Equal Protection Under The Law, Round Two

Congressman John Bingham of Ohio was the principal framer of the Equal Protection Clause.  We had a photo of the dignified old bird here, but it didn't copy across.  The next two paragraphs are pretty straight copies from Wikipedia.

Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, providing that all those born in the United States were citizens of the United States, to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford.  It also required "citizens of every race and color ... [to have] full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens." Doubts about whether Congress could legitimately enact such a law under the Constitution led Congress to begin to draft and debate what would become the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.   The Radical Republicans of both houses of Congress, including John Bingham, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens led this effort. The most important among these was Bingham.

The Southern states were opposed to the Civil Rights Act, but in 1865 Congress, exercising its power under Article I, section 5, clause 1 of the Constitution, to "be the Judge of the ... Qualifications of its own Members," had excluded Southerners from Congress, declaring that their states, having rebelled against the Union, could therefore not elect members to Congress. It was this fact—the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted by a "rump" Congress—that allowed the equal protection clause, which white Southerners almost uniformly hated (would we include Robert E. Lee here?), to be passed by Congress and proposed to the states. Its ratification by the former Confederate states was made a condition of their reacceptance into the Union.^[4]  By 1868 28 of 37 states had approved the Amendment and it became part of the Constitution.  In part it read:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;

nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. 

        

Archibald Cox, in The Court and the Constitution (a fine one-volume introduction to constitutional law for nonlawyers) called equal protection “the great third clause.”  (p 113)  In October, 2012, a Supreme Court journalist said the most prominent cases of the coming term would probably be equal protection cases.  While the due process clause pointed at keeping citizens in possession of their life, liberty and property unless a lawful process took them away, equal protection was an emphasis on the privileges and protections of all citizens, regardless of color.  All of these phrases have helped Americans of every background breathe more freely.   

By its terms, the clause restrains only state governments. However, the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee, beginning with Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), has been interpreted as imposing some of the same restrictions on the federal government: "Though the Fifth Amendment does not contain an equal protection clause, as does the Fourteenth Amendment which applies only to the States, the concepts of equal protection and due process are not mutually exclusive."^[5]  This has the tidy legal name of "reverse selective incorporation."  Maybe someday we'll understand it and explain it here.  
Equal protection under law didn’t reach women until 1971 (though it has hardly reached them fully 41 years later), in the Supreme court decision of Reed v. Reed.^[6]  Note this took even longer than allowing interracial marriage, done by 1967’s Griswold v. Connecticut case.