Civil Rights Cases

The Civil Rights Cases , were a group of five similar cases consolidated into one issue for the United States Supreme Court to review. The Court held that Congress lacked the constitutional authority under the Fourteenth Amendment to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals and organizations, rather than state and local governments.

The Court held that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which provided that "all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude" was unconstitutional.

Facts
The decision itself involved five consolidated cases (United States v. Stanley, United States v. Ryan, United States v. Nichols, United States v. Singleton, and Robinson v. Memphis & Charleston Railroad 109 U.S. 3, 3 S. Ct. 18, 27 L. Ed. 835.) coming from different lower courts in which Black Americans had sued theaters, hotels and transit companies that had refused them service or excluded them from "white only" facilities.

Decision of the Court

The Court also acknowledged that the 13th Amendment does apply to private actors, but only to the extent that it prohibits people from owning slaves, not exhibiting discriminatory behavior. The Court said that "it would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car; or admit to his concert or theatre, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business."

 Reactions 
Many African-American leaders were outraged and disappointed that the Supreme Court declared the first two sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional.Marianne L. Engelman Lado, 'A Question of Justice: African-American Legal Perspectives on the 1883 Civil Rights Cases - Freedom: Constitutional Law', Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 70, No. 3 (April 1995), p. 1123 On October 20, 1883, T. Thomas Fortune, the editor of the New York Globe wrote: "The colored people of the United States feel to-day as if they had been baptized in ice water". Many felt it was the end of an era in which the Federal government would protect the rights of African-American citizens.

The Supreme Court decision severely restricted the power of the federal government to guarantee equal status under the law to blacks. State officials in the South took advantage of the decision and began to enact laws that legalized the treatment of blacks as second-class citizens for another seventy years. The court's decision thus ultimately led to the enactment of state laws, such as Jim Crow laws, which made racial segregation the law.

 Notes 

 References 

Category:United States Supreme Court cases
Category:1883 in the United States