A Kentuckian Well Deserving Of GREAT Honor: U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.

In 1800s, a rights icon on the bench
By Peter S. Canellos

DANVILLE, Ky. - One of the nation's greatest civil rights advocates was born here in 1833, beside the old Salt River, in a house made of thousands of pieces of limestone. Two hills away, across a rolling field of bluegrass, were smaller stone dwellings for his family's slaves.

Like many of his fellow whites in border-state Kentucky, the future Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan grew up with reservations about slavery that did not prevent him from reaping the benefits of slave labor. But when the Civil War came, he sided with the Union - a somewhat risky proposition at the time - and his views on race evolved even further.

When he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1877, Republicans worried that he wouldn't give full force to the postwar constitutional amendments guaranteeing equal rights to blacks. They were wrong. For the next 34 years he was the best - and sometimes the only - friend that black people had in any position of power.

Now, in the first Black History Month of the Obama administration, there is new interest in the creation of a freer, fairer nation - and in the leaders in that struggle. But most of the focus is on the mid-20th-century civil rights heroes and not the man who, 60 years earlier, became their inspiration.

Harlan's fame derives largely from one document - his extraordinary dissenting opinion from the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case that, in 1896, gave constitutional approval to racial segregation.

The Plessy case, which allowed Louisiana to require that blacks travel in separate railroad cars, was the final blow to post-Civil War reconstruction, the nation's official acknowledgment that emancipation would be followed not by slow progress toward integration, but rather by a bitter and violently enforced segregation.

Harlan understood instantly that, by accepting the "separate but equal" fallacy, the Supreme Court was jeopardizing the nation's most cherished principle of equality under the law. Never before had a Supreme Court justice stood so forcefully against the prevailing views of his brethren and much of society at the time.

"Everyone knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks but as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons," Harlan wrote, breezily exposing the hypocrisy of separate-but-equal.

"In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved," Harlan wrote.

He also correctly predicted the nightmare of segregation that followed: "What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens. That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation as was enacted in Louisiana."

Harlan's view, so lonely in its time, is now unquestioningly accepted. And in areas well beyond civil rights, his dissenting opinions proved far more durable and prescient than the court majorities.

Over the years, however, some of the nation's more academic jurists have portrayed his views as more emotionally than legally sound. Felix Frankfurter called Harlan's opinions eccentric. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who had pithy putdowns for everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt, called Harlan "the last of the tobacco-spitting judges."

More seriously, scholars have noted that Harlan was briefly a member of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing party, and that his affinity for blacks didn't necessarily extend to immigrants.

His views, it seems, sprang less from a sense of the universal rights of man than a faith in American institutions. He believed that maintaining a powerful Constitution, and applying it forcefully against the disparate actions of states, was the key to making the United States a great nation.

It was a lesson he had learned the hard way amid the political, legal, and ultimately constitutional flux in Kentucky during the years leading up to the Civil War. Having witnessed the hard birth of the postwar amendments to the Constitution, he understood, better than anyone else of his time, their vision of a colorblind society.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond. He can be reached at canellos@globe.com.