Racial Segregation Laws challenged – 1927
NO LAWS MAY PART WHITE AND BLACK – ALL segregation laws, keeping white people out of negro residence sections and negroes out of white sections, are unconstitutional, says the Supreme Court for the second time. Such laws violate the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal civil rights to persons of all races. Very well, comes the answer from the press of the South, we will drop segregation laws, but keep on segregating the races.
OF COURSE, nobody can compel white people and colored people to be neighbors—and now the Supreme Court comes along to say that no State or city can legally keep them apart. That is, the segregation ordinances and laws that have been passed in recent years, particularly in the South, are invalidated by the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal rights to all races. Taking this decision together with the one the week before which voided the Texas law barring negroes from Democratic primaries, the New York Evening World sees the Southern people “coming in for considerable lashing in the Supreme Court of the United States.” And in Louisiana, the State whose segregation laws have just been hit so hard, one daily paper declares that the decision “will meet with universal disapproval by the white people, not only of New Orleans and Louisiana, but the entire South.” However, the Louisiana dailies in general accept the decision, insisting that segregation is necessary and will continue as a private policy even if it can not be enforced by law.
A spokesman for the colored race acclaims the outcome of the case as a victory in the “fight against legalized ghettoes.”
It is remarkable to note that the case involving so acute an issue in American life should be settled by the Supreme Court without a word of comment. All the Court had to do was to refer to what it said on a previous occasion. The recent case, which has been pushed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, rose in New Orleans, where a negro planned to rent to negro tenants a house in the white section of the city. A white resident secured an injunction appealing to New Orleans ordinances and Louisiana laws. As the Baltimore Sun’s Washington correspondent explains:
“The ordinances were enacted under a State law passed in 1912 authorizing municipalities to withhold permits for white or negro houses under certain circumstances, and a State law of 1924 prohibiting a white person from establishing a residence in a negro community and a negro from establishing a residence in a white community. The ordinance provides that white persons can not move into a negro neighborhood without the consent of two-thirds of the negroes resident thereof, and vice versa.”
The injunction was therefore upheld by the State Supreme Court. But, as we read in a Washington dispatch to the New York World, “all segregation laws look alike to the Supreme Court.” We are reminded that “in 1917 in the Buchanan-Warley case the Court killed the Louisville law.” And on March 14 Chief Justice Taft simply announced that the judgment of the Louisiana court was reversed on the authority of the 1917 case, which involved a Louisville segregation ordinance. So to give their readers an idea of the Supreme Court’s actual views, the Baltimore Sun quotes from the 1917 decision:
“A city ordinance forbidding colored persons from occupying houses as residences or places of abode or public assembly on blocks where the majority of the houses are occupied by white persons for those purposes, and in like manner prohibiting white persons when the conditions as to occupancy are reversed and which bases the interdiction upon color and nothing more, passes the legitimate bound of police power and invades the civil right to acquire, enjoy and use property, which is guaranteed in equal measure to all citizens, white or colored, by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Racial Segregation Laws continued here
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