3.12 Balancing Minority and Majority Rights

Democracy runs on majority rule, but the founders feared a “tyranny of the majority,” in which a majority uses government to oppress a minority. Madison's Federalist No. 10 is built around this worry (1.3). Protections for minorities come from the Constitution's structure, the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights laws. American history shows government both failing and succeeding at this balance.

Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation in September 1862, and the final Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. It declared enslaved people in areas still in rebellion against the United States to be free.

Key features:

• It was a war measure based on Lincoln's power as commander in chief, aimed at weakening the Confederacy.
• It didn't apply to the slaveholding border states loyal to the Union (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) or to some areas already under Union control.
• It had little immediate effect where the Confederacy still ruled, but freedom spread as Union armies advanced.
• It allowed Black men to serve in the Union army and navy, and about 180,000 served in the army.
• It made ending slavery a goal of the war, and it made European support for the Confederacy less likely.

Because the proclamation was a wartime order with limited reach, supporters worried courts or later leaders could undo it. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude everywhere in the United States, except as punishment for a crime. Together with the Fourteenth (equal protection and citizenship) and Fifteenth (voting regardless of race) Amendments, it formed the Reconstruction Amendments.

After Reconstruction ended, Southern states passed Jim Crow laws requiring racial segregation. In 1892, Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, sat in a whites-only railroad car to challenge Louisiana's Separate Car Act and was arrested.

In a 7–1 decision, the Court upheld the law, ruling that separate facilities did not violate equal protection as long as they were equal. This “separate but equal” doctrine gave legal cover to segregation in schools, transportation and public places for nearly 60 years, and in practice facilities for Black Americans were rarely equal. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented alone, arguing that the Constitution is “color-blind.” Brown v. Board (1954) rejected Plessy's reasoning for public schools (3.11).

A majority-minority district is an election district in which a racial or ethnic minority group makes up a majority of voters. After the Voting Rights Act was strengthened in 1982, states drew more of these districts so that minority voters could elect candidates of their choice, and minority representation in Congress grew.

But in Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Court ruled that districts drawn predominantly on the basis of race must survive strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause (2.3). The Court saw racial sorting of voters, even with a goal of helping a minority group, as a form of racial classification. The tension between using race to protect minority voting power and avoiding racial classifications is still being argued in court.