Civil Rights Cases

Impact

The Civil Rights Cases decision closed the first chapter of the civil rights struggle in the United States. The majority ruling negated Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had mandated Congress to enforce the amendment with “appropriate legislation.” Yet again, the Court abrogated Congress’s ability to protect and enforce civil liberties, as it had already previously ruled in the Reese, Cruikshank, and Harris cases. This ruling was as much a setback for Congress as it was for African Americans. With this fierce gesture, the Court applied the brakes on the development of national government and the extension of civil rights.

News of the Court’s decision elicited a mixture of smugness and indifference to the principle of equal protection. The Atlanta Constitution reported:

We do not hope to compass with words the deep and perfect satisfaction with which the decision of the United States Supreme Court on the Civil-Rights Bill will be received throughout the South. … It was against the mischievous intrusion of the negro into places set apart for white people that we protested.

Frederick Douglass saw the mischief elsewhere: “The decision is to the direction and interest of the Old Calhoun doctrine of State rights as against Federal authority.… The decision has resulted largely from confusing social with civil rights.” The Chicago Tribune agreed with Douglass: “The Constitution in its present shape does not warrant Congressional regulation of social affairs … which individuals regulate to suit themselves.” The Washington Post published statements attributed to Lee Nance, “an intelligent and well-informed colored resident of this city,” who was quoted as having said, “‘I would say that I am bothered more about where and how I can get enough money with which to pay for a good, square meal, than I am about where I will eat it.’” The Post then editorialized that “there are other issues of more concern to the colored people … than the social and sentimental questions passed upon by the court.” While acknowledging the existence of prejudice against African Americans, Harper’s Weekly maintained: “Colored citizens … need not regret the fate of the Civil Rights Bill. The wrongs under which they suffer are not to be remedied by law.”

From the perspective of more than one well-respected editor, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 never had a chance. The Nation under the editor E. L. Godkin had championed civil rights for African Americans, but by 1883 Godkin, like much of the rest of America, had grown weary of the fight. On October 18, 1883, the magazine published this assessment:

The Act was forced through Congress.… It was as clear then as it is now to almost every candid-minded man, that the Fourteenth Amendment, on which the promoters of the Act professed to base it, was really directed against State legislation, and not against the acts of individuals.… The Civil Rights Act was really rather an admonition, or statement of moral obligation, than a legal command. Probably nine-tenths of those who voted for it knew very well that whenever it came before the Supreme Court it would be torn to pieces.

The Cleveland Gazette perhaps offered the most succinct, if solemn, pronouncement: The Civil Rights Bill “lingered unconsciously nearly nine years and died on the 15th of October, 1883.”

The Court’s narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment in the Civil Rights Cases decision destroyed movements toward integration and helped usher in racial segregation that would continue through the post–World War II years in much of the United States. That Justice Bradley and his colleagues did not view segregation as a “badge of slavery” brings up the question that if segregation is not such a badge, what is? The Court’s ruling erased civil rights enforcement from the Republican agenda and mandated federal withdrawal from civil rights enforcement, a policy that would not begin to be reversed until well after World War II. Interestingly, when framing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress relied on its powers under the commerce clause of the Constitution—one of the same arguments brought up by Justice Harlan in his famous dissent in the Civil Rights Cases. In passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress circumvented not only the legal precedent of the Civil Rights Cases decision but also the Supreme Court’s limitation on congressional power to enforce “equal protection” under the law.