Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/19

Rh Fourteenth Amendment” apply “to all persons,” we unanimously declared six years later; it is “hostility to … race and nationality” “which in the eye of the law is not justified.” Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 368–369, 373–374 (1886); see also id., at 368 (applying the Clause to “aliens and subjects of the Emperor of China”); Truax v. Raich, 239 U. S. 33, 36 (1915) (“a native of Austria”); semble Strauder, 100 U. S., at 308–309 (“Celtic Irishmen”) (dictum).

Despite our early recognition of the broad sweep of the Equal Protection Clause, this Court—alongside the country—quickly failed to live up to the Clause’s core commitments. For almost a century after the Civil War, state-mandated segregation was in many parts of the Nation a regrettable norm. This Court played its own role in that ignoble history, allowing in Plessy v. Ferguson the separate but equal regime that would come to deface much of America. 163 U. S. 537 (1896). The aspirations of the framers of the Equal Protection Clause, “[v]irtually strangled in [their] infancy,” would remain for too long only that—aspirations. J. Tussman & J. tenBroek, The Equal Protection of the Laws, 37 Cal. L. Rev. 341, 381 (1949).

After Plessy, “American courts … labored with the doctrine [of separate but equal] for over half a century.” Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 491 (1954). Some cases in this period attempted to curtail the perniciousness of the doctrine by emphasizing that it required States to provide black students educational opportunities equal to—even if formally separate from—those enjoyed by white students. See, e.g., Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U. S. 337, 349–350 (1938) (“The admissibility of laws separating the races in the enjoyment of privileges afforded by the State rests wholly upon the equality of the privileges which the laws give to the separated groups….”). But the inherent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from inequality—soon became apparent. As the Court