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The legislative history of [the Fourteenth! Amendment is not enlightening, and the history of its ratification is not edifying. --Justice Robert H. Jackson (1955) (1) The Fourteenth Amendment was actually the culmination of the determined efforts of the. Radical Republican majority in Congress to incorporate into our fundamental law the well-defined equalitarian principle of complete equality for all without regard to race or color. The debates in the 39th Congress and succeeding Congresses clearly reveal the intention that the Fourteenth Amendment would work a revolutionary change in our state-federal relationship by denying to the states the power to distinguish on the basis of race. --NAACP Brief on Reargument in Brown v. Board of Education (1953 (2) Legal scholars and historians in recent years have sought to elevate Reconstruction to the stature of a 'second Founding, ' according it the same careful inquiry and legitimating function as the first. Their work marks the latest iteration of a decades-long campaign to displace the far more dismissive attitude toward Reconstruction that permeated historical scholarship and legal opinions in the first half of the twentieth century. In this Article, I present the flurry of engagement with the history of the Fourteenth Amendment during the litigation of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as a key transition point in how historians and legal scholars have approached the constitutional history of Reconstruction. 1 highlight in particular the efforts of the lawyers for the NAACP, who advocated a reading of the Equal Protection Clause that most scholars at the time believed conflicted with the Fourteenth Amendment's original meaning. With the aid of a group of historians sympathetic to their cause, the NAACP lawyers prepared a brief that presented a bold (if often tendentious) revisionist history of the Fourteenth Amendment that advanced an originalist justification for striking down segregation laws. The Supreme Court did not accept the NAACP's reading of history; in his Brown opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded the historical record was 'inconclusive' on the question oj school segregation. Yet the basic assumption about Reconstruction history on which the NAACP legal brief turned--that the aspirations of the most egalitarian voices of the day deserve special iveight in assessing the meaning of the Reconstruction amendments--has today become a core tenet of legal and historical scholarship., This Article considers how scholars and jurists have approached the history of the framing and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. I use as a centerpiece of my inquiry the Supreme [...]

INTRODUCTION I. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CURRENT EQUAL PROTECTION LAW REGARDING THE DISPROPORTIONATE IMPACT OF LAWS ON RACIAL MINORITIES A. THE PURPOSEFUL AND INTENTIONAL RACIAL DISCRIMINATION STANDARD B. DAVIS AND DISPROPORTIONATE [...]