP first challenged an aspect of segregation that would

be familiar to the Supreme Court justices: the ways in which states kept blacks out

of all-white law schools. Another strategy was to challenge admissions practices in

law schools outside the Deep South to demonstrate that segregation was not just a

“southern problem” and to raise the chances for compliance with favorable Court

decisions. A young NAACP attorney named Thurgood Marshall (who later became

the first African-American Supreme Court justice) argued that the University of

Maryland’s practice of sending black students to out-of-state law schools rather than

admitting them to the university’s all-white law school violated the black students’

civil rights. (The state gave black students a $200 scholarship, which did not cover the

costs of tuition and travel and was not available to all black students who wanted to

attend law school.) In 1936, the circuit court and subsequently the Maryland appeals

court rejected this arrangement and ordered that black students be admitted to the

University of Maryland law school.^56

Over the next 15 years, a series of successful lawsuits slowly chipped away at the idea

of “separate but equal.” After these victories, there was a debate within the NAACP

over whether to continue the case-by-case approach against the “separate but equal”

doctrine or to directly challenge the principle itself. The latter approach was risky

because it was unclear if the Court was ready to take this bold step, and defeat in the

Court would set back the movement. However, the signals increasingly indicated that

the Supreme Court was ready to strike down the “separate but equal” doctrine.

In addition to the law school cases, in 1948 the Court ruled that “restrictive covenants”—

clauses in real estate contracts that prevented a property owner from selling to

an African American—could not be enforced by state or local courts because the

Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the states from denying blacks the “equal protection

of the laws.”^57

This application of the Fourteenth Amendment was expanded in the landmark

ruling Brown v. Board of Education. The case arrived on the Court’s docket in 1951,

was postponed for argument until after the 1952 election, and then was re-argued in

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