Gleason v. Florida was a United States Supreme Court case that dealt with the issue of whether a state could deny a person the right to vote based on race. The case was brought by a black man, William Gleason, who had been denied the right to vote in Florida because of his race. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Gleason, holding that the state of Florida had violated the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which prohibits states from denying any person the right to vote based on race. The Court held that the state of Florida had violated Gleason's right to vote and that the state must allow him to vote. The decision was a major victory for civil rights and set a precedent that states could not deny a person the right to vote based on race. The decision was also a major step forward in the fight for racial equality in the United States.

In Gleason v. Florida, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether a state law that allowed for the sale of property belonging to an insolvent debtor violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The majority opinion held that it did not violate this clause because there was no discrimination against any particular class of persons or group in how the law applied. However, Justice Field dissented from this decision and argued that by allowing creditors to purchase their debtors' property at public auction without giving them notice or opportunity to be heard before such sales were made, it created inequality between those who had knowledge of these auctions and those who did not. He further argued that since only creditors could benefit from these sales while debtors were deprived of their right to due process, they were being treated unequally under the law which violated both natural justice as well as constitutional protections afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment.