Civil Rights and Equal Protection Cases 1856-1948

This is where American equality was legally defined, debated, and sometimes betrayed. Spanning nearly a century of Supreme Court decisions, this collection traces the arc from Dred Scott's declaration that Black people could not be citizens to the early challenges against segregation that would eventually explode into the modern civil rights movement. Here are the cases that gave us "separate but equal," that interpreted the 14th Amendment's promise of equal protection, and that determined who belongs to the American experiment and who can be excluded from it. The documents reveal a Court grappling with the nation's original sin in real time, sometimes expanding freedom, more often constraining it. For law students, historians, and anyone who wants to understand how we got here, these are the original texts that shaped the constitutional landscape of race in America.