Harlan irrefutably took apart Brown’s racist logic. “The white race,” Harlan wrote, was undoubtedly “the dominant race” in wealth, power, prestige, and achievements. “But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. . . . Our Constitution is color-blind.” What was at stake was not an illusory social equality but “personal liberty,” and thus the Louisiana law violated not only the Fourteenth Amendment but the Thirteenth as well. The “thin disguise” of equal facilities could not obscure the fact that enforced
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