Iowa has a proud history of leading in civil rights advancements. During its territorial years, a vigorous abolitionist movement planted the seeds for Iowa to become, by the end of the Civil War, one of the Union's most racially egalitarian states. Iowa passed one of the nation's first civil rights laws in 1884. Several cases before the Iowa Supreme Court, including the very first case heard, have radically reshaped our state's approach to civil rights – putting us, in many cases, years or decades ahead of the rest of the country. While these decisions may have been controversial at the time, history now views them as both advanced and courageous.
The Role of the Courts
From its earliest days, the Iowa judiciary has played a preeminent and indispensable role in protecting the state constitution's guarantees of freedom, equality, and inalienable rights. This tradition of judicial leadership and independence is so essential to the state's history that the Iowa Judicial Branch devotes a section of its web site to the state's early civil rights cases. "Like the courts of today," the Judicial Branch explains, "the early Iowa courts were sometimes called upon to decide cases that involved volatile social or political controversies of the time. . . . These decisions demonstrate legal foresight as well as a deep and abiding respect for the values enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights." This history sheds valuable light on the role of the judiciary in deciding whether state officials may exclude same-sex couples from the protections and responsibilities of marriage.
In its very first decision, the Iowa Supreme Court considered the case of Ralph, a former Missouri slave whose master, Jordan Montgomery, allowed him to go to Dubuque to earn money to buy his freedom. After Ralph had been in Iowa for five years, Montgomery sent agents into the state to reclaim him by force. The Supreme Court held that since Montgomery had given Ralph permission to resettle in Iowa, the former slave could not be labeled a fugitive. Although the court ruled that Ralph was obligated to pay the $550 Montgomery had demanded for his freedom, such a debt could not form a basis on which any "man in this territory can be reduced to slavery." The case of Ralph stands in sharp contrast to the infamous Dred Scott decision 18 years later, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even in free states, slaves had no legal claim to freedom.
On the question of "separate but equal" systems of education, the Iowa Supreme Court was nearly a century ahead of its federal counterpart in declaring segregated schools to be intolerable and contrary to law. The 1868 case, Clark v. Board of Directors, concerned Susan B. Clark, a 12-year-old girl who had been denied admission to Muscatine Grammar School No. 2 because of her race. The court said the local school board had no authority to deny African-American children the right to equal education merely because "public sentiment in their district is opposed to the intermingling of white and colored children." To do so "would be to sanction a plain violation of the spirit of our laws
tend to perpetuate the national differences of our people and stimulate a constant strife." Not until Brown v. Board of Education would the U.S. Supreme Court locate the federal constitutional principles and summon the courage to reach the same conclusion.
http://www.oneiowa.org/web/beInformed/civilRights/history/
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