Article Title
Abstract
When constitutional lawyers talk about the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment as applied to questions of race, they often men-tion that the spectators’ galleries in Congress were racially segregated when Congress debated the Amendment.1 If the Thirty-Ninth Congress practiced racial segregation, the thinking goes, then it probably did not mean to prohibit racial segregation.2 As an argument about constitutional interpretation, this line of thinking has both strengths and weaknesses. But this brief Essay is not about the interpretive consequences, if any, of segregation in the congressional galleries during the 1860s. It is about the factual claim that the galleries were segregated.
Recommended Citation
Richard Primus,
Segregation in the Galleries: A Reconsideration,
118
Mich. L. Rev. Online
150
(2020).
Available at:
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr_online/vol118/iss1/3
Included in
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