From the 14th Amendment: "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Are convinced that the arrangements in the segregated South were "separate but equal", with the emphasis on "equal"? It never appeared that way to me.
Also, there's a bit of a problem with defining just exactly who the second class citizens are. Was Obama a black man or a white man? What do you think of the "one drop rule"?
Please be careful concerning the 14th Amendment’s (14A) equal protection clause (EPC). The EPC is often misinterpreted imo.
More specifically, regardless that state sovereignty-ignoring activist judges have been twisting the EPC to wrongly create new, politically correct rights from the bench, please consider the following.
The states originally did not obligate themselves to respect the rights that they expressly protected with the Bill of Rights, the states requiring only the feds to respect such rights. But when the states ratified 14A, they likewise obligated themselves to respect constitutionally enumerated rights.
But it remains that the states are free to make laws which discriminate on the basis of any criteria that they have not amended the Constitution to expressly protect, EPC requiring the states only to discriminate equally with respect to enforcing discriminatory laws.
For example, the Supreme Court clarified in Minor v. Happersett that the EPC did not automatically give otherwise qualified female citizens the right to vote since the states had never amended the Constitution to expressly protect womens' right to vote up to that time. (Note that Virginia Minor’s effort led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment which effectively gave women the right to vote.)
Again, with respect to state laws that discriminate on basis of constitutionally unprotected criteria, all that 14A’s EPC was intended to do is to make sure that a given state discriminates equally against everybody within its borders with respect to such laws.
For example, noting that I’m not encouraging underage citizens to do so, this is why underage citizens in one state who want to drink alcoholic beverages occasionally visit a state that discriminates to a lesser extent with minimum drinking age.