The Fall of Roe: You Thought Dobbs Was Bad? They’re Coming for Brown v. Board

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The Fall of Roe: You Thought Dobbs Was Bad? They’re Coming for Brown v. Board
In June 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned more than a half-century of Supreme Court precedent. Five justices voted to deny constitutional protection for a woman’s right to choose and gutted privacy as a fundamental right. Texas and 13 other states now bar abortions in almost all circumstances. Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina have enacted six-week bans.

Writing for the Supreme Court majority, Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, explicitly compared the death of Roe to the end of state-enforced racial segregation, 68 years before. Back in 1954, in a landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous court overruled the doctrine of “separate but equal.” These days, Brown is under attack from Alito’s allies on and off the bench.

In their new book The Fall of Roe, named for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that previously safeguarded federal abortion rights, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer masterfully lay out how the cultural right and pro-life movement refused to take “no” for an answer, played the long game, and attained the victory for which they had yearned. Diasand Lerer also capture the somnolence of the left and how “intersectionality” came to divide old allies.

 

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/23/clarence-thomas-supreme-court-racial-segregation

Clarence Thomas attacks Brown v. Board ruling amid 70th anniversary

Clarence Thomas attacks Brown v. Board ruling amid 70th anniversary
Russell Contreras
Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas
issued a strong rebuke of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling on Thursday, suggesting the court overreached its authority in the landmark decision that banned separating schoolchildren by race.

Why it matters: Thomas attacked the Brown decision in a concurrence opinionthat allowed South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that critics say discriminated against Black voters.

Driving the news: The court "took a boundless view of equitable remedies" in the Brown ruling, wrote Thomas, who in 1991 replaced Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — the first Black Supreme Court Justice and the lead lawyer in the Brown case.

• Those remedies came through "extravagant uses of judicial power" to end racial segregation in the 1950s and 60s, Thomas wrote.
• Federal courts have limited power to grant equitable relief, "not the flexible power to invent whatever new remedies may seem useful at the time," he said, justifying his opinion to keep a predominantly white congressional district in South Carolina.

Zoom out: The U.S. marked the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling last week.

• The 9-0 decision declared the "separate but equal" doctrine unconstitutional and helped usher in the Civil Rights Movement, though it took two decades to dismantle some school segregation policies.

State of play: An Axios review found American public schools are growing more separate and unequal even though the country is more racially and ethnically diverse than ever.

• Racial segregation in schools across the country has increased dramatically over the last three decades, according to two new reports and an Axios review of federal data.
• The resegregation of America's public schools coincides with the rise ofcharter schools and school choice options and as civil rights groups have turned away from desegregation battles.

 

On one hand, the public schools still are informally segregated. On the other, it’ll be looney tunes watching school districts fully lean into racial segregation.