Newton is an adherent of the liberal line on the 14th Amendment and equal protection.
Well, why not?
Even Plessy was halfway there.
Even Plessy, though rightly decided, was wrongly reasoned.
The equal protection clause is about the protection of the law against attacks on one's person or property.
The law and law enforcement in the states must protect all equally with others, regardless of race, etc.
It was written with an eye toward the white terrorism directed against blacks in the South in the immediate post-Civil War period that Southern states did little to prevent or prosecute, when they were not actually complicit.
And that has nothing to do with train service.
But that is not how even the Plessy court had seen it, and Newton finds fault with Fred Vinson that his Supreme Court did not decide that separate was per se unequal and so forbidden by the 14th.
An idea from which originates the myth of constitutionally mandatory integration.
Analogously, the due process guarantee means only that government cannot deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property except lawfully.
No small thing, this is the essential repudiation of executive absolutism.
But that is all it is.
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