Sotomayor, J., dissenting
In time, the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century again demanded racial equality in public places. In 1963, two decades after then–Howard University law student Pauli Murray organized sit-ins at cafeterias in Washington, D. C., a diverse group of students and faculty from Tougaloo College sat at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. For doing so, they were violently attacked by a white mob. See A. Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi 235–240 (1992). Around the country, similar acts of protest against racial injustice, some big and some small, sought “to create such a crisis and foster such a tension” that the country would be “forced to confront the issue.” M. King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Apr. 16, 1963. That year, Congress once more set out to eradicate “discrimination … in places of accommodation and public facilities,” Heart of Atlanta Motel, 379 U. S., at 246, notwithstanding this Court’s previous declaration of a federal public accommodations law to be unconstitutional.
Congress believed, rightly, that discrimination in places of public accommodation—“the injustice of being arbitrarily denied equal access to those facilities and accommodations which are otherwise open to the general public”—had “no place” in this country, the country “of the melting pot, of equal rights, of one nation and one people.” S. Rep. No. 872, at 8–9 (quoting President Kennedy, June 19, 1963). It therefore passed Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declares: “All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation … without discrimination … on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” 42 U. S. C. §2000a. In enacting this landmark civil rights statute, Congress invoked the holding-out rationale from antebellum common law: “one who employed his private property for purposes of commercial gain by offering goods or services to the public must stick to his bargain.” S. Rep. No. 872, at
