The Heart of Atlanta Motel in Atlanta, Georgia, refused to accept black Americans and was charged with violating Title II.ĭid Congress, in passing Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, exceed its Commerce Clause powers by depriving motels, such as the Heart of Atlanta, of the right to choose their own customers? Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade racial discrimination by places of public accommodation if their operations affected commerce. But Brown noted that "in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races unsatisfactory to either." In short, segregation does not in itself constitute unlawful discrimination.
(The phrase, "separate but equal" was not part of the opinion.) Justice Brown conceded that the Fourteenth Amendment intended to establish absolute equality for the races before the law. The justices based their decision on the separate-but-equal doctrine, that separate facilities for blacks and whites satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment so long as they were equal. The majority, in an opinion authored by Justice Henry Billings Brown, upheld state-imposed racial segregation. No, the state law is within constitutional boundaries. Is Louisiana's law mandating racial segregation on its trains an unconstitutional infringement on both the privileges and immunities and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment? He refused to move to the car reserved for blacks and was arrested.
In 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy-who was seven-eighths Caucasian-took a seat in a "whites only" car of a Louisiana train. The state of Louisiana enacted a law that required separate railway cars for blacks and whites. The case summaries below were provided by Oyez and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Lesson 18: How Has the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment Changed the Constitution?
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