3.10 - Social Movements and Equal Protection

The Equal Protection Clause

• Text: no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

• This clause is the foundation for civil rights and anti-discrimination law. It was originally meant to protect formerly enslaved people from unequal treatment by the states after the Civil War. Over time, courts and Congress have used it to fight discrimination based on race, sex, national origin, and more.

• Civil rights protect individuals from discrimination based on characteristics like race, national origin, religion, and sex. They're guaranteed by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses and by acts of Congress, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is distinct from civil liberties, which protect individual freedoms from government interference (Topic 3.1).

Major Social Movements Using the Clause

• The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments had already abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection, and banned race-based voting restrictions, but those promises weren't being fully honored.

• Gettysburg Address (1863): Lincoln's short speech at a Civil War battlefield cemetery described the nation as "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" and called for "a new birth of freedom." It tied the war to the Declaration of Independence's promise of equality, an idea later written into the Constitution through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and used by movements fighting for equal protection.

• Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (April 1963): written from jail after King was arrested for leading protests against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, in defiance of a court order. He was answering eight white clergymen who called the protests "unwise and untimely" and said the fight should be in the courts, not the streets.
• Main argument: nonviolent direct action is needed because waiting hasn't worked. Quoting a jurist, he writes that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." People have a moral duty to disobey unjust laws, like segregation laws, as long as they do it openly and accept the penalty.
• Link to the Constitution: King says the protesters are bringing the nation back to the ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He points to the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling against school segregation (Brown v. Board) to explain why obeying some laws and breaking others isn't a contradiction.
• Why it matters: it's the go-to example of how the promise of equal protection motivated a social movement (EK 3.10.A.2). Protests like Birmingham's helped push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Topic 3.11).

• NOW: founded in 1966 (Betty Friedan was its first president) to push for full equality for women, including equal pay, an end to job discrimination, and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

• The ERA: would have added equal rights regardless of sex to the Constitution. Congress passed it in 1972, but it fell short of the 38 states it needed before the deadline Congress set.

• Using equal protection: in the 1970s, women's rights advocates won cases where the Court ruled that laws treating men and women differently without a good reason violate the Equal Protection Clause.

• Pro-choice movement: argues a woman has the right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy, as part of the liberty and privacy the 14th Amendment protects (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Some also argue abortion bans deny women equal protection, since only women carry the burden.

• Pro-life movement: argues unborn children have a right to life the government should protect, and that the Constitution says nothing about abortion. For decades after Roe it won state restrictions, like waiting periods and limits on later abortions, and pushed for Roe to be overturned, which happened in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022).

• After Dobbs: since states now decide abortion law, both movements focus on state legislatures, state courts, elections, and ballot measures where voters decide directly.