Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination on account of color, race, or previous condition of servitude on railroads or other forms of public conveyances, or in theaters, restaurants, inns, or other forms of public accommodation. Convicted persons were subjected to fines of not less than $500 and possible imprisonment. In 1883 five cases of violation were examined by the U. S. Supreme Court: African Americans had been denied service in a Kansas City restaurant, a seat in the dress circle of a San Francisco theater, admission to a New York City opera house, accommodations in a Missouri hotel, and a seat in the ladies car of a railroad train in Tennessee.
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the 1875 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional. Justice Joseph Bradley declared for the majority that the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, was not applicable to the law and that the Fourteenth Amendment “interdicted discriminatory action only by the states and not by private persons.” He added that the act of denying accommodation by an owner of an inn, a public carrier, or place of amusement is not tantamount to “imposing any badge of slavery or servitude upon the applicant.” Bradley noted that slavery could not be cited as the cause of every act of discrimination because blacks were no longer slaves nor were they any longer “the special favorite of the laws.”
In his lone dissent Justice John Marshall Harlan—a former slaveholder from Kentucky—said Bradley’s opinion was “narrow and artificial” and that the Thirteenth Amendment not only abolished slavery but in conferring freedom gave Congress the power to destroy the “badges of slavery.” He noted that railroad corporations, inns, theaters, and other public facilities were “agents or instruments of the state” and thereby liable.
Black activists and their supporters, aware that the Court’s decision would encourage segregation, were dismayed. Timothy Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Globe, wrote that “the colored people of the United States feel today as if they had been baptized in ice water,” and the Detroit Plain Dealer noted that the Court’s ruling “comes like an avalanche carrying our fondest hopes down the hill of despair.”
Indeed, the decision of the Supreme Court emboldened southerners who opposed racial integration. In less than two decades the Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and the enactment of Jim Crow laws would effectively create a rigid segregated system in the southern states that would not be seriously challenged until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Further reading: Henry J. Abraham and Barbara A. Perry, Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Loren Miller, The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1967).
—William Seraile
World History
