1. Be familiar with how Native Americans living on reservations attained voting rights
and U.S. citizenship.
● 1823 Johnson v. MÍntosh Supreme Court declared Native Americans än inferior
race of people without privileges of citizenship.”
● 1884 Supreme Court ruled that the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment did not provided citizenship to Native Americans born on
reservations because reservations are not fully under the jurisdiction of the
United States
● Indian Citizenship Act of 1924: extended natural-born citizenship rights
(and hence, voting rights) to Native Americans living on reservations.
2. Be familiar with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and its
provision for citizenship. Does equal protection extend to only citizens of the United
States? (we discussed this in class)
● Section 1 of the Fourteenth amendment (1868) made all people born in the
United States citizens of the U.S. and guarantees that states may not deprive
any person due process of law or equal protection under the law.
● The portion of the Fourteenth Amendment that prevents states from denying
persons equal protection under the law is knows as the equal protection clause.
3. Be familiar with the Supreme Court case that established the “separate but equal”
doctrine and which racial and ethnic groups were affected by it.
● In the landmark case, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), U.S. Supreme Court upheld
the Louisiana law the institution of segregation when it established the separate–
but-equal-doctrine.
● Phoenix, AZ ran separate schools for blacks, Indians and Mexicans
● California ran separate schools for Asians as well as Mexicans
● Texas kept Mexican-American students in separate classrooms.
● In areas of the Southwestern U.S., Latinos were required to sit in the back of the
buses, sit in movie theater balconies, and attended separate public schools.
4. Be familiar with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the part of the constitution that
upholds the law’s constitutionality. Know what is meant by the term “public
accommodation.”
● Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act which prohibited discrimination on the
basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment, education and
places of public accommodation.
● Because the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies only
to the acts of discrimination by state governments, the U.S. Supreme Court used
the authority of Congress to ban private discrimination.
● Public Accommodation refer to facilities both public and private that serve the
public. This meant the private business such as retail stores.
5. Prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act, how did discrimination operate in northern
states? Was it state-sponsored or private?
● In norther states, segregation was not enforced by law, though African-
Americans encountered discrimination in hiring, housing, hotels and restaurants.
6. Be familiar with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the current status of its requirement
for preclearance for states with a history of voter discrimination. What is the current
status of the Texas voter ID law? Be familiar with language requirements for ballots and
voting information materials as a result of amendments to the VRA.
● July, 2016 Texas NAACP v. Steen, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled
that the Texas voter ID law does not comply with the 1965 Voting Rights Acts.
● Women in the state of New Jersey allowed women to vote only if they had
property.
7. Posted on Blackboard is a summary of the documentary, A Class Apart. In that
summary and the powerpoint you will find info relating to the significance of Hernandez
v. Texas for the rights of Latinos in the U.S. What affect did the treaty that ended the
Mexican-American War have on the citizenship of Mexican-Americans living in Texas at
the time? In Texas, what race were Mexican-Americans legally?
● Mexicans -Americans living in the USA obtain their citizenship with the treaty that
ended the Mexican-American War.
● This meant that under the law Mexican-Americans were legally white.
