Civil Rights Cases

Context

The American Civil War freed nearly four million slaves. While historians continue to debate the causes of the war, as President Abraham Lincoln made clear in his Second Inaugural Address, “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” Eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, nominally to protect “states’ rights” but more specifically to preserve the institution of slavery. Even after four years of bloodshed, Confederate defeat, and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, southern states stubbornly resisted northern attempts to grant blacks civil, political, and social rights. Throughout the period known as Reconstruction (until the mid-1870s Republicans in Congress passed a great deal of legislation, and two more amendments to the Constitution (the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments), all with an eye toward expanding American citizenship to include former slaves. Of these many initiatives, none has had more positive or lasting effect than the Fourteenth Amendment, the five sections of which are notable for providing the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses that serve as the basis for over two-thirds of all cases that go before the Supreme Court today.

Under the leadership of such Radical Republicans from the Midwest and New England as John Bingham, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens, Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which reversed the Supreme Court’s decision in 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the Court had ruled that African Americans could not be considered citizens of the United States. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 deemed “all persons born in the United States” to be American citizens. Congress then established constitutional protection of that act with the Fourteenth Amendment, the ratification of which Congress demanded of former Confederate states before they could be readmitted to the Union. The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment’s vital first section—“no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws”—enforced the Declaration of Independence’s principle that “all men are created equal.” The Fourteenth Amendment extended legal protection to African Americans and ensured both equality and protection of all U.S. citizens, although the meaning of the terms equality and protection would soon prove to be the focus of considerable debate.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was controversial from the moment Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts first proposed it in 1870. The original bill had attempted to eliminate all forms of segregation, which Sumner viewed as inherently discriminatory. Sumner’s proposed legislation also sought to redefine what most Americans took to be “social rights” as civil rights. The concept that Congress could regulate the actions of individuals or privately held companies proved to be especially contentious; Democrats and Republicans alike insisted that such provisions were unconstitutional and would never be upheld by the Supreme Court. Many legislators objected to the bill’s initial provisions for desegregation in schools, churches, and cemeteries, all of which were omitted from the final version passed by the lame-duck second session of the Forty-third Congress.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 met with mixed treatment from federal circuit courts prior to being ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, as many as one hundred cases related to the act’s provisions were tried and appealed before federal judges in Pennsylvania, Texas, Maryland, and Kentucky—all of which ruled the act constitutional. Divided federal courts in New York, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, and other states referred issues arising from the act to the Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court had already considered the meaning of equal protection in three jury cases of 1880, it was not until the Civil Rights Cases ruling that the Court put forth the critically important doctrine of “state action,” which limited federal guarantees of equal protection in favor of the laws and customs of individual states.