Largely premised on the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education
decision, which galvanized the civil rights movement, the U.S.
Supreme Court's reputation for protecting minorities' rights is
not often challenged. But, according to Harvard Law Professor
Michael Klarman, that conventional wisdom is a myth. In "Has the
Supreme Court Been Mainly a Friend or a Foe to African
Americans?" at SCOTUSblog, Klarman argues that, over the course
of its history, the Court has repeatedly proven to be
"regressive force on racial issues." By way of example, Klarman
observes: Before the Civil War, the Court sustained the
constitutionality of federal fugitive slave laws, invalidated
the laws of northern states that were designed to protect free
blacks from kidnapping by slavecatchers, voided Congress's
effort to restrict the spread of slavery into federal
territories, and denied that even free blacks possessed any
rights "which the white man was bound to respect." After the
Civil War, the Court freed the perpetrators of white-on-