Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903

by Lawrence Goldstone

...A potent and original examination of how the Supreme Court subverted justice and empowered the Jim Crow era. In the years following the Civil War, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery; the 14th conferred citizenship and equal protection under the law to white and black; and the 15th gave black American males the right to vote. In 1875, the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the nation's history granted all Americans "the full and equal enjoyment" of public accommodations. Just eight years later, the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, overturned the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional and, in the process, disemboweled the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. Using court records and accounts of the period, Lawrence Goldstone chronicles how "by the dawn of the 20th century the U.S. had become the nation of Jim Crow laws, quasi-slavery, and precisely the same two-tiered system of justice that had existed in the slave era." The very human story of how and why this happened make Inherently Unequal as important as it is provocative. Examining both celebrated decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson and those often overlooked, Goldstone demonstrates how the Supreme Court turned a blind eye to the obvious reality of racism, defending instead the business establishment and status quo--thereby legalizing the brutal prejudice that came to define the Jim Crow era.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Law, Politics, American History, African American

243 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Lawrence Goldstone is the author of fourteen books of both fiction and non-fiction. Six of those books were co-authored with his wife, Nancy, but they now write separately to save what is left of their dishes.
Goldstone's articles, reviews, and opinion pieces have appeared in, among other publications, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Hartford Courant, and Berkshire Eagle. He has also written for a number of magazines that have gone bust, although he denies any cause and effect.
His first novel, Rights, won a New American Writing Award but he now cringes at its awkward prose. (Anatomy of Deception and The Astronomer are much better.)
Despite a seemingly incurable tendency to say what's on his mind (thus mortifying Nancy), Goldstone has been widely interviewed on both radio and television, with appearances on, among others, "Fresh Air" (NPR), "To the Best of Our Knowledge" (NPR), "The Faith Middleton Show" (NPR), "Tavis Smiley" (PBS), and Leonard Lopate (WNYC). His work has also been profiled in The New York Times, The Toronto Star, numerous regional newspapers, Salon, and Slate.
Goldstone holds a PhD in American Constitutional Studies from the New School. His friends thus call him DrG, although he can barely touch the rim. (Sigh. Can't make a layup anymore either.) He and his beloved bride founded and ran an innovative series of parent-child book groups, which they documented in Deconstructing Penguins. He has also been a teacher, lecturer, senior member of a Wall Street trading firm, taxi driver, actor, quiz show contestant, and policy analyst at the Hudson Institute.
He is a unerring stock picker. Everything he buys instantly goes down.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The period after the Civil War was supposed to usher in some semblance of equality for just-freed African-Americans. Three constitutional amendments, a republican majority in a very strong federal government and an occupied South should have combined to guarantee this equality. Instead, the US Supreme Court gutted the amendments, legalized Jim Crow laws, gave us "equal but separate" (as it was first called), and shifted the rights of the three amendments to corporations - they're the guys we need to blame for corporations being the same as people under the law. Shameful. Amendments are supposed to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority and the Court was the last refuge for the freedmen.

Goldstone does a great job in conveying this awful period of our history. He works hard to keep his own distaste out of the story but it is clear where his beliefs lie. Difficult to read, given what it says about an esteemed US institution, this book is worth reading.

[Deane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started to rate this book a 3. After all, Goldstone is a writer, not a professional historian. And, I was going to say that its treatment of the subject was too surface, not deep enough.

As I finished the book, I thought what's not to like? It's an engaging treatment of a subject that could be dry, an overall look at a period of American history of which I knew little, with enough detail on case law (all I wanted), and includes a review of social issues that influenced American thought and actions at that time.

So, I would simply say, "read it." You will learn much about one of the key issues of 19th century America.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted so much more from this book. The Supreme Court’s complicity towards racism in the 19th Century is covered – albeit in less detail – in law school, but the book never ventures beyond hinting at an elevated legal and political analysis of the subject. If anything, the book strikes me as a survey intended for a general audience – except that the style and tone are more suited to a legal audience. I relied on my own study of the law to fill in some of the blanks in the analysis, and I have no idea how someone without a legal background would fare. In short, it’s difficult to pinpoint who is intended as the target audience: it’s sufficiently rooted in legal style to be off putting to those without legal training while offering little more than a detailed review for most attorneys. Mr. Goldstone also operates on a number of assumptions – which are entirely necessary to keep the book at a tidy 200 pages – except he does not make those controlled factors clear from the start. This is a decent book – and I wish more people were familiar with this period in the Supreme Court’s history – but I found it more frustrating than enlightening. Not recommended.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lawrence Goldstone begins by remembering the high ideal of the Supreme Court's potential in Alexander Hamilton's arguments for adopting the Constitution in the Federalist Papers and the potential for the Supreme Court's opposite in the arguments against enacting the Constitution by the Anti-federalist author Brutus. In Inherently Unequal, Goldstone makes a strong case that during the period of Reconstruction the cast of judges making up the Supreme Court personified Brutus' argument of an anti-democratic body swayed by the powerful, a fox sent to watch over the hen-house of individual rights & the tread upon.

"In a series of decisions spanning almost three decades, the Supreme Court announced that it considered popular will and its own notion of racial hierarchy more compelling than the promise of equality under the Constitution. On the altar of strict adherence to the law, they ruled time and again to deny fundamental rights to black Americans, In reading and interpreting statutes with self-enforced myopia, a series of justices rewrote constitutional amendments to suit racial attitudes to which Americans of today express repugnance (196)." -Lawrence Goldstone

[Robert Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Inherently Unequal” is a guided tour through the Supreme Court decisions in the latter half of the 19th century that legitimated the Jim Crow racial oppression that characterized America in the first 2/3 of the 20th century. Yet in that Lawrence Goldstone takes the time to place these decisions in their appropriate post-Civil War political and social context, his book is much more than simply a compendium of key court rulings – it is a discussion of our past that makes much of our present comprehensible.

While there are countless books that address the key events of the Civil Rights era, and recently, several books (i.e. “Slavery by Another Name”, “Warmth of Other Suns” and “Buried in the Bitter Waters”) describing the depredations of life for African Americans under Jim Crow, none of these make comprehensible how it could be that such abuses were allowed to continue in a nation governed by laws as noble as those set forth in the Constitution of the United States. In light of the 13th Amendment, for example, how was it possible for thousands of blacks to be reduced to a state of slavery through the convict labor system and debt peonage? In light of the 14th Amendment, for example, how could it be that hundreds of blacks could be lynched by murders who had absolutely no fear of legal sanction? In light of the 15th Amendment, for example, how was it possible for millions of black voters to be denied the vote without the slightest objection from the courts? That these conditions existed in the first half of the 20th Century are so well known that we hardly think to question the legal mechanics by which they were possible in a land purportedly governed by the rule of law.

By painstakingly telling the social and political story of Reconstruction and Redemption as a backdrop to the evolution of Supreme Court opinions throughout the period from 1865 to 1903, Goldstone shows us the starting point for many of the abortions of legal reason that were so ubiquitous during the period of Jim Crow that no one ever really thinks to question them.

What is particularly chilling is that one can see in many of these decisions the genesis of twisted social ideologies that remain with us to this day. In Goldstone’s discussion of social Darwinism one sees the origins of contemporary neoliberal dogma that elevates stinginess and greed to the level of a social virtue. In his explanation of how the 14th Amendment, which was created to guarantee the civil rights of recently freed slaves, was corrupted to ignore injustices to those slaves while simultaneously channeling the Amendment’s rights to corporations (which were accorded “personhood” under the law), a modern reader sees the parallels to current-day conceptions of corporate personhood, and how these rights are advanced and protected at the expense of rights due to actual human beings.

With all of this being said, I had to work to love this book. This is less a criticism than it is a warning. The cases Goldstone discusses are like characters in a novel who are presented briefly, but who constantly reappear throughout the rest of the story. I found myself having to go back again and again to remind myself about the details of individual cases to understand their significance as precedence for cases that followed them. Notwithstanding the pesky requirement that I actually had to remember what I’d read 20 pages previously, the book is a gem and has contributed significantly to my understanding of America’s racial history.

[Marcus Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most Americans don’t know of a time period just after the civil war where Blacks were actually treated as equal citizens. Lawyers, doctors, congressmen, affluent respectable people. Jackie Robinson is technically the first African-American in the big leagues SINCE Reconstruction. Many teams were segregated before the Jim Crow laws came into effect. Protected by force, Blacks were allowed to flourish and within 10 years of slavery achieved remarkable success in this country. After the civil war, the south was defeated but similar to our war strategies of today, southern ideals were left smoldering and not extinguished and within a few years they were again full-fledged fires burning racism into America. Revoted into governorship and Congress, southern whites with their disdain for Blacks were now able to legally create separate but equal laws that survived until the mid 1900’s and some can argue continuing until this day. Lincoln’s murder began the descent as he had a democratic vice president, imagine President Obama’s VP being John McCain and you’ll understand. This death returned the country to being controlled by southern ideals. Although not immediately, the force that had enforced our new country’s post civil war ideals slowly but intentionally began to wither away. With Supreme Court appointments, control of Congress, a separation of federal and local laws were enacted that created mayhem for Blacks that still exist.

This book chronicles the time period circumferencing Reconstruction and the various politics that legalized racism. An amazing read that initially I thought would be technical but was full of facts and concise. I always wondered why did america risk its own death to equalize its citizens then just as quickly allow bigotry to run wild? The answers were given.

Just reading the first (5) pages will saddened you to think about the abuse of power many elected and appointed officials have even still this day and how their personal agendas are adhered to.

[Peter Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The descent of the United States into enforced segregation, into a nation where human beings could be tortured and horribly murdered without trial, is a story profoundly tragic and profoundly American. And the Supreme Court was a central player in the tale.
If the Court's complicity in the subversion of equal rights had been due to rogue justices, or was an aberration of jurisprudence, Americans of the current day might merely shake their heads, deplore a shameful episode in their history, and congratulate themselves that the United States was no longer that nation. If, however, the Court's actions were not aberrant at all, but simply examples of ongoing practice, in which justices subordinate the role that Hamilton espoused for them to the exigencies of popular politics--or worse, their own personal beliefs and prejudices--the equal rights decisions of the latter decades of the nineteenth century become expressions of issues deeper, more disturbing. For then the United States Supreme Court would have, in a very real sense, eschewed the dispassion that the Founders thought so vital and become merely a third political arm of government."

Subtitled "The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court 1865-1903" is an excellent historical account of disturbing action and non-action by our highest court. Containing a lot of legal analysis, the book is compelling and hard to put down. I was attracted to the book by actions of the current court and found the similarities I suspected, personal politics taking precedence over sound legal decisions. The author is quite a scholar and presents historical insights into both the Supreme Court and America's rejection of equal rights for all its citizens

[Ariel Castellon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book about the aftermath of the civil war according to the 14th and 15th amendments of the Constitution. They mainly dealt with voting right and how they should not be infringed upon according the your race; Native Americans though were not counted as a race but as a conquered peoples. (another subject altogether)

The book basically tells the story about how the country and its supreme court judges were just not ready for the full integration of African Americans in the political and every day life. How for a short time there was a hoped upon real sense of equality but it was shot down by the supreme legal analyst of that time, (supreme court judges).

Reviews the most important cases of that era and reviews them as to why even though they elicit a clear break from the two amendments, the judges found a way to circumvent them and as they being the final word or any judgement things were allowed to go back to how they way before the Civil War or 'War of Northern Aggression' as some Southern peoples' like to refer to it.

The book is not long and has great information on a subject not much talked about in the History of Wars. The after effects.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although a DENSE read, I found this to be a really enlightening description of the Court's reaction to public sentiment, political competition with the legislature, and personal prejudices during the time between the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments and the rise of Jim Crow laws. I won't lie, it's clear that the author has a definite liberal slant- but looking beyond that is a pretty vivid discussion of federal versus state rights, and what happens when states cross a pretty major moral line while exercising those rights. It got me to thinking about how Republicans are currently viewed as "conservative" and Democrats as "liberal" and how those monikers seem to be passed back and forth. When did that last flip occur? I'm guessing post-WWII, but I guess I'll have to find another book to answer this question.

[Rick Fonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1869 the Fifteenth Amendment was passed : "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" yet by the early 20th century Jim Crow laws in the South prevented all but a tiny fraction of African-Americans from voting. How could and did this happen? Hint: the Supreme Court had a lot to do with it...

[Avery Dresser]

A revealing look at the dark past of institutional racism that we still haven't put behind us. Goldstone effectively weaves together historical anecdotes, biography, and analysis of the legal proceedings of the civil war, reconstruction, and post-reconstruction era supreme court, that altogether make it clear exactly how and why Jim Crow racism came to enjoy legal protection and institutional dominance in the American South.

[Carlos Galvis Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written with clarity in laying out judicial cases that affected African-Americans and their civil rights up to the turn of the twentieth century. As I am not trained in law in any way, I found the narration to be smooth and not beleaguered by the various cases that were brought up to make the author's point. For the layman, the book gives us a peek into the Judicial Branch's function and how the decisions that come from the Supreme Court affect the everyday man's life in civil society.

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm. Historical context is great, but a lot of his language is hyperbolic, and his analysis of the opinions, statutes, and arguments is fuzzy. Agree with other reviewers who said they expected/wanted more.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting history of a little talked about period in American history. Very effective at making the case against "activist judges."

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully written, smartly researched, and incredibly maddening book.

[Meryl Nesbit · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened on Audible and I felt that the writer showed bias toward the Supreme Court. More research may have been needed on my part to grasp this part of history.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing and intense look into the legal system after the Civil War. Detailed looked at all the cases that lead up to Plessy. Loved this book!

[Sugarpuss O'Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book takes the reader through several SCOTUS cases that systematically disenfranchised Black citizenship. While my eyes glazed over at some parts (mainly all the legalese), this was a truly eye-opening book. We are all taught that the SCOTUS is something we should admire; an institution that is sacrosanct. Well I for one have my eyes wide open to this myth. In the words of Mr Goldstone:

the Court did not render its decisions to conform to the law but rather contorted the law to conform to its decisions. . .

. .Constitution law is, after all, simply politics made incomprehensible to the common man. . .

. . . all constitutional analysis is “broad construction,” interpretive. Pure objectivity is impossible. . .

. . . without a Supreme Court willing to come out from under the umbrella of legal gymnastics and demand enforcement of the laws protecting citizens’ rights, even constitutional amendments are simply hollow verbiage. Perhaps it is true that American democracy has survived the skewing of checks-and-balances toward an unelected branch of its government, but for many of its citizens, . . . that democracy has hardly flourished.

[Davina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recall writing a paper on the Civil Rights cases of 1875 while in University. This covers much more than that case, and includes some interesting discussion over changing views of the Court, as subsequent justices were added to the bench. These cases have an important consequence for modern jurisprudence. We have the 14th Amendment, but for so long the Supreme Court made the most undignified contortions to use the Rights of Citizenship, and the Rights to Due Process only to advance the interests of the newly growing corporations, rather than the freed African Americans for whom the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments had been enacted. It's really sad to read of these cases. And, we see even some of our heroes disappointing us. The book is quite clear in it's arguments, and one does not need to be a lawyer to understand or appreciate this work.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise primer on the massively influential period of history (1865-1900) where the United States Supreme Court was essentially implicit in the rise of Jim Crow. Understanding the collapse of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the brazen way the Court twisted the law to fit personal racist beliefs should be mandatory study in history classes throughout the country. I found the highjacking of the "Equal Rights" amendment by corporations (spurred by the rise of commerce primarily thru the railroads) to be very educational. America has a dark, disgusting history, rooted systemically deep within our culture. It is hard to face, but important to do so.

[Rachel Mayes Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

My knowledge of legal history is, shall we say, sparse. This book did fill me in on some of the Reconstruction-era court cases that led to Jim Crow-era segregation. The information was helpful, but the book was light on explanation, especially for some of the more jargon-laden sections of the original decisions. I did learn from reading this, but it was not a great reading experience.

[Geicodave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to the post-Civil War Supreme Court

The author's thesis is that the justices of the post Civil War period deliberately ignored the intent of the Reconstruction Amendments and related legislation and allowed the South to maintain (and increase) its traditional oppression of blacks. The blacks were emancipated, but that's as far as the Court and the South would allow.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Writer Lawerence Goldstone’s book, Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903 was published in 2011. The American Civil War and Reconstruction Constitutional Amendment established Black Americans as full political members of the United States. Between 1865 and 1903, the Supreme Court had a duty to protect Black Americans and the Supreme Court failed to protect them. The first two chapters cover the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The book covers the intersection of money and politics between 1865 and 1903. The book explores the rise of false scientific theories of eugenics and social Darwinism. The two concepts of false science and the rise of big business heavily influenced the rulings of the Supreme Court in the late 19th Century. Goldstone feels the era rulings on civil rights for Black Americans illustrates the point that the Supreme Court “has sometimes been in the interest of justice, more often, as in Dred Scott or the Civil Rights Cases, in the interest of philosophical self-interest” (Goldstone 207). The book has a section on notes and a bibliography. I read the book on the Kindle. Goldstone feels that the Supreme Court in the late 19th Century, “in a series of decisions spanning almost three decades, the Supreme Court announced that it considered popular will and its own notions of racial hierarchy more compelling than the promise of equality under the Constitution” (Goldstone 211). Goldstone’s book, Inherently Unequal is interesting.

[Vanessa Holloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

On my list of highly recommend. VH