The Constitution ensures “equal protection of the laws.” Federal, state, and local governments and agencies are charged to enforce them. But race and class discrimination over time vitiated “justice under law.”

Discrimination troubled Raymond P. Alexander (1897–1974), Senior Judge of the Court of Common Pleas No. 4, Philadelphia. “There is still active and virulent discrimination in employment, in housing, in education and in many other areas,” he declared in 1969. “So, too, the law has not dealt adequately with the problem of de facto discrimination — that discrimination which is inherent in Ghetto living” (Alexander, 1969, p. 95).

Injustices against blacks have endured since slavery and emancipation. Slaves and free black people, the US Chief Justice said in 1857, were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In the Reconstruction South, home of nine in ten African Americans, an Army-staffed judiciary sought to protect black workers and voters while settling black-white disputes. Governing by 1877, ex-Confederates quickened purges of blacks from jury and voter rolls. Arbitrarily and repeatedly, they arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned blacks to be leased laborers. In 1896, when the Supreme Court declared its “equal, but separate” ruling, black southerners faced not only legal disfranchisement and segregation but also rampant “Lynch Law.” De facto race separation and injustice spread nationwide.

Blacks fought for equality. For example, the NAACP's fight to end lynching and litigate civil and criminal cases enlisted black churches and women's, civic, fraternal, labor, and interracial organizations. Its litigation won Court decisions securing black citizens’ right to counsel, to trial by juries of their peers, and to vote, while overruling segregated housing and schools. It lobbied for and helped win passage of the 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1965 civil and voting rights acts.

But inequities persisted. Racial profiling, used in the War on Drugs (1970), and police brutality fueled massive riots in Miami (1980) and Los Angeles (1992). Assessing drug, alcohol, and handgun crimes from 1944, the Committee on the Status of Black Americans (1989) reported “overt bias in arrests, trials, and sentencing.” In capital prosecutions, the skin color of the victim clearly shaped “the odds of a murderer's receiving the death penalty.” Not surprising, the National Black Police Association, with locals in thirty-five major cities, called for community policing, narcotics interdiction, and gun control.