Federal Jurisdiction: The Civil Rights Removal Statute Revisited

For the first time in sixty years, the Supreme Court in Georgia v. Rachel and City of Greenwood v. Peacock re-examined the civil rights removal provisions of section 1443 of the Judicial Code, which until recent years have remained dormant because of the restrictive interpretation assigned to this remnant of Reconstruction legislation. The Supreme Court as late as 1906 apparently relegated the statute\u27s principal remedy to instances involving a state enactment discriminatory on its face, a standard which rendered the legislation impotent as more subtle devices for denying equal civil rights developed. However, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided a new opportunity for the Court to re-examine the obscure textual language of section 1443, the resulting re-evaluation produced a restrictive construction which apparently permits removal in only one additional and narrowly circumscribed circumstance, probably foreclosing all other channels for invoking this remedy