In a set of five cases consolidated in a single decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The decision affirmed the premise that the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to prohibit discrimination only by state governments and not by private individuals or businesses.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875
Anticipating questions about the constitutionality of his proposals, Sumner tied his advocacy of free access to public facilities directly to the abolition of slavery, arguing that because one of the disabilities of slavery was the prohibition against entering public places, the end of slavery should mean freedom to enter the establishments of one’s choosing. Restrictions on that freedom based on race constituted a “badge of slavery.”
Supporters of the public accommodations law also argued that it could be sustained on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. Representative Robert Brown Elliott
The Republicans lost their majority in Congress in the 1874 elections. They passed the Civil Rights Act in a lame duck session in early 1875, as a last effort to secure the rights of African Americans before Congress became dominated by Democrats and pro-white southerners. The original version of the bill was drafted by African American civil rights activist John Mercer Langston
In the year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, neither Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes nor Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden
The challenges to the law arose from four criminal prosecutions of persons who had excluded African Americans from their hotels or theaters and a fifth case brought by a black woman who had been excluded from a white railroad car reserved for women. All five cases fell under sections 1 and 2 of the 1875 law, and the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether these provisions were constitutional under the Thirteenth
On October 15, 1883, Justice Joseph P. Bradley delivered the opinion of the Court. Seven justices joined his opinion; only Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented. Bradley’s ruling effectively established a narrow scope for the Fourteenth Amendment, which was determined to apply only to the official actions of state governments. Congress, he maintained, did not have the power to prohibit discrimination by private individuals. Bradley asserted that such legislation was a “municipal law for the protection of private rights,” far beyond the scope of congressional authority. He considered that under the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress’s power to ensure that no state deprived a citizen of equal protection of the law meant that Congress could provide relief only after a state agency had acted to deny equal protection.
Bradley’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment
Bradley reasoned that federal laws could only prohibit or prevent the “denial” of rights—that is, the elimination of those rights in principle. Because a private individual did not have the power to deny rights but only to “interfere with the enjoyment of the right in a particular case,” such an individual’s actions fell outside the scope of federal power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. It remained up to each state to enforce its laws against instances of “force or fraud” that interfered with the enjoyment of civil rights, just as it was up to the state to enforce laws against any other instance of “force or fraud.”
Bradley further denied that the Thirteenth
Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner, wrote the only dissent in the Civil Rights Cases. As he would do later in Plessy v. Ferguson,
Through its narrow definition of state action and of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the Supreme Court effectively limited the federal government’s power to outlaw racial discrimination. Rather than affirming that the federal government had the constitutional authority to ensure equal citizenship
Among those who protested the Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases was a group of black lawyers called the Brotherhood of Liberty. They argued that leaving the enforcement of civil rights to the states would be a disaster for African Americans. They criticized Republican federal judges as well as Republican legislators for betraying the purposes of the Reconstruction amendments out of political self-interest. Some black journalists compared the Civil Rights Cases to the Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford
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Hyman, Harold M., and William M. Wiecek. Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Emphasizes issues concerning the Thirteenth Amendment as a source of federal power to enforce civil rights. -
Lewis, Thomas T., and Richard L. Wilson, eds. Encyclopedia of the U.S. Supreme Court. 3 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2001. Comprehensive reference work on the Supreme Court that contains substantial discussions of the Civil Rights Cases and of all of the Court’s other major civil rights decisions. -
Litwack, Leon, and August Meier, eds. Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Profiles of prominent African American activists. -
Lively, Donald E. The Constitution and Race. New York: Praeger, 1992. A careful analysis of constitutional interpretation based on primary sources. -
Nelson, William E. The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. A valuable study of the changing application and meaning of the amendment. -
Perry, Michael J. We the People: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court. New ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Examines the controversies historically surrounding interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment by the Supreme Court.
Ohio Enacts the First Black Codes
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Reconstruction of the South
Mississippi Enacts First Post-Civil War Black Code
Thirteenth Amendment Is Ratified
Civil Rights Act of 1866
Fourteenth Amendment Is Ratified
Hayes Becomes President
Mississippi Constitution Disfranchises Black Voters
Plessy v. Ferguson
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
Rutherford B. Hayes; Charles Sumner.