What powers does the Constitution grant to the national government to protect civil rights?

0:05Plessy v. Ferguson in 1890s, says that Southern states, as long as in they're equal between the races in terms of accommodations given, that segregation is all right. The Supreme Court narrows, it gives license to, essentially allows Southern states to build these tight regimes of what I think we call today like authoritarian regimes where large parts of their populations were disenfranchised.

0:31Jim Crow, if you have a general decline in voting in the South. Among Blacks, obviously almost total suppression. This is more or less the status quo. The courts, the federal government are content to let this lie for the better part of 60 years. Of course, do all of this, Black Americans are organizing, they're pressing for their rights, their freedoms in the South and North campaigns for bills to outlaw lynching.

1:00There's a massive campaign for federal build-out lynching throughout the 1910s and '20s into the 1930s. But the thing that really begins to change the tide and this gets to one of my own views, which is that when thinking of what causes or what leaves the constitutional change, you have to look from the bottom-up primarily, you have to look at what's happening in the society.

1:22Beginning of the 1910s, you have this massive wave of migration of Black Americans from the South to North because although they didn't have political rights, if you could afford to, you could still move. You could still leave. The question was always, will there be jobs?

1:37Will there be jobs for you went? With the advent of the American entry into the First World War, in our massive supplying of the Allied effort in Europe in the draft that took four million American men and put them in uniform. There's this desperate need for labor in the cities of the north, and so that drew millions of African Americans.

1:56It continued to draw millions of African Americans even after the war, and obviously with the Second World War, this is even a greater wave of people moving to the north. This does a couple of things. First of all, it creates some pressure in the South to maybe make conditions a little better, but importantly, it creates a whole new constituency of Black voters in the North because there's no Jim Crow there.

2:19There's still a ton of discrimination, a lot of racism, a lot of violence, but there's no formal regime of vote suppression that could keep Black Americans away from the polls. Until all of a sudden, you have this big constituency of Black voters. You have politicians newly responsive to Black voters, the North national politicians especially.

2:38You have all the pressures that come with that as well as the experience of the Second World War in particular, which is taught explicitly as a war for democracy. A war against fascism, a war against racism, and against Nazi racial theories. All of this begins to exert tremendous pressure on the political system to really begin to resolve the question of the South and the status of Black Americans in the South.

3:07Pressure to the Cold War, great power competition with the Soviet Union were at the time the Soviet Union is this seemingly unstoppable futuristic behemoth, and Americans have to show the world that the United States can also compete with that, not just economically or politically, but also ideologically.

3:27It's in all of these contexts that Black activists are making renewed pushes against segregation, renewed pushes against the legal architecture of Jim Crow. In that political elites are newly receptive to it because there are incentives in terms of votes. There's pressures in terms of ideological competition with the Soviet Union, and there's also an internal, we do have to make things better.

3:54We have to live up to our own ideals here. It's a combination of all of that. Sets the stage for the Supreme Court to really begin re-evaluating, essentially reevaluating the rulings it made in the late 19th century. Brown v. Board of Education, repudiating Plessy v. Ferguson and then subsequent cases essentially repudiating the Supreme Court cases that held a conscious power to protect people from discrimination.

4:22Congress's power to enforce civil rights was limited. Congress still had to act, but the Supreme Court was essentially giving it the room to act, whereas previously it put shackles on Congress's ability to act. Then we get Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act, the big one, that was 1964.

4:42We get the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which is the Housing Act. Interestingly, the '64 act is larger than under the Commerce Clause. I think it's interesting that the patch the drafters take in terms of how they're going to justify this one make constitution, but I think the big point is that the Supreme Court has one set of powerful elites in the country.

5:04Essentially it says, we're going to actually let Congress tackle this problem in a way that we didn't let Congress tackle it 60 years prior.