People are scratching their heads and rolling their eyes at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for what he said about a major court case that sparked the Civil Rights Movement.
In the case of the Alexander vs. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on May 23. This overturned a lower court’s ruling that race played a role in the recent redistricting of Congress in South Carolina. The Court’s six conservative members voted as a group to make up the majority. Newsweek was told by the NAACP that the ruling was a “gut punch” to democracy and the people of the United States.
It took Justice Thomas some time to write a concurring opinion that said the courts shouldn’t be involved in how political districts are drawn. He did this to support Justice Samuel Alito’s decision for the Court.
Thomas wrote that politicians, not federal courts, should be in charge of drawing up political districts. “There are no standards that can be used by judges to decide claims about districting, and the Constitution leaves those decisions solely to the political branches.”
Then he said something that started the Civil Rights Movement all by itself. Thomas then said that the 1957 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which banned racial segregation in public schools, was to blame for these kinds of problems.
Thomas said that the court went too far in the Brown case. He said that the result showed the court’s “extravagant uses of judicial power…at odds with the history and tradition of the equity power and the Framers’ design.”
In the original Brown ruling, it was said that segregation based on race is against the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which says that everyone has the same rights under the law. On the other hand, Thomas has long said that “separate but equal” is a good idea.
