The whole "corporations are people" legal reasoning is entirely about protecting black corporations from being discriminated against.
If they're not treated as "people," then states can routinely deny government contracts, for example, to black owned businesses.
If a corporation is not a "person," then you couldn't sue it.
A corporation is not some nebulous evil entity. It is a free association of actual people with shared interests, risks, and rewards.
"From the moment the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, lawyers for corporations — particularly railroad companies — wanted to use that 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection to make sure that the states didn't unequally treat corporations," Moglen says.
Nobody was talking about extending to corporations the right of free speech back then. What the railroads sought was equal treatment under state tax laws and things like that.
The Supreme Court extended that protection to corporations, and over time also extended some — but not all — of the rights guaranteed to individuals in the Bill of Rights. The court ruled that corporations don't have a right against self-incrimination, for instance, but are protected by the ban on warrantless search and seizure.
Otherwise, as the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro puts it, "the police could storm down the doors of some company and take all their computers and their files."
