“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  So wrote America’s founders on July 4, 1776.  Despite the good intentions, many signatories of the Declaration of Independence would vote in 1787 in favor of a Constitution that kept millions of slaves in bondage, initiating the many long years of toil, brutality, and war that lay ahead before even the basic concept of equality would gain acceptance in the United States.   

It took almost 100 years before slavery led to war, and even the Civil War did not end racial inequality, the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution notwithstanding.  In many ways, the involuntary servitude prohibited by the 13th Amendment lived on in southern states through economic policies such as sharecropping for almost 100 years after the end of the Civil War.  Most former Confederate states used state and local “Jim Crow” laws to deny former slaves equality in virtually every aspect of life, including the right to vote.  

Between 1941 and 1945, some ten years after the construction of the Supreme Court Building with it’s two inscriptions “Equal Justice Under Law” and “Justice, the Guardian of Liberty,” Americans of color faced rampant inequality, discrimination, and segregation in America’s armed forces as they fought the Nazis, who wrote discrimination, racial hatred, and even mass murder into law.  After the war, African American veterans returned to segregated and racially discriminatory states, where their military service freeing those facing racial inequality overseas meant nothing. 

In the 1960’s, Martin Luther King and many other extraordinarily courageous individuals gave their lives fighting for the equality that had supposedly been granted by a creator and guaranteed by America since 1776.  It took incredible patience, relentless hard work, inconceivable sacrifice, economic boycotts, non-violent actions, riots, assassinations, and countless individual epiphanies to end America’s intergenerational nightmare of racial hatred, segregation, and discrimination.  Even after their victory, discriminatory stereotypes, symbols, and laws quietly lived on.  Interracial marriage remained a crime in South Carolina until 1998. 

Despite America’s proud traditions of freedom and many religious institutions’s alleged adherence to the ancient “Golden Rule,” We the People of the United States once again hear the voices of fellow citizens apparently denied equal justice under law.  Another unpopular minority now seeks the equality allegedly enshrined upon the very walls of America’s Supreme Court Building.  As in the past, those facing discrimination seek redress in the courts and with their representatives, while others seek to codify inequality into state, local, and even federal law. 

It took some 200 years of strife for the US to create at least the appearance of racial equality (many statistics suggest true equality has yet to occur).  Will it take another civil war and 200 years of assassinations, devastation, hatred, murder, and tragedy before the freedoms allegedly granted by the Constitution and its Amendments actually exist?  Will the courts honor America’s proud traditions of equality and equal justice under law?  No matter what the courts decide, it appears that until citizens opposing equality agree to treat others in the way that they expect to be treated, the “inalienable” Rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness will not exist.