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Long before the jury rendered its guilty verdict in the Karmelo Anthony case, there was reason to question whether the trial had already gone off the constitutional rails. The case, which concluded last week in a conviction for first-degree murder, has generated exactly the sort of fierce debate, outrage, celebration, and anguish that high-profile criminal trials often produce. Every significant criminal case eventually becomes a vessel into which the country pours its anxieties, fears, loyalties, and grievances. People see the same facts and emerge with entirely different stories. That is neither new nor surprising.

The details of this case and the central factual questions are not what’s remarkable: People may dispute whether the then-17-year-old Anthony acted in self-defense when he stabbed unarmed 17-year-old Austin Metcalf to death at a track meet. These sorts of legal skirmishes happen all the time in this country.

What is remarkable is that after nearly a century and a half of Supreme Court decisions condemning racial discrimination in jury selection, after generations of litigation, after Batson v. Kentucky, after countless judicial pronouncements declaring that race has no place in the selection of jurors, we are still arguing about whether Black citizens were excluded from a jury because they were Black. That is a scandal.

According to reports from the trial, defense counsel objected after prosecutors struck the final three remaining Black prospective jurors from the venire—ultimately, there was not a single Black juror. The state reportedly responded that the jurors were removed because they were educators. The trial court accepted this explanation.

The exchange, as reported, captures in miniature one of the oldest constitutional failures in American life. It reveals a wound so old that Americans have almost grown accustomed to it, a wound that has survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and nearly four decades of Batson jurisprudence.

The history of excluding Black Americans from juries is often described as though it were merely a chapter in the chronicle of criminal law. That understates the matter dramatically. The struggle over jury service is a struggle over citizenship itself. The generations that systematically excluded Black Americans from jury boxes understood that a jury is one of the few institutions in American life through which ordinary........

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