Existing comment:
Legal Timeline
The Segregation Era: 1903–1939
1903: Giles v. Harris (Alabama) refused to order the board of registrars to register an African American to vote in part because the court concluded that unless it could actually supervise elections, it was unable to force white Alabamans to allow African Americans to vote
1906: Hodges v. United States (Arkansas) reversed a conviction against whites who had ejected "citizens of the United States of African descent" from their jobs; the decision narrowed the congressional civil rights authority under the Thirteenth Amendment
1910: Franklin v. State of South Carolina affirmed the judgment of the South Carolina Supreme Court to execute African American Pink Franklin for the killing of a white constable, H. E. Valentine. Franklin shot Valentine when he came to arrest Franklin for violating a peonage-based contract for work
1911: Bailey v. State of Alabama invalidated, based on the Thirteenth Amendment, a law that facilitated "debt peonage," a form of involuntary servitude
1913: Guinn v. United States (Oklahoma) deemed that state constitutional provisions permitting "grandfather clauses" for passing literacy tests as a voting requirement were unconstitutional
1917: Buchanan v. Warley (Kentucky) held residential racial segregation unconstitutional
1920: Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote
1927: Nixon v. Herndon (Texas) struck down a 1923 Texas law that prohibited blacks from voting in the Democratic Party primary
1932: Nixon v. Condon (Texas) declared that the prohibition of African Americans from the Democratic primaries by the executive committee was unconstitutional
1935: Grovey v. Townsend (Texas) ruled that the members of the Democratic Party of Texas who assembled at a convention and made resolutions about those qualified to vote in the Democratic primary were a private group and that barring all but white citizens was not an act of the state and therefore not in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
1935: Pearson v. Murray (Maryland), Daniel Gaines Murray, an African American, was admitted to the University of Maryland Law School when the Maryland Court of Appeals concluded that the state had failed to provide Murray with a separate but equal education
1938: Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada (Missouri), the Supreme Court held that states providing a law school for white students were constitutionally required to provide in-state education for African American students as well, either by integrating the state law school or creating a separate school for African Americans
1939: Creation of the Civil Liberties Unit, later renamed the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice, the first federal entity tasked with the protection of civil rights since Reconstruction |