State Action

• Author: Jeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

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A requirement for claims that arise under the DUE PROCESS CLAUSE of the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT and CIVIL RIGHTS legislation, for which a private citizen seeks relief in the form of damages or redress based on an improper intrusion by the government into his or her private life.

The U.S. Supreme Court has established that the protections offered by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution apply only to actions authorized or sanctioned by state law. The "state-action" requirement means that private acts of RACIAL DISCRIMINATION cannot be addressed under these amendments or the federal civil rights laws authorized by the amendments.

The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a state from denying any person due process of law and the EQUAL PROTECTION of the law. The FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT prohibits a state from infringing on a person's right to vote. Both amendments were passed after the Civil War to guarantee these constitutional rights to newly freed slaves. During Reconstruction, Congress enacted many laws that it claimed were based on these amendments. Armed with this constitutional authority, Congress, in the CIVIL RIGHTS ACT of 1875, sought to prohibit racial discrimination by private parties in the provision of public accommodations, such as hotels, restaurants, theaters, and public transportation.

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The Supreme Court struck down the 1875 act in the Civil Rights cases, 109 U.S. 3, 3 S. Ct. 18, 27 L. Ed. 835 (1883). It held that under the Fourteenth Amendment, "it is state action of a particular character that is prohibited. Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the amendment." The Court relied on language of the amendment that provides that "no state" shall engage in certain specified conduct.

This restrictive reading of the state-action requirement permitted racial discrimination to flourish in the South. For example, the Supreme Court upheld the "white primary," a device used to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, in Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U.S. 45, 55 S. Ct. 622, 79 L. Ed. 1292 (1935). The Court reasoned that because political parties were private organizations, their primary elections did not constitute state action.

The Supreme Court began to move away from a strict state-action requirement in the 1940s. In Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649, 64 S. Ct. 757, 88 L. Ed. 987 (1944), the Court struck down the WHITE PRIMARY as violative of the Fifteenth...