We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution

by Bruce Ackerman,
The Florida Courier, March 28, 2014

When we think of the mid-20th century civil rights movement in the United States, we tend to think, first and foremost, about Supreme Court cases. Brown v. Board of Education, the school desegregation case, overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. And a spate of decisions, including Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc. v. the United States and Katzenbach v. McClung, upheld the authority of the federal government to expand the scope of equal protection, under the 14th Amendment and the commerce clause, to public accommodations, employment, housing, and voting.