ABSTRACT
John Marshall Harlan served as a justice of the US Supreme Court 1877–1911. Justice Harlan was a man who was not afraid to speak his mind even when eight other Supreme Court justices disagreed with him. Despite his past history as a slave owner and his opposition to the Thirteenth Amendment, Justice Harlan was often the lone voice advocating equal treatment of the races during his term of service on the Supreme Court. Justice Harlan was the only dissenter in the Civil Rights Cases, in which the Court's majority held unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that mandated equal treatment for all races. Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy provided the framework for the Supreme Court's unanimous decision fifty-eight years later in Brown v. Board of Education. Even while Harlan was still a justice, there were some indications his ideas were going to help change the Court's position on civil rights issues.
