Strauder v. West Virginia bars explicit racial exclusion from juries

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that West Virginia's statute explicitly barring Black men from jury service violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Justice William Strong wrote the majority opinion, holding that the law denied Black defendants the right to a jury drawn from peers of their own race. The ruling banned only statutory exclusion, leaving intact the discretionary discrimination that prosecutors and jury commissioners would use for the next century.