When the Government Restricted Rights

The Fourteenth Amendment promised equal protection in 1868, but the Supreme Court spent decades deciding what that actually meant. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court said separate facilities for Black and white citizens were constitutional as long as they were equal. States took that ruling and ran with it. Jim Crow laws segregated schools, trains, restaurants, and water fountains across the South for nearly sixty years, built right on top of an amendment that was supposed to guarantee equality. The facilities were almost never actually equal, but the Court let the fiction stand.

Wartime pressure produced a similar failure. After Pearl Harbor, the federal government forced over 100,000 Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, into internment camps with no evidence of wrongdoing. In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Court upheld this, accepting the government's claim that military necessity justified it. Decades later, historians and the Court itself recognized the ruling as a serious error — the evidence of a real threat had been thin to nonexistent, and the decision stripped an entire group of due process based on ancestry.

Both cases teach the same lesson from different angles. A Supreme Court ruling is the Court's best judgment at one moment, not a final, infallible truth. Plessy was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; Korematsu was formally repudiated by the Court in 2018. This connects directly to why rights exist at all: they are meant to survive majority pressure, even when that pressure is a popular war measure or a popular social order, and the slow correction of these rulings shows the system checking itself, late but real.