Of Color Lines and Race Lines: John Marshall Harlan, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in a Colorblind Regime

Phillip Hutchison

doi:10.22158/wjssr.v4n4p270

Abstract

The life of the first Justice Harlan has been the subject of myriad studies, largely inspired by his declaration “Our Constitution is color-blind,” which appeared in his storied dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. This article interrogates unaddressed angles of his dissent that, when given proper attention, can deliver fruitful insights into his intentions behind the colorblind metaphor. The focus is primarily trained upon Harlan’s concept of the “race line,” which he referenced twice in his dissent. Placing this “race line” up against the colorblind Constitution will reveal that he purposed to keep whites educationally and financially dominant “for all time” by means of (colorblind) legal racial equality. The article delves further into the race line by juxtaposing it with W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of the “color line,” which was voiced at the same moment of Plessy.

Highlights

Henry Billings Brown’s majority opinion in the 1896 case Plessy v
Brown’s logic came to constitute judicial common sense among most whites through the first half of the Twentieth Century. Such common sense persisted until the advent of the civil rights movement, whose campaigns against legal racial subordination eviscerated the rationales Brown had deployed in his defense of Jim Crow
Comparing Harlan’s “race line” and Du Bois’s “color line” will expose their colossal differences, but will show how the former was restricted to its legal manifestations divorced from material racial inequalities in every other realm of society