III.

Racial and Ethnic Discrimination

One of the most pervasive forms of discrimination in the United States, and elsewhere, is that directed toward racial and ethnic groups. The Constitution of the United States recognized the legality of slavery, and the vast majority of slaves were black Africans and their descendants. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the constitutional amendments that followed the American Civil War (1861-1865) changed the legal status of African Americans, but a series of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States struck down federal statutes designed to enforce the amendments. The most important of these decisions declared unconstitutional a law that outlawed racial discrimination by private individuals. The Court also upheld state-enforced segregation. For decades after Reconstruction, the absence of adequate federal laws permitted discrimination against African Americans in employment and housing, public accommodations, the judicial system, and voting. This discrimination was further legitimized by the Supreme Court’s notorious ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld legally enforced segregation in public transportation and established the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine.

Discriminatory practices remained largely unchallenged until 1941, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order forbidding discrimination in employment by a company working under a government defense contract. States began to legislate against discrimination in 1945. By 1964, when the federal Civil Rights Act largely superseded state legislation, 25 states had legal prohibitions against discrimination in employment and 31 states had laws against discrimination in public accommodations. Some states banned discrimination in the sale and rental of private housing, and some prohibited discrimination in college admissions. However, methods of enforcing such laws varied from state to state and were largely ineffectual.

On the national level, a major blow against discrimination was the unanimous Supreme Court decision in May 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the intentional segregation of African American children in public schools was held to violate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Over bitter opposition, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but only the right to vote was expressly addressed; other provisions of the act established a new civil rights division in the Department of Justice and a fact-finding Civil Rights Commission. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in most hotels, restaurants, and other public facilities; prohibited unions and certain categories of employers from practicing discrimination; and banned registrars from applying different standards to white and black voting applicants, a provision that was strengthened by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its later amendments. The 1964 law also authorized the U.S. attorney general to file suit when a “pattern or practice” of widespread discrimination was found; federal financial aid could then be withdrawn from programs in which racial discrimination persisted.

In 1968 Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, barring racial discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing in which federal moneys are involved by way of loans, mortgages, or grants. Racial discrimination in employment by a state government agency was banned in 1972, and U.S. attorneys were authorized to sue noncomplying state agencies; similarly, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, established in 1964, was authorized to file suit.

Racial discrimination practiced against Hispanic Americans is also widespread, and has generally assumed traditional forms, including discriminatory policies in employment, housing, and access to the judicial system, but it has also involved such issues as bilingual education, fair treatment by the communications media, and prison reform. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund have worked to defend the rights of Hispanic people.

Asian Americans have also suffered discrimination, notably in immigration quotas and in employment and housing. The most egregious example was the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast during World War II—an event upheld by the Supreme Court in 1944 but repudiated by Congress many years later.