Week Eight: Yick Wo vs. Hopkins (1886)
This week, we begin considering Supreme Court decisions that attacked discrimination or its effects and so helped bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.
Beginning in 1880, a San Francisco city ordinance required that all laundries located in wooden buildings have a permit issued by the city's Board of Supervisors. When the ordinance was first enforced, laundrymen of Chinese descent operated 89 percent of the city's laundry businesses and yet not a single Chinese owner was granted a permit. In response, Yick Wo continued to operate his laundry, was convicted of operating without a permit, and, after refusing to pay a $10 fine, imprisoned.
Mr. Wo sued seeking release under a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the discriminatory enforcement of the ordinance violated his rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Because the language of the law was nondiscriminatory, lower courts upheld the conviction. A unanimous US Supreme Court focused on how the law was being used and, by so doing, established a foundation for the many successful civil rights cases that eventually followed.
Follow the link below to some short videos from C-SPAN Classroom that explain the case, events leading up to it, and the lasting importance of this case that has been cited in over 150 other Supreme Court decisions.
Our latest series focuses on the US Supreme Court and the role it has played in the struggle for civil rights. This new series has three parts. First, we look at two cases that established the principle of judicial review of actions by federal (1803) and state (1817) government. Second, we look at a series of Supreme Court cases decided between 1857 and 1944. These cases made it easier for governments to deny individuals their rights and so each made the moral arc of the universe a little longer. Finally, we look at a series of cases decided between 1886 and 1983 that moved America forward toward justice. For this new series, we draw on some very short (thirty seconds to four-minute videos) from C-SPAN Classroom.