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In Re Turner (1867), Charles Olmsted

Legal History Publications

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregation and separate but equal policies were unconstitutional. By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment and race-specific social science data in its opinion, the Court overlooked the Thirteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, including equal access to education. The Court’s decision “would rest on a much more sound footing if [it] had paid more attention to the history of the Thirteenth Amendment and its accompanying case law.”

By disregarding the Thirteenth Amendment, which had abolished slavery, the Court emphasized the racist attitudes of opponents of Civil War …