Opinion of the Court
III
A
In the wake of the Civil War, Congress proposed and the States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, providing that no State shall “deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws.” Amdt. 14, §1. To its proponents, the Equal Protection Clause represented a “foundation[al] principle”—“the absolute equality of all citizens of the United States politically and civilly before their own laws.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 431 (1866) (statement of Rep. Bingham) (Cong. Globe). The Constitution, they were determined, “should not permit any distinctions of law based on race or color,” Supp. Brief for United States on Reargument in Brown v. Board of Education, O. T. 1953, No. 1 etc., p. 41 (detailing the history of the adoption of the Equal Protection Clause), because any “law which operates upon one man [should] operate equally upon all,” Cong. Globe 2459 (statement of Rep. Stevens). As soon-to-be President James Garfield observed, the Fourteenth Amendment would hold “over every American citizen, without regard to color, the protecting shield of law.” Id., at 2462. And in doing so, said Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, the Amendment would give “to the humblest, the poorest, the most despised of the race the same rights and the same protection before the law as it gives to the most powerful, the most wealthy, or the most haughty.” Id., at 2766. For “[w]ithout this principle of equal justice,” Howard continued, “there is no republican government and none that is really worth maintaining.” Ibid.
At first, this Court embraced the transcendent aims of the Equal Protection Clause. “What is this,” we said of the Clause in 1880, “but declaring that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States?” Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 307–309. “[T]he broad and benign provisions of the
