rmer
occasions that this decision permitted the States and groups of
individuals supposedly subject to the government of those States to
fasten upon the Negro badges or incidents of slavery in violation of
the civil rights guaranteed him by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
Amendments. He believed that Congress had the right to pass any law to
protect citizens in the enjoyment of any right granted him by
Congress. The duty of the Federal government as Justice Harlan saw it
was very clear in that the State had caused the race question to be
injected therein and in such a case Congress always has power to act.

On the whole, however, the United States Supreme Court has not yet had
the moral courage to face the issue in cases involving the
constitutional rights of the Negro. Not a decision of that tribunal
has yet set forth a straightforward opinion as to whether the States
can enact one code of laws for the Negroes and another for the other
elements of our population in spite of the fact that the Constitution
of the United States prohibits such iniquitous legislation. In cases
in which this question has been frankly put the court has wiggled out
of it by some such declaration as that the case was improperly
brought, that there were defects in the averments, or that the court
lacked jurisdiction.

In the matter of jurisdiction the United States Supreme Court has been
decidedly inconsistent. This tribunal at first followed the opinion
of Chief Justice John Marshall in the case of _Osborn_ v. _United
States Bank_,[79] that "when a question to which the judicial power of
the United States is extended by the Constitution forms an ingredient
of the original cause it is in the power of Congress to give the
Circuit Courts the jurisdiction of that cause, although other
questions of fact or of law may be involved." Prior to the rise of the
Negro to the status of so-called citizenship the court built upon this
decision the prerogative of examining all judicial matters pertaining
to the Federal Government until it made itself the sole arbiter in all
important constitutional questions and became the bulwark of
nationalism. After some reaction the court resumed that position in
all of its decisions except those pertaining to the Negro; for in the
recent commercial expansion of the country involving the litigation of
unusually large property values, the United States Supreme Court has
easily found grounds for jurisdiction where economic r