Wanted: Dead Or Alive

He was born into a prominent Kentucky slave-holding family. He strongly supported slavery. And yet John Marshall Harlan would go on to fight in the Union army and become the lone justice on the Supreme Court to dissent in Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld Jim Crow laws. Harlan, who served on the court between 1877 and 1911, wrote famously, "Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. 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."