Strauder+v.+West+Virginia

=Strauder v. West Virginia= 100 U.S. 303 (1880)

This case involved a West Virginia law that limited jury service to "white male persons who are twenty-one years of age and who are citizens of this State." Strauder was an African American male who had been convicted of murder by an all-white jury; this case was his challenge to his conviction under the Equal Protection Clause.

Just as it had in //The Slaughter-House Cases// seven years previously, the Court used strong language to set out the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment:

"The worlds of the amendment [contain] a positive immunity or right, most valuable to the colored race,— the right to exemption from legal discriminations, implying inferiority in civil society, lessening the security of their enjoyment of the rights which others enjoy, and discriminations which are steps towards reducing them to the condition of a subject race."

The Court found West Virginia's law to be discriminatory, and the law was invalidated. Interestingly, the Court commented that the law would also be invalid if the races were switched in status, if African Americans were in the majority and the law discriminated against whites. This was an expansion of Equal Protection as laid out by the //Slaughter-House// Court; not only was the Fourteenth Amendment designed to protect blacks, it was intended to eliminate discrimination on the basis of race altogether.

West Virginia, by its law, "may confine the selection [of the jury] to males, to freeholders, to citizens, to persons within certain ages, or to persons having educational qualifications," just not in exclusion of persons of a certain race or color.