THE POLICY-MAKING PROCESS AND CIVIL RIGHTS| 4032009 evolved into the “Tea Party” movement (evoking the Boston Tea Party of
the American Revolution). Rooted in an opposition to high taxes and activist gov-
ernment, the Tea Party movement organized protests on Tax Day (April 15) that
drew more tha n 300,000 people in 346 cities.^23 Clea rly, the legacy of the civ i l 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.
The Judicial Arena
Early in the civil rights movement in the 1930s and 1940s, the Supreme Court pro-
vided most of the successes, especially in voting rights and desegregation. Later
the Court’s attention turned to discrimination cases in employment (in addition
to cases in voting rights), and here its record was more mixed from the perspective
of civil rights supporters.
CHALLENGING “SEPARATE BUT EQUAL” IN EDUCATION
In the 1930s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NA ACP), which fi ghts for equal rights for blacks, started a concerted eff ort to
nibble away at the “separate but equal” doctrine. Rather than tackle segregation
head-on, the NA ACP 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.
The Court’s fi rst ruling in this area came in 1938, in a case from Missouri. Here,
the state paid black students’ tuition to attend an out-of-state school, while white
students attended the in-state school tuition-free. The state defended the practice
under the separate but equal doctrine, but the Court rejected these arguments. The
bottom line was that white students could attend law school in the state and simi-
larly qualifi ed black students could not, which violated the Fourteenth Amend-
ment’s equal protection of the laws.^24
Another case chipped away at the principle itself. In 1950 Texas had a separate
law school for black students, but this school had only four part-time faculty, no
librarian in the law library, and a library with few of the promised books. The situ-
ation started to improve after the case was under way, but the Court ruled that this
FOUR AFRICAN AMERICAN COLLEGE
students protest at a whites-only
lunch counter in Greensboro,
North Carolina. These sit-ins
spread throughout the South in
1960 as civil rights activists were
able to put pressure on businesses
to integrate through their
nonviolent protests.