Court Opinion

ID: 9422863
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:04:52.491736+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:40.035703
License: Public Domain

*286Mr. Justice Goldberg,
with whom The Chief Justice joins, and with whom Mr. Justice Douglas joins as to Parts II-V,
concurring.
I.
I join in the opinion and the judgment of the Court and would therefore have no occasion under ordinary circumstances to express my views on the underlying constitutional issue. Since, however, the dissent at length discusses this constitutional issue and reaches a conclusion with which I profoundly disagree, I am impelled to state the reasons for my conviction that the Constitution guarantees to all Americans the right to be treated as equal members of the community with respect to public accommodations.
II.
The Declaration of Independence states the American creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This ideal was not fully achieved with the adoption of our Constitution because of the hard and tragic reality of Negro slavery. The Constitution of the new Nation, while heralding liberty, in effect declared all men to be free and equal — except black men who were to be neither free nor equal. This inconsistency reflected a fundamental departure from the American creed, a departure which it took a tragic civil war to set right. With the adoption, however, of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, freedom and equality were guaranteed expressly to all regardless “of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”1 United, States v. Reese, 92 U. S. 214, 218.
*287In light of this American commitment to equality and the history of that commitment, these Amendments must be read not as “legislative codes which are subject to continuous revision with the changing course of events, but as the revelation of the great purposes which were intended to be achieved by the Constitution as a continuing instrument of government.” United States v. Classic, 313 U. S. 299, 316. The cases following the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537, too often tended to negate this great purpose. In 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, this Court unanimously concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment commands equality and that racial segregation by law is inequality. Since Broion the Court has consistently applied this constitutional standard to give real meaning to the Equal Protection Clause “as the revelation” of an enduring constitutional purpose.2
The dissent argues that the Constitution permits American citizens to be denied access to places of public accommodation solely because of their race or color. Such a view does not do justice to a Constitution which *288is color blind and to the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which affirmed the right of all Americans to public equality. We cannot blind ourselves to the consequences of a constitutional interpretation which would permit citizens to be turned away by all the restaurants, or by the only restaurant, in town. The denial of the constitutional right of Negroes to access to places of public accommodation would perpetuate a caste system in the United States.
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments do not permit Negroes to be considered as second-class citizens in any aspect of our public life. Under our Constitution distinctions sanctioned by law between citizens because of race, ancestry, color or religion “are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” Hira-bayashi v. United States, 320 U. S. 81, 100. We make no racial distinctions between citizens in exacting from them the discharge of public responsibilities: The heaviest duties of citizenship — military service, taxation, obedience to laws — are imposed evenhandedly upon black and white. States may and do impose the burdens of state citizenship upon Negroes and the States in many ways benefit from the equal imposition of the duties of federal citizenship. Our fundamental law which insures such an equality of public burdens, in my view, similarly insures an equality of public benefits. This Court has repeatedly recognized and applied this fundamental principle to many aspects of community life.3
III.
Of course our constitutional duty is “to construe, not to rewrite or amend, the Constitution.” Post, at 342 (dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Black). Our sworn duty to construe the Constitution requires, however, that *289we read it to effectuate the intent and purposes of the Framers. We must, therefore, consider the history and circumstances indicating what the Civil War Amendments were in fact designed to achieve.
In 1873, in one of the earliest cases interpreting the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, this Court observed:
“[N]o one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in . . . all [these Amendments], lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested ; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him. . . .” Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 71.
A few years later, in 1880, the Court had occasion to observe that these Amendments were written and adopted “to raise the colored race from that condition of inferiority and servitude in which most of them had previously stood, into perfect equality of civil rights with all other persons within the jurisdiction of the States.” Ex parte Virginia, 100 U. S. 339, 344-345. In that same Term, the Court in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 307, stated that the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment must “be construed liberally, to carry out the purposes of its framers.” Such opinions immediately following the adoption of the Amendments clearly reflect the contemporary understanding that they were “to secure to the colored race, thereby invested with the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of citizenship, the enjoyment of all the civil rights that, under the law, are enjoyed by white persons . . . .” Neal v. Delaware, 103 U. S. 370, 386.
*290The historical evidence amply supports the conclusion of the Government, stated by the Solicitor General in this Court, that:
“it is an inescapable inference that Congress, in recommending the Fourteenth Amendment, expected to remove the disabilities barring Negroes from the public conveyances and places of public accommodation with which they were familiar, and thus to assure Negroes an equal right to enjoy these aspects of the public life of the community.”
The subject of segregation in public conveyances and accommodations was quite familiar to the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment.4 Moreover, it appears that the contemporary understanding of the general public was that freedom from discrimination in places of public accommodation was part of the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection.5 This view was readily *291accepted by the Supreme Court of Mississippi in 1873 in Donnell v. State, 48 Miss. 661. The Mississippi Supreme Court there considered and upheld the equal accommodations provisions of Mississippi’s “civil rights” bill as applied to a Negro theater patron. Justice Simrall, speaking for the court, noted that the “13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution of the United States, are the logical results of the late civil war,” id., at 675, and concluded that the “fundamental idea and principle pervading these amendments, is an impartial equality of rights and privileges, civil and political, to all 'citizens of the United States’. . . ,” id., at 677.6
In Strauder v. West Virginia, supra, this Court had occasion to consider the concept of civil rights embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment:
“What is this but declaring that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States, and, in regard to the colored race, for whose protection the amendment was primarily designed, that no discrimination shall be made against them by law because of their color? The words of the amendment, it is true, are prohibitory, but they contain a necessary implication of a positive immunity, or right, most valuable to *292the colored race, — the right to exemption from unfriendly legislation against them distinctively as colored, — exemption from legal discriminations, implying inferiority in civil society, lessening the security of their enjoyment of the rights which others enjoy, and discriminations which are steps towards reducing them to the condition of a subject race.” Id., at 307-308.
“The Fourteenth Amendment makes no attempt to enumerate the rights it designed to protect. It speaks in general terms, and those are as comprehensive as possible. Its language is prohibitory; but every prohibition implies the existence of rights and immunities, prominent among which is an immunity from inequality of legal protection, either for life, liberty, or property.” Id., at 310. (Emphasis added.)
The Fourteenth Amendment was in part designed to provide a firm constitutional basis for the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27, and to place that legislation beyond the power of congressional repeal.7 The origins of subsequently proposed amendments and legislation lay in the 1866 bill and in a companion measure, the Freed*293men’s Bureau bill.8 The latter was addressed to States “wherein, in consequence of any State or local law, . . . custom, or prejudice, any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right . . . to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, are refused or denied to negroes . . . .” Cong. Globe., 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 318. A review of the relevant congressional debates reveals that the concept of civil rights which lay at the heart both of the contemporary legislative proposals and of the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed the right to equal treatment in public places — a right explicitly recognized to be a “civil” rather than a “social” right. It was repeatedly emphasized “that colored persons shall enjoy the same civil rights as white persons,” 9 that the colored man should have the right “to go where he pleases,”10 that he- should have “practical” free*294dom,11 and that he should share “the rights and guarantees of the good old common law.” 12
In the debates that culminated in the acceptance of the Fourteenth Amendment, the theme of granting “civil,” as distinguished from “social,” rights constantly recurred.13 Although it was commonly recognized that in some areas the civil-social distinction was misty, the critical fact is that it was generally understood that “civil rights” certainly included the right of access to places of public accommodation for these were most clearly places and areas of life where the relations of men were traditionally regulated by governments.14 Indeed, the opponents both *295of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill and of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 frequently complained, without refutation or contradiction, that these measures would grant Negroes the right to equal treatment in places of public accommodation. Thus, for example, Senator Davis of Kentucky, in opposing the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, protested that “commingling with [white persons] in hotels, theaters, steamboats, and other civil rights and privileges, were always forbid to free negroes, until . . .” recently granted by Massachusetts.15
An 1873 decision of the Supreme Court of Iowa clearly reflects the contemporary understanding of the meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In Coger v. North West. Union Packet Co., 37 Iowa 145, a colored woman sought damages for assault and battery occurring when the officers of a Mississippi River steamboat ordered that she be removed from a dining table in accordance with a practice of segregation in the main dining room on the boat. In giving judgment for the plaintiff, the Iowa Supreme Court quoted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and concluded that:
“Under this statute, equality in rights is secured to the negro. The language is comprehensive and includes the right to property and all rights growing out of contracts. It includes within its broad terms every right arising in the affairs of life. The right of the passenger under the contract of transportation with the carrier is included therein. The colored man is guarantied equality and equal protec*296tion of the laws with his white neighbor. These are the rights secured to him as a citizen of the United States, without regard to his color, and constitute his privileges, which are secured by [the Fourteenth Amendment].” Id., at 156.
The Court then went on to reject the contention that the rights asserted were “social, and . . . not, therefore, secured by the constitution and statutes, either of the State or of the United States.” Id., at 157.16
Underlying the congressional discussions, and at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, was the assumption that the State by statute or by “the good old common law” was obligated to guarantee all citizens access to places of public accommodation. This obligation was firmly rooted in ancient *297Anglo-American tradition. In his work on bailments, Judge Story spoke of this tradition:
“An innkeeper is bound ... to take in all travellers and wayfaring persons, and to entertain them, if he can accommodate them, for a reasonable compensation; and he must guard their goods with proper diligence. ... If an innkeeper improperly refuses to receive or provide for a guest, he is liable to be indicted therefor. . . .” Story, Commentaries on the Law of Bailments (Schouler, 9th ed., 1878) § 476.17
*298“The first and most general obligation on [carriers of passengers] is to carry passengers whenever they offer themselves, and are ready to pay for their transportation. This results from their setting themselves up, like innkeepers, and common carriers of goods, for a common public employment on hire. They are no more at liberty to refuse a passenger, if they have sufficient room and accommodations, than an innkeeper is to refuse suitable room and accommodations to a guest. . . Id., at §§ 590, 591.
It was in this vein that the Supreme Court of Mississippi spoke when in 1873 it applied the equal accommodations *299provisions of the State’s civil rights bill to a Negro refused admission to a theater:
“Among those customs which we call the common law, that have come down to us from the remote past, are rules which have a special application to those who sustain a quasi public relation to the community. The wayfarer and the traveler had a right to demand food and lodging from the inn-keeper; the common carrier was bound to accept all passengers and goods offered for transportation, according to his means. So, too, all who applied for admission to the public shows and amusements, were entitled to admission, and in each instance, for a refusal, an action on the case lay, unless sufficient reason were shown. The statute deals with subjects which have always been under legal control.” Donnell v. State, 48 Miss. 661, 680-681.
In a similar manner, Senator Sumner, discussing the Civil Rights Act of 1875, referred to and quoted from Holingshed, Story, Kent and Parsons on the common-law duties of innkeepers and common carriers to treat all alike. Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 2d Sess., 382-383. With regard to “theaters and places of public amusement,” the Senator observed that:
“Theaters and other places of public amusement, licensed by law, are kindred to inns or public conveyances, though less noticed by jurisprudence. But, like their prototypes, they undertake to provide for the public under sanction of law. They are public institutions, regulated if not created by law, enjoying privileges, and in consideration thereof, assuming duties not unlike those of the inn and the public conveyance. From essential reason, the rule should be the same with all. As the inn cannot close its *300doors, or the public conveyance refuse a seat to any paying traveler, decent in condition, so must it be with the theater and other places of public amusement. Here are institutions whose peculiar object is the ‘pursuit of happiness,’ which has been placed among the equal rights of all.” Id., at 383.18
The first sentence of § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, the spirit of which pervades all the Civil War Amend*301ments, was obviously designed to overrule Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393, and to ensure that the constitutional concept of citizenship with all attendant rights and privileges would henceforth embrace Negroes. It follows that Negroes as citizens necessarily became entitled to share the right, customarily possessed by other citizens, of access to public accommodations. The history of the affirmative obligations existing at common law serves partly to explain the negative — “deny to any person” — language of the Fourteenth Amendment. For it was assumed that under state law, when the Negro’s disability as a citizen was removed, he would be assured the same public civil rights that the law had guaranteed white persons. This view pervades the opinion of the Supreme Court of Michigan in Ferguson v. Gies, 82 Mich. 358, 46 N. W. 718, decided in 1890. That State had recently enacted a statute prohibiting the denial to any person, regardless of race, of “the full and equal accommodations . . . and privileges of . . . restaurants . . . and all other places of public accommodation and amusement . ...”19 A Negro plaintiff brought an action for damages arising from the refusal of a restaurant owner to serve him at a row of tables reserved for whites. In upholding the plaintiff’s claim, the Michigan court observed:
“The negro is now, by the Constitution of the United States, given full citizenship with the white man, and all the rights and privileges of citizenship attend him wherever he goes. Whatever right a white man *302has in a public place, the black man has also, because of such citizenship.” Id., at 364, 46 N. W., at 720.
The court then emphasized that in light of this constitutional principle the same result would follow whether the claim rested on a statute or on the common law:
“The common law as it existed in this State before the passage of this statute, and before the colored man became a citizen under our Constitution and laws, gave to the white man a remedy against any unjust discrimination to the citizen in all public places. It must be considered that, when this suit was planted, the colored man, under the common law of this State, was entitled to the same rights and privileges in public places as the white man, and he must be treated the same there; and that his right of action for any injury arising from an unjust discrimination against him is just as perfect and sacred in the courts as that of any other citizen. This statute is only declaratory of the common law, as I understand it now to exist in this State.” Id., at 365, 46 N. W., at 720.20
Evidence such as this demonstrates that Mr. Justice Harlan, dissenting in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 26, was surely correct when he observed:
“But what was secured to colored citizens of the United States — as between them and their respective States — by the national grant to them of State citizenship ? With what rights, privileges, or immunities did this grant invest them? There is one, if there be no other — exemption from race discrimination in respect of any civil right belonging to citizens of the *303white race in the same State. That, surely, is their constitutional privilege when within the jurisdiction of other States. And such must be their constitutional right, in their own State, unless the recent amendments be splendid baubles, thrown out to delude those who deserved fair and generous treatment at the hands of the nation. Citizenship in this country necessarily imports at least equality of civil rights among citizens of every race in the same State. It is fundamental in American citizenship that, in respect of such rights, there shall be no discrimination by the State, or its officers, or by individuals or corporations exercising public functions or authority, against any citizen because of his race or previous condition of servitude.” Id., at 48.
The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, reacting against the Black Codes,21 made certain that the States could not frustrate the guaranteed equality by enacting discriminatory legislation or by sanctioning discriminatory treatment. At no time in the consideration of the Amendment was it suggested that the States could Achieve the same prohibited result by withdrawing the traditional right of access to public places. In granting Negroes citizenship and the equal protection of the laws, it was never thought that the States could permit the proprietors of inns and public places to restrict their general invitation to the public and to citizens in order to exclude *304the Negro public and Negro citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment was therefore cast in terms under which judicial power would come into play where the State withdrew or otherwise denied the guaranteed protection “from legal discriminations, implying inferiority in civil society, lessening the security of [the Negroes’] enjoyment of the rights which others enjoy . . . .” Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S., at 308.
Thus a fundamental assumption of the Fourteenth Amendment was that the States would continue, as they had for ages, to enforce the right of citizens freely to enter public places. This assumption concerning the affirmative duty attaching to places of public accommodation was so rooted in the experience of the white citizenry that law and custom blended together indistinguishably.22 Thus it seemed natural for the Supreme Court of Mississippi, considering a public accommodations provision in a civil rights statute, to refer to “those customs which we call the common law, that have come down to us from the remote past,” Donnell v. State, 48 Miss., at 680, *305and thus it seems significant that the various proposals for federal legislation often interchangeably referred to discriminatory acts done under “law” or under “custom.” 23 In sum, then, it was understood that under the Fourteenth Amendment the duties of the proprietors of places of public accommodation would remain as they had long been and that the States would now be affirmatively obligated to insure that these rights ran to Negro as well as white citizens.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, enacted seven years after the Fourteenth Amendment, specifically provided that all citizens must have “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 . . . .” 18 Stat. 335. The constitutionality of this federal legislation, was reviewed by this Court in 1883 in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3. The dissent in the present case purports to follow the “state action” concept articulated in that early decision. There the Court had declared that under the Fourteenth Amendment:
“It is State action of a particular character that is prohibited. Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the amendment. It has a deeper and broader scope. It nullifies and makes void all State legislation, and State action of every kind, which impairs the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, or which injures them in life, liberty or property without due *306process of law, or which denies to any of them the equal protection of the laws.” 109 U. S., at 11. (Emphasis added.)
Mr. Justice Bradley, writing for the Court over the strong dissent of Mr. Justice Harlan, held that a proprietor’s racially motivated denial of equal access to a public accommodation did not, without more, involve state action. It is of central importance to the case at bar that the Court’s decision was expressly predicated:
“on the assumption that a right to enjoy equal accommodation and privileges in all inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement, is one of the essential rights of the citizen which no State can abridge or interfere with.” Id., at 19.
The Court added that:
“Innkeepers and public carriers, by the laws of all the States, so far as we are aware,24 are bound, to the *307extent of their facilities, to furnish proper accommodation to all unobjectionable persons who in good faith apply for them.” Id., at 25;25
This assumption, whatever its validity at the time of the 1883 decision, has proved to be unfounded. Although reconstruction ended in 1877, six years before the Civil Rights Cases, there was little immediate action in the South to establish segregation, in law or in fact, in places *308of public accommodation.26 This benevolent, or perhaps passive, attitude endured about a decade and then in the late 1880’s States began to enact laws mandating unequal treatment in public places.27 Finally, three-quarters of a century later, after this Court declared such legislative action invalid, some States began to utilize and make available their common law to sanction similar discriminatory treatment.
A State applying its statutory or common law28 to deny, rather than protect' the right of access to public accommodations has clearly made the assumption of the opin*309ion in the Civil Rights Cases inapplicable and has, as the author of that opinion would himself have recognized, denied the constitutionally intended equal protection. Indeed, in light of the assumption so explicitly stated in the Civil Rights Cases, it is significant that Mr. Justice Bradley, who spoke for the Court, had earlier in correspondence with Circuit Judge Woods expressed the view that the Fourteenth Amendment “not only prohibits the making or enforcing of laws which shall abridge the privileges of the citizen; but prohibits the states from denying to all persons within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” 29 In taking this position, which is consistent with his opinion and the assumption in the Civil Rights Coses,30 he concluded that: “Denying includes inaction as well as action. And denying the equal protection of the laws includes the omission to protect, as well as the omission *310to pass laws for protection.” 31 These views are fully consonant with this Court’s recognition that state conduct which might be described as “inaction” can nevertheless *311constitute responsible “state action” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. See, e. g., Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U. S. 501; Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U. S. 1; Terry v. Adams, 345 U. S. 461; Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U. S. 249.
In the present case the responsibility of the judiciary in applying the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment is clear. The State of Maryland has failed to protect petitioners’ constitutional right to public accommodations and is now prosecuting them for attempting to exercise that right. The decision of Maryland’s highest court in sustaining these trespass convictions cannot be described as “neutral,” for the decision is as affirmative in effect as if the State had enacted an unconstitutional law explicitly authorizing racial discrimination in places of public accommodation. A State, obligated under the Fourteenth Amendment to maintain a system of law in which Negroes are not denied protection in their claim to be treated as equal members of the community, may not use its criminal trespass laws to frustrate the constitutionally granted right. Nor, it should be added, may a State frustrate this right by legitimating a proprietor’s attempt at self-help. To permit self-help would be to disregard the principle that “[t]oday, no less than 50 years ago, the solution to the problems growing out of race relations 'cannot be promoted by depriving citizens of their constitutional rights and privileges,’ Buchanan v. Warley . . . 245 U. S., at 80-81.” Watson v. City of Memphis, 373 U. S. 526, 539. As declared in Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1, 16, “law and order are not ... to be preserved by depriving the Negro ... of [his] constitutional rights.”
In spite of this, the dissent intimates that its view best comports with the needs of law and order. Thus it is said: “It would betray our whole plan for a tranquil and orderly society to say that a citizen, because of his per*312sonal prejudices, habits, attitudes, or beliefs, is cast outside the law’s protection and cannot call for the aid of officers sworn to uphold the law and preserve the peace.” Post, at 327-328. This statement, to which all will readily agree, slides over the critical question: Whose conduct is entitled to the “law’s protection”? Of course every member of this Court agrees that law and order must prevail; the question is whether the weight and protective strength of law and order will be cast in favor of the claims of the proprietors or in favor of the claims of-petitioners. In my view the Fourteenth Amendment resolved this issue in favor of the right of petitioners to public accommodations and it follows that in the exercise of that constitutionally granted right they are entitled to the “law’s protection.” Today, as long ago, “[t]he very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 163.
IV.
My Brother Douglas convincingly demonstrates that the dissent has constructed a straw man by suggesting that this case involves “a property owner’s right to choose his social or business associates.” Post, at 343. The restaurant involved in this case is concededly open to a large segment of the public. Restaurants such as this daily open their doors to millions of Americans. These establishments provide a public service as necessary today as the inns and carriers of Blackstone’s time. It should be recognized that the claim asserted by the Negro petitioners concerns such public establishments and does not infringe upon the rights of property owners or personal associational interests.
Petitioners frankly state that the “extension of constitutional guarantees to the authentically private choices of man is wholly unacceptable, and any constitutional *313theory leading to that result would have reduced itself to absurdity.” Indeed, the constitutional protection extended to privacy and private association assures against the imposition of social equality. As noted before, the Congress that enacted the Fourteenth Amendment was particularly conscious that the “civil” rights of man should be distinguished from his “social” rights.32 Prejudice and bigotry in any form are regrettable, but it is the constitutional right of every person to close his home or club to- any person or to choose his social intimates and business partners solely on the basis of personal prejudices including race. These and other rights pertaining to privacy and private association are themselves constitutionally protected liberties.
We deal here, however, with a claim of equal access to public accommodations. This is not a claim which significantly impinges upon personal associational interests; nor is it a claim infringing upon the control of private property not dedicated to public use. A judicial ruling on this claim inevitably involves the liberties and free*314doms both of the restaurant proprietor and of the Negro citizen. The dissent would hold in effect that the restaurant proprietor’s interest in choosing customers on the basis of race is to be preferred to the Negro’s right to equal treatment by a business serving the public. The history and purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment indicate, however, that the Amendment resolves this apparent conflict of liberties in favor of the Negro’s right to equal public accommodations. As the Court said in Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U. S. 501, 506: “The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” 33 The broad acceptance of the public in this and in other restaurants clearly demonstrates that the proprietor’s interest in private or unrestricted association is slight.34 The relationship between the modern innkeeper or restaurateur and the customer is relatively impersonal and evanescent. This is highlighted by cases such as Barr v. City of Columbia, ante, at. 146, Bouie v. City of Columbia, post, at 347, and Robinson v. Florida, ante, at 153, in which Negroes are invited into all departments of the store but nonetheless ordered, in the name of private association or property rights, not to purchase and eat food, as other customers do, on the premises. As the history of the common law *315and, indeed, of our own times graphically illustrates, the interests of proprietors of places of'public accommodation have always been adapted to the citizen’s felt need for public accommodations, a need which is basic and deep-rooted. This history and the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment compel the conclusion that the right to be served in places of public accommodation regardless of color cannot constitutionally be subordinated to the proprietor’s interest in discriminatorily refusing service.
Of course, although the present case involves the right to service in a restaurant, the fundamental principles of the Fourteenth Amendment apply with equal force to other places of public accommodation and amusement. Claims so important as those presented here cannot be dismissed by asserting that the Fourteenth Amendment, while clearly addressed to inns and public conveyances, did not contemplate lunch counters and soda fountains. Institutions such as these serve essentially the same needs in modern life as did the innkeeper and the carrier at common law.35 It was to guard against narrow conceptions that Chief Justice Marshall admonished the Court never to forget “that it is a constitution we are expounding ... a constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 407, 415. Today, as throughout the history of the Court, we should remember that “in determining whether a provision of the Constitution applies to a new subject matter, it is of little significance that it is one with which the framers were not familiar. For in setting up an enduring framework of government they undertook to carry out for the indefinite future and in all the vicissitudes of the changing affairs of men, those fundamental purposes which the instrument itself discloses.” United States v. Classic, 313 U. S. 299, 316.
*316V.
In my view the historical evidence demonstrates that the traditional rights of access to places of public accommodation were quite familiar to Congressmen and to the general public who naturally assumed that the Fourteenth Amendment extended these traditional rights to Negroes. But even if the historical evidence were not as convincing as I believe it to be, the logic of Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, based as it was on the fundamental principle of constitutional interpretation proclaimed by Chief Justice Marshall,36 requires that petitioners’ claim be sustained.
In Brown, after stating that the available history was “inconclusive” on the specific issue of segregated public schools, the Court went on to say:
“In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.” 347 U. S., at 492-493.
The dissent makes no effort to assess the status of places of public accommodation “in the light of” their “full development and . . . present place” in the life of American citizens. In failing to adhere to that approach the dissent ignores a pervasive principle of constitutional adjudication and departs from the ultimate logic of Brown. As Mr. Justice Holmes so aptly said:
“[W]hen we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United
*317States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.” Missouri v. Holland, 252 U. S. 416, 433.
Conclusion.
The constitutional right of all Americans to be treated as equal members of the community with respect to public accommodations is a civil right granted by the people in the Constitution — a right which “is too important in our free society to be stripped of judicial protection.” Cf. Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U. S. 1, 7; Baker v. Carr, 369 U. S. 186. This is not to suggest that Congress lacks authority under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, or under the Commerce Clause, Art. I, § 8, to implement the rights protected by § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the give-and-take of the legislative process, Congress can fashion a law drawing the guidelines necessary and appropriate to facilitate practical administration and to distinguish between genuinely public and private accommodations. In contrast, we can pass only on justiciable issues coming here on a case-to-case basis.
It is, and should be, more true today than it was over a century ago that “[t]he great advantage of the Americans is that . . . they are born equal” 37 and that in the eyes of the law they “are all of the same estate.” The *318first Chief Justice of the United States, John Jay, spoke of the “free air” of American life. The great purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment is to keep it free and equal. Under the Constitution no American can, or should, be denied rights fundamental to freedom and citizenship. I therefore join in reversing these trespass convictions.
Mr. Justice Black, with whom Mr. Justice Harlan and Mr. Justice White join, dissenting.
This case does not involve the constitutionality of any existing or proposed state or federal legislation requiring restaurant owners to serve people without regard to color. The crucial issue which the case does present but which the Court does not decide is whether the Fourteenth Amendment, of itself, forbids a State to enforce its trespass laws to convict a person who comes into a privately owned restaurant, is told that because of his color he will not be served, and over the owner’s protest refuses to leave. We dissent from the Court’s refusal to decide that question. For reasons stated, we think that the question should be decided and that the Fourteenth Amendment does not forbid this application of a State’s trespass laws.
The petitioners were convicted in a Maryland state court on a charge that they “unlawfully did enter upon and cross over the land, premises and private property” of the Hooper Food Co., Inc., “after having been duly notified by Albert Warfel, who was then and there the servant and agent for Hooper Food Co.,” not to do so, in violation of Maryland’s criminal trespass statute.1 The *319conviction was based on a record showing in summary that:
A group of fifteen to twenty Negro students, including petitioners, went to Hooper’s' Restaurant to engage in what their counsel describes as a “sit-in protest” because the restaurant would not serve Negroes. The hostess, on orders of Mr. Hooper, the president of the corporation owning the restaurant,2 told them, “solely on the basis of their color,” that she would not serve them. Petitioners refused to leave when requested by the hostess and the manager; instead they went to tables, took seats, and refused to leave, insisting that they be served. On orders of the owner the police were called, but they advised the manager that a warrant would be necessary before they could arrest petitioners. The manager then went to the police station and swore out the warrants. Petitioners had remained in the restaurant in all an hour and a half, testifying at their trial that they had stayed knowing they would be arrested — -that being arrested was part of their “technique” in these demonstrations.
*320The Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions, rejecting petitioners’ contentions urged in both courts that Maryland had (1) denied them equal protection and due process under the Fourteenth Amendment by applying its trespass statute to enforce the restaurant owner’s policy and practice of racial discrimination-, and (2) denied them freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution by punishing them for remaining at the restaurant, which they were doing as a protest against the owner’s practice of refusing service to Negroes.3 This case, Barr v. City of Columbia, ante, p. 146, and Bouie v. City of Columbia, post, p. 347, all raised these same two constitutional questions, which we granted certiorari to decide.4 The Solicitor General has filed amicus briefs and participated in oral argument in these cases; while he joins in asking reversal of all the convictions, his arguments vary in significant respects from those of the petitioners. We would reject the contentions of the petitioners and of the Solicitor General in this case and affirm the judgment of the Maryland court.
I.
On the same day that petitioners filed the petition for certiorari in this case, Baltimore enacted an ordinance forbidding privately owned restaurants to refuse to serve Negroes because of their color.5 Nearly a year later Maryland, without repealing the state trespass law petitioners violated, passed a law applicable to Baltimore and some other localities making such discrimination by res*321taurant owners unlawful.6 We agree that the general judicial rule or practice in Maryland and elsewhere, as pointed out in the Court’s opinion, is that a new statute repealing an old criminal law will, in the absence of a general or special saving clause, be interpreted as barring pending prosecutions under the old law. Although Maryland long has had a general saving clause clearly declaring that prosecutions brought under a subsequently repealed statute shall not be barred, the Court advances many arguments why the Maryland Court of Appeals could and perhaps would, so the Court says, hold that the new ordinance and statute nevertheless bar these prosecutions. On the premise that the Maryland court might hold this way and because we could thereby avoid passing upon the constitutionality of the State’s trespass laws, the Court, without deciding the crucial constitutional questions which brought this case here, instead sends the case back to the state court to consider the effect of the new ordinance and statute.
We agree that this Court has power, with or without deciding the constitutional questions, to remand the case for the Maryland Court of Appeals to decide the state question as to whether the convictions should be set aside and the prosecutions abated because of the new laws. But as the cases cited by the Court recognize, our question is not one of power to take this action but of whether we should. And the Maryland court would be equally free to give petitioners the benefit of any rights they have growing out of the new law whether we upheld the trespass statute and affirmed, or refused to pass upon its validity at this time. For of course our affirmance of the state court’s holding that the Maryland trespass *322statute is constitutional as applied would in no way hamper or bar decision of further state questions which the Maryland court might deem relevant to protect the rights of the petitioners in accord with Maryland law. Recognition of this power of state courts after we affirm their holdings on federal questions is a commonplace occurrence. See, e. g., Piza Hermanos v. Caldentey, 231 U. S. 690, 692 (1914); Fidelity Ins. Trust & Safe Deposit Co. v. McClain, 178 U. S. 113, 114 (1900).
Nor do we agree that because of the new state question we should vacate the judgment in order to avoid deciding the constitutionality of the trespass statute as applied. We fully recognize the salutary general judicial practice of not unnecessarily reaching out to decide constitutional questions. But this is neither a constitutional nor a statutory requirement. Nor does the principle properly understood and applied impose a rigid, arbitrary, and inexorable command that courts should never decide a constitutional question in any single case if subtle ingenuity can think up any conceivable technique that might, if utilized, offer a distant possibility of avoiding decision. Here we believe the constitutionality of this trespass statute should be decided.
This case is but one of five involving the same kind of sit-in trespass problems we selected out of a large and growing group of pending cases to decide this very question. We have today granted certiorari in two more of this group of cases.7 We know that many similar cases are now on the way and that many others are bound to follow. We *323know, as do all others, that the conditions and feelings that brought on these demonstrations still exist and that rights of private property owners on the one hand and demonstrators on the other largely depend at this time on whether state trespass laws can constitutionally be applied under these circumstances. Since this question is, as we have pointed out, squarely presented in this very case and is involved in other cases pending here and others bound to come, we think it is wholly unfair to demonstrators and property owners alike as well as against the public interest not to decide it now. Since Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803), it has been this Court's recognized responsibility and duty to decide constitutional questions properly and necessarily before it. That case and others have stressed the duty of judges to act with the greatest caution before frustrating legislation by striking it down as unconstitutional. We should feel constrained to decide this question even if we thought the state law invalid. In this case, however, we believe that the state law is a valid exercise of state legislative power, that the question is properly before us, and that the national interest imperatively calls for an authoritative decision of the question by this Court. Under these circumstances we think that it would be an unjustified abdication of our duty to leave the question undiscussed. This we are not willing to do. So we proceed to state our views on the merits of the constitutional challenges to the Maryland law.
II.
Although the question was neither raised nor decided in the courts below, petitioners contend that the Maryland statute is void for vagueness under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because its language gave no fair warning that “sit-ins” staged over a restaurant owner’s protest were prohibited by the statute. *324The challenged statutory language makes it an offense for any person to “enter upon or cross over the land, premises or private property of any person or persons in this State after having been duly notified by the owner or his agent not to do so . . . .” Petitioners say that this language plainly means that an entry upon another’s property is an offense only if the owner’s notice has been given before the intruder is physically on the property; that the notice to petitioners that they were not wanted was given only after they had stepped from the street into the restaurant; and that the statute as applied to them was void either because (1) there was no evidence to support the charge of entry after notice not to do so, or because (2) the statute failed to warn that it could be violated by remaining on property after having been told to leave. As to (1), in view of the evidence and petitioners’ statements at the trial it is hard to take seriously a contention that petitioners were not fully aware, before they ever entered the restaurant, that it was the restaurant owner’s firmly established policy and practice not to serve Negroes. The whole purpose of the “sit-in” was to protest that policy. (2) Be that as it may, the Court of Appeals of Maryland held that “the statutory references to ‘entry upon or crossing over,’ cover the case of remaining upon land after notice to leave,” and the trial court found, with very strong evidentiary support, that after unequivocal notice to petitioners that they would not be seated or served they “persisted in their demands and, brushing by the hostess, took seats at various tables on the main floor and at the counter in the basement.” We are unable to say that holding this conduct barred by the Maryland statute was an unreasonable interpretation of the statute or one which could have deceived or even surprised petitioners or others who *325wanted to understand and obey it. It would certainly be stretching the rule against ambiguous statutes very far indeed to hold that the statutory language misled these petitioners as to the Act’s meaning, in the face of evidence showing a prior series of demonstrations by Negroes, including some of petitioners, and in view of the fact that the group which included petitioners came prepared to picket Hooper and actually courted arrest, the better to protest his refusal to serve colored people.
We reject the contention that the statute as construed is void for vagueness. In doing, so, we do not overlook or disregard the view expressed in other cases that statutes which, in regulating conduct, may indirectly touch the areas of freedom of expression should be construed narrowly where necessary to protect that freedom.8 And we do not doubt that one purpose of these “sit-ins” was to express a vigorous protest against Hooper’s policy of not serving Negroes.9 But it is wholly clear that the Maryland statute here is directed not against what petitioners said but against what they did — remaining on the premises of another - after having been warned to leave, conduct which States have traditionally prohibited in this country.10 And none of our prior cases has held that a person’s right to freedom of expression carries with it a right to force a private property owner to furnish his property as a platform to criticize the property owner’s use of that property. Cf. Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co., 336 U. S. 490 (1949). We believe that the statute as construed and applied is not void for vagueness.
*326III.
Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides in part:
“No State shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
This section of the Amendment, unlike other sections,11 is a prohibition against certain conduct only when done by a State — “state action” as it has come to be known— and “erects no shield against merely private conduct, however discriminatory or wrongful.” Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U. S. 1, 13 (1948).12 This well-established interpretation of section 1 of the Amendment — which all the parties here, including the petitioners and the Solicitor General, accept — means that this section of the Amendment does not of itself, standing alone, in the absence of some cooperative state action or compulsion,13 forbid property holders, including restaurant owners, to ban people from entering or remaining upon their premises, even if the owners act out of racial prejudice. But “the prohibitions of the amendment extend to all action of the State denying equal protection of the laws” whether “by its legislative, its executive, or its judicial authorities.” Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 318 (1880). The Amendment thus forbids all kinds of state action, by all state agencies and officers, that dis*327criminate against persons on account of their race.14 It was this kind of state action that was held invalid in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), Peterson v. City of Greenville, 373 U. S. 244 (1963), Lombard v. Louisiana, 373 U. S. 267 (1963), and Griffin v. County School Board, 377 U. S. 218 (1964), and that this Court today holds invalid in Robinson v. Florida, ante, p. 153.
Petitioners, but not the Solicitor General, contend that their conviction for trespass under the state statute was by itself the kind of discriminatory state action forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment. This contention, on its face, has plausibility when considered along with general statements to the effect that under the Amendment forbidden “state action” may be that of the Judicial as well as of the Legislative or Executive Branch of Government. But a mechanical application of the Fourteenth Amendment to this case cannot survive analysis. The Amendment does not forbid a State to prosecute for crimes committed against a person or his property, however prejudiced or narrow the victim’s .views may be. Nor can whatever prejudice and bigotry the victim of a crime may have be automatically attributed to the State that prosecutes. Such a doctrine would not only be based on a fiction; it would also severely handicap a State’s efforts to maintain a peaceful and orderly society. Our society has put its trust in a system of criminal laws to punish lawless conduct. To avert personal feuds and violent brawls it has led its people to believe and expect that wrongs against them will be vindicated in the courts. Instead of attempting to take the law into their own hands, people have been taught to call for police protection to protect their rights wherever possible.15 It would *328betray our whole plan for a tranquil and orderly society to say that a citizen, because of his personal prejudices, habits, attitudes, or beliefs, is cast outside the law’s protection and cannot call for the aid of officers sworn to uphold the law and preserve the peace. The worst citizen no less than the best is entitled to equal protection of the laws of his State and of his Nation. None of our past cases justifies reading the Fourteenth Amendment in a way that might well penalize citizens who are law-abiding enough to call upon the law and its officers for protection instead of using their own physical strength or dangerous weapons to preserve their rights.
In contending that the State’s prosecution of petitioners for trespass is state action forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment, petitioners rely chiefly on Shelley v. Kraemer, supra. That reliance is misplaced. Shelley held that the Fourteenth Amendment was violated by a State’s enforcement of restrictive covenants providing that certain pieces of real estate should not be used or occupied by Negroes, Orientals, or any other non-Caucasians, either as owners or tenants, and that in case of use or occupancy by such proscribed classes, the title of any person so using or occupying it should be divested. Many briefs were filed in that case by the parties and by amici curiae. To support the holding that state *329enforcement of the agreements constituted prohibited state action even though the agreements were made by private persons to whom, if they act alone, the Amendment does not apply, two chief grounds were urged: (1) This type of agreement constituted a restraint on alienation of property, sometimes in perpetuity, which, if valid, was in reality the equivalent of and had the effect of state and municipal zoning laws, accomplishing the same kind of racial discrimination as if the State had passed a statute instead of leaving this objective to be accomplished by a system of private contracts, enforced by the State. See Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U. S. 501 (1946); Terry v. Adams, 345 U. S. 461 (1953); cf. Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356 (1886); Nashville, C. & St. L. R. Co. v. Browning, 310 U. S. 362 (1940).16 (2) Nearly all the briefs in Shelley which asked invalidation of the restrictive covenants iterated and reiterated that judicial enforcement of this system of covenants was forbidden state action because the right of a citizen to own, use, enjoy, occupy, and dispose of property is a federal right protected by the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1870, validly passed pursuant to congressional power authorized by section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.17 This *330argument was buttressed by citation of many cases, some of which are referred to in this Court’s opinion in Buchanan v. Warley, 246 U. S. 60 (1917). In that ease this Court, acting under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1870, struck down a city ordinance which zoned property on the basis of race, stating, 245 U. S., at 81, “The right which the ordinance annulled was the civil right of a white man to dispose of his property if he saw fit to do so to a person of color and of a colored person to make such disposition to a white person.” Buchanan v. Warley was heavily relied on by this Court in Shelley v. Kraemer, supra, where this statement from Buchanan was quoted: “The Fourteenth Amendment and these statutes [of 1866 and 1870] enacted in furtherance of its purpose operate to qualify and entitle a colored man to acquire property without state legislation discriminating against him solely because of color.” 334 U. S., at 11-12. And the Court in Shelley went on to cite with approval two later decisions of this Court which, relying on Buchanan v. Warley, had invalidated other city ordinances.18
It seems pretty clear that the reason judicial enforcement of the restrictive covenants in Shelley was deemed state action was not merely the fact that a state court had acted, but rather that it had acted “to deny to petitioners, on the grounds of race or color, the enjoyment of property rights in premises which petitioners are willing and financially able to acquire and which the grantors are willing to sell.” 334 U. S., at 19. In other words, this Court held that state enforcement of the covenants had the effect of denying to the parties their federally guaranteed right to own, occupy, enjoy, and use their property without regard to race or color. Thus, the line of cases from Buchanan through Shelley establishes these *331propositions: (1) When an owner of property is willing to sell and a would-be purchaser is willing to buy, then the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which gives all persons the same right to “inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey” property, prohibits a State, whether through its legislature, executive, or judiciary, from preventing the sale on the grounds of the race or color of one of the parties. Shelley v. Kraemer, supra, 334 U. S., at 19. (2) Once a person has become a property owner, then he acquires all the rights that go with ownership: “the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of a person’s acquisitions without control or diminution save by the law of the land.” Buchanan v. Warley, supra, 245 U. S., at 74. This means- that the property owner may, in the absence of a valid statute forbidding it, sell his property to whom he pleases and admit to that property whom he will; so long as both parties are willing parties, then the principles stated in Buchanan and Shelley protect this right. But equally, when one party is unwilling, as when the property owner chooses not to sell to a particular person or not to admit that person, then, as this Court emphasized in Buchanan, he is entitled to rely on the guarantee of due process of law, that is, “law of the land,” to protect his free use and enjoyment of property and to know that only by valid legislation, passed pursuant to some constitutional grant of power, can anyone disturb this free use. But petitioners here would have us hold that, despite the absence of any valid statute restricting the use of his property, the owner of Hooper’s restaurant in Baltimore must not be accorded the same federally guaranteed right to occupy, enjoy, and use property given to the parties in Buchanan and Shelley; instead, petitioners would have us say that Hooper’s federal right must be cut down and he must be compelled — though no statute said he must— to allow people to force their way into his restaurant and remain there over his protest. We cannot subscribe to *332such a mutilating, one-sided interpretation of federal guarantees the very heart of which is equal treatment under law to all. We must never forget that the Fourteenth Amendment protects “life, liberty, or property” of all people generally, not just some people’s “life,” some people’s “liberty,” and some kinds of “property.”
In concluding that mere judicial enforcement of the trespass law is not sufficient to impute to Maryland Hooper’s refusal to serve Negroes, we are in accord with the Solicitor General’s views as we understand them. He takes it for granted
“that the mere fact of State intervention through the courts or other public authority in order to provide sanctions for a private decision is not enough to implicate the State for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. . . . Where the only State involvement is color-blind support for every property-owner’s exercise of the normal right to choose his business visitors or social guests, proof that the particular property-owner was motivated by racial or religious prejudice is not enough to convict the State of denying equal protection of the laws.”
The Solicitor General also says:
“The preservation of a free and pluralistic society would seem to require substantial freedom for private choice in social, business and professional associations. Freedom of choice means the liberty to be wrong as well as right, to be mean as well as noble, to be vicious as well as kind. And even if that view were questioned, the philosophy of federalism leaves an area for choice to the States and their people, when the State is not otherwise involved, instead of vesting the only power of effective decision in the federal courts.”
*333We, like the Solicitor General, reject the argument that the State’s protection of Hooper’s desire to choose customers on the basis of race by prosecuting trespassers is enough, standing alone, to deprive Hooper of his right to operate the property in his own way. But we disagree with the contention that there are other circumstances which, added to the State’s prosecution for trespass, justify a finding of state action. There is no Maryland law, no municipal ordinance, and no official proclamation or action of any kind that shows the slightest state coercion of, or encouragement to, Hooper to bar Negroes from his restaurant.19 Neither the State, the city, nor any of their agencies has leased publicly owned property to Hooper.20 It is true that the State and city regulate the restaurants — but not by compelling restaurants to deny service to customers because of their race. License fees are collected, but this licensing has no relationship to race. Under such circumstances, to hold that a State must be held to have participated in prejudicial conduct of its licensees is too big a jump for us to take. Businesses owned by private persons do not become agencies of the State because they are licensed; to hold that they do would be completely to negate all our private ownership concepts and practices.
Neither the parties nor the Solicitor General, at least with respect to Maryland, has been able to find the present existence of any state law or local ordinance, any state court or administrative ruling, or any other official state conduct which could possibly have had any coercive influence on Hooper’s racial practices. Yet despite a complete absence of any sort of proof or even respectable *334speculation that Maryland in any way instigated or encouraged Hooper's refusal to serve Negroes, it is argued at length that Hooper’s practice should be classified as “state action.” This contention rests on a long narrative of historical events, both before and since the Civil War, to show that in Maryland, and indeed in the whole South, state laws and state actions have been a part of a pattern of racial segregation in the conduct of business, social, religious, and other activities. This pattern of segregation hardly needs historical references to prove it. The argument is made that the trespass conviction should be labeled “state action” because the “momentum” of Maryland's “past legislation” is still substantial in the realm of public accommodations. To that extent, the Solicitor General argues, “a State which has drawn a color line may not suddenly assert that it is color blind.” We cannot accept such an ex post facto argument to hold the application here of Maryland’s trespass law unconstitutional. Nor can we appreciate the fairness or justice of holding the present generation of Marylanders responsible for what their ancestors did in other days 21• — even if we had the right to substitute our own ideas of what the Fourteenth Amendment ought to be for what it was written and adopted to achieve.
There is another objection to accepting this argument. If it were accepted, we would have one Fourteenth Amendment for the South and quite a different and more lenient one for the other parts of the country. Present “state action” in this area of constitutional rights would *335be governed by past history in the South — by present conduct in the North and West. Our Constitution was not written to be read that way, and we will not do it.
IV.
Our Brother Goldberg in his opinion argues that the Fourteenth Amendment, of its own force and without the need of congressional legislation, prohibits privately owned restaurants from discriminating on account of color or race. His argument runs something like this: (1) Congress understood the “Anglo-American” common law, as it then existed in the several States, to prohibit owners of inns and other establishments open to the public from discriminating on account of race; (2) in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and other civil rights legislation, Congress meant access to such establishments to be among the “civil rights” protected; (3) finally, those who framed and passed the Fourteenth Amendment intended it, of its own force, to assure persons of all races equal access to privately owned inns and other accommodations. In making this argument, the opinion refers us to three state supreme court cases and to congressional debates on various post-Civil War civil rights bills. However, not only does the very material cited furnish scant, and often contradictory, support for the first two propositions (about the common law and the Reconstruction era statutes), but, even more important, the material furnishes absolutely none for the third proposition, which is the issue in this case.
In the first place, there was considerable doubt and argument concerning what the common law in the 1860’s required even of carriers and innkeepers and still more concerning what it required of owners of other establishments. For example, in Senate debates in 1864 on a proposal to amend the charter of the street railway company in the District of Columbia to prohibit it from excluding *336any person from its cars on account of color — a debate cited in MR. Justice Goldberg's opinion — one Senator thought that the common law would give a remedy to any Negro excluded from a street car,22 while another argued that “it was universally conceded that railroad companies, steamboat proprietors, coach lines, had the right to make this regulation” requiring Negroes to ride in separate cars.23 Senator Sumner of Massachusetts, one of the chief proponents of legislation of this type, admitted that there was “doubt” both as to what the street railway’s existing charter required and as to what the common law required; therefore he proposed that, since the common law. had “fallen into disuse” or “become disputable,” Congress should act: “[L]et the rights of colored persons be placed under the protection of positive statute . . . .” 24
Second, it is not at all clear that in the statutes relied on — the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Supplementary Freedmen’s Bureau Act — Congress meant for those statutes to guarantee Negroes access to estab*337lishments otherwise open to the general public.25 For example, in the House debates on the Civil Rights bill of 1866 cited, not one of the speakers mentioned privately owned accommodations.26 Neither the text of the bill,27 *338nor, for example, the enumeration by a leading supporter of the bill of what “civil rights” the bill would protect,28 even mentioned inns or other such facilities. Hence we are pointed to nothing in the legislative history which gives rise to an inference that the proponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 meant to include as a “civil right” a right to demand service at a privately owned restaurant or other privately owned establishment. And, if the 1866 Act did impose a statutory duty on innkeepers and others, then it is strange indeed that Senator Sumner in 1872 thought that an Act of Congress was necessary to require hotels, carriers, theatres, and other places to receive all races,29 and even more strange that Congress felt obliged in 1875 to pass the Civil Rights Act of that year explicitly prohibiting discrimination by inns, conveyances, theatres, and other places of public amusement.30
Finally, and controlling here, there is nothing whatever in the material cited to support the proposition that the Fourteenth Amendment, without congressional legislation, prohibits owners of restaurants and other places to refuse service to Negroes. We are cited, only in passing, to general statements made in the House of Representatives to the effect that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to incorporate the “principles” of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.31 Whether “principles” are the same thing as “provisions,” we are not told. But we have noted the serious doubt that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 even dealt with access to privately owned facilities. And it is revealing that in not one of the passages cited from the debates on the Fourteenth Amendment did any speaker suggest that the Amendment was designed, *339of itself, to assure all races equal treatment at inns and other privately owned establishments.
Apart from the one passing reference just mentioned above to the debates on the Fourteenth Amendment, a reference which we have shown had no relevance whatever to whom restaurants should serve, every one of the passages cited deals entirely with proposed legislation — not with the Amendment.32 It should be obvious that what may have been proposed in connection with passage of one statute or another is altogether irrelevant to the question of what the Fourteenth Amendment does in the absence of legislation. It is interesting to note that in 1872, some years after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Senator Sumner, always an indefatigable proponent of statutes of this kind, proposed in a debate to which we áre cited a bill to give all citizens, regardless of color, equal enjoyment of carriers, hotels, theatres, and certain other places. He submitted that, as to hotels and carriers (but not as to theatres and places of amusement), the bill “simply reenforce[d]” the common law;33 it is *340significant that he did not argue that the bill would enforce a right already protected by the Fourteenth Amendment itself- — the stronger argument, had it been available to him. Similarly, in an 1874 debate on a bill to give all citizens, regardless of color, equal enjoyment of inns, public conveyances, theatres, places of public amusement, common schools, and cemeteries (a debate also cited), Senator Pratt argued that the bill gave the same rights as the common law but would be a more effective remedy.34 Again, it is significant that, like Sumner in the 1872 debates, Pratt suggested as precedent for the bill only his belief that the common law required equal treatment; he never intimated that the Fourteenth Amendment laid down such a requirement.
We have confined ourselves entirely to those debates cited in Brother Goldberg’s opinion the better to show how, even on its own evidence, the opinion’s argument that the Fourteenth Amendment without more prohibits discrimination by restaurants and other such places rests on a wholly inadequate historical foundation. When read and analyzed, the argument is shown to rest entirely on what speakers are said to have believed bills and statutes of the time were meant to do. Such proof fails entirely when the question is, not what statutes did, but rather what the Constitution does. Nor are the three state cases35 relied on any better evidence, for all three *341dealt with state antidiscrimination statutes; not one purported to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment.36 And, if we are to speak of cases decided at that time, we should recall that this Court, composed of Justices appointed by Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur, held in a series of constitutional interpretations beginning with the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36 (1873), that the Amendment of itself was directed at state action only and that it did not displace the power of the state and federal legislative bodies to regulate the affairs of privately owned businesses.37
We are admonished that in deciding this case we should remember that “it is a constitution we are ex*342pounding.” 38 We conclude as we do because we remember that it is a Constitution and that it is our duty “to bow with respectful submission to its provisions.” 39 And in recalling that it is a Constitution “intended to endure for ages to come,” 40 we also remember that the Founders wisely provided the means for that endurance: changes in the Constitution, when thought necessary, are to be proposed by Congress or conventions and ratified by the States. The Founders gave no such amending power to this Court. Cf. Ex parte Virginia, 100 U. S. 339, 345-346 (1880). Our duty is simply to interpret the Constitution, and in doing so the test of constitutionality is not whether a law is offensive to our conscience or to the “good old common law,” 41 but whether it is offensive to the Constitution. Confining ourselves to our constitutional duty to construe, not to rewrite or amend, the Constitution, we believe that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment does not bar Maryland from enforcing its trespass laws so long as it does so with impartiality.
This Court has done much in carrying out its solemn duty to protect people from unlawful discrimination. And it will, of course, continue to carry out this duty in the future as it has in the past.42 But the Fourteenth *343Amendment of itself does not compel either a black .man or a white man running his own private business to trade with anyone else against his will. We do not believe that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment was written or designed to interfere with a storekeeper’s right to choose his customers or with a property owner’s right to choose his social or business associates, so long as he does not run counter to valid state43 or federal regulation. The case before us does not involve the power of the Congress to pass a law compelling privately owned businesses to refrain from discrimination on the basis of race and to trade with all if they trade with any. We express no views as to the power of Congress, acting under one or another provision of the Constitution, to prevent racial discrimination in the operation of privately owned businesses, nor upon any particular form of legislation to that end. Our sole conclusion is that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, standing alone, does not prohibit privately owned restaurants from choosing their own customers. It does not destroy what has until very recently been universally recognized in this country as the unchallenged right of a man who owns a business to run the business in his own way so long as some valid regulatory statute does not tell him to do otherwise.44
*344y.
Petitioners, but not the Solicitor General, contend that their convictions for trespass deny them the right of freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution. They argue that their
“expression (asking for service) was entirely appropriate to the time and place at which it occurred. They did not shout or obstruct the conduct of business. There were no speeches, picket signs, handbills or other forms of expression in the store possibly inappropriate to the time and place. Rather they offered to purchase food in a place and at a time set aside for such transactions. Their protest demonstration was a part of the Tree trade in ideas’ (Abrams v. United States, 250 U. S. 616, 630, Holmes, J., dissenting) . . . .”
Their argument comes down to this: that since petitioners did not shout, obstruct Hooper’s business (which the record refutes), make speeches, or display picket signs, handbills, or other means of communication, they had a perfect constitutional right to assemble and remain in the restaurant, over the owner’s continuing objections, for the purpose of expressing themselves by language and “demonstrations” bespeaking their hostility to Hooper’s refusal to serve Negroes. This Court’s prior cases do not support such a privilege growing out of the constitutional rights of speech and assembly. Unquestionably peti*345tioners had a constitutional right to express these views wherever they had an unquestioned legal right to be. Cf. Marsh v. Alabama, supra. But there is the rub in this case. The contention that petitioners had a constitutional right to enter or to stay on Hooper’s premises against his will because, if there, they would have had a constitutional right to express their desire to have restaurant service over Hooper’s protest, is a bootstrap argument. The right to freedom of expression is a right to express views — not a right to force other people to supply a platform or a pulpit. It is argued that this supposed constitutional right to invade other people’s property would not mean that a man’s home, his private club, or his church could be forcibly entered or used against his will — only his store or place of business which he has himself “opened to the public” by selling goods or services for money. In the first place, that argument assumes that Hooper’s restaurant had been opened to the public. But the whole quarrel of petitioners with Hooper was that instead of being open to all, the restaurant refused service to Negroes. Furthermore, legislative bodies with power to act could of course draw lines like this, but if the Constitution itself fixes its own lines, as is argued, legislative bodies are powerless to change them, and homeowners, churches, private clubs, and other property owners would have to await case-by-case determination by this Court before they knew who had a constitutional right to trespass on their property. And even if the supposed constitutional right is confined to places where goods and services are offered for sale, it must be realized that such a constitutional rule would apply to all businesses and professions alike. A statute can be drafted to create such exceptions as legislators think wise, but a constitutional rule could as well be applied to the smallest business as to the largest, to the most personal professional relationship as to the most impersonal business, *346to a family business conducted on a man’s farm or in his home as to businesses carried on elsewhere.
A great purpose of freedom of speech and press is to provide a forum for settlement of acrimonious disputes peaceably, without resort to intimidation, force, or violence. The experience of ages points to the inexorable fact that people are frequently stirred to violence when property which the law recognizes as theirs is forcibly inyaded or occupied by others. Trespass laws are born of this experience. They have been, and doubtless still are, important features of any government dedicated, as this country is, to a rule of law. Whatever power it may allow the States or grant to the Congress to regulate the use of private property, the Constitution does not confer upon any group the right to substitute rule by force for rule by law. Force leads to violence, violence to mob conflicts, and these to rule by the strongest groups with control of the most deadly weapons. Our Constitution, noble work of wise men, was designed— all of it — to chart a quite different course: to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” At times the rule of law seems too slow to some for the settlement of their grievances. But it is the plan our Nation has chosen to preserve both “Liberty” and equality for all. On that plan we have put our trust and staked our future. This constitutional rule of law has served us well. Maryland’s trespass law does not depart from it. Nor shall we.
We would affirm.

 See generally Flack, The Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment (1908); Harris, The Quest for Equality (1960).

 E. g., Anderson v. Martin, 376 U. S. 399; Goss v. Board of Education, 373 U. S. 683; Watson v. City of Memphis, 373 U. S. 526; Lombard v. Louisiana, 373 U. S. 267; Peterson v. City of Greenville, 373 U. S. 244; Johnson v. Virginia, 373 U. S. 61; Turner v. City of Memphis, 369 U. S. 350; Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 365 U. S. 715; Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U. S. 454; Gomillion v. Light-foot, 364 U. S. 339; Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1. As Professor Freund has observed, Brown and the decisions that followed it “were not an abrupt departure in constitutional law or a novel interpretation of the guarantee of equal protection of the laws. The old doctrine of separate-but-equal, announced in 1896, had been steadily eroded for at least a generation before the school cases, in the way that precedents are whittled down until they finally collapse.” Freund, The Supreme Court of the United States (1961), p. 173. See, e. g., Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U. S. 337; Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U. S. 629; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U. S. 637.

 See supra, note 2.

 See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., 839; Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., 1156-1157; Cong. Globe, 42d. Cong., 2d Sess., 381-383; 2 Cong. Rec. 4081-4082. For the general attitude of post-Civil War Congresses toward discrimination in places of public accommodation, see Frank and Munro, The Original Understanding of “Equal Protection of the Laws,” 50 Col. L. Rev. 131, 150-153 (1950).

 The Civil Rights Act of 1866,14 Stat. 27, which was the precursor of the Fourteenth Amendment, did not specifically enumerate such rights but, like the Fourteenth Amendment, was nevertheless understood to open to Negroes places of public accommodation. See Flack, op. cit., supra, note 1, at 45 (opinion of the press); Frank and Munro, supra, note 4, at 150-153; Lewis, The Sit-In Cases: Great Expectations, 1963 Sup. Ct. Rev. 101, 145-146. See also Coger v. The North West. Union Packet Co., 37 Iowa 145; Ferguson v. Cries, 82 Mich. 358, 46 N. W. 718. The Government, in its brief in this Court, has agreed with these authorities: “[W]e may feel sure that any member of Congress would have answered affirmatively if he had been asked in 1868 whether the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment would have the effect of securing Negroes the same right as other members of the public to use hotels, trains and public conveyances.”

 Justice Simrall, a Kentuckian by birth,' was a plantation owner and a prominent Mississippi lawyer and Mississippi State Legislator before the Civil War. Shoftly before the war, he accepted a chair of law at the University of Louisville; he continued in that position until the beginning of the war when he returned to his plantation in Mississippi. He subsequently served, for nine years on the Mississippi Supreme Court, the last three years serving as Chief Justice. He later lectured at the University of Mississippi and in 1890 was elected a member of the Constitutional Convention of Mississippi and served as chairman of the judiciary committee. 5 National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1907), 456; 1 Rowland, Courts, Judges, and Lawyers of Mississippi 1798-1935 (1935), 98-99.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 2459, 2462, 2465, 2467, 2538; Flack, op. cit., supra, note 1, at 94; Harris, op. cit., supra, note 1, at 30-40; McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1960), 326-363; Gressman, The Unhappy History of Civil Rights Legislation, 50 Mich. L. Rev. 1323, 1328-1332 (1952). A majority of the courts that considered the Act of 1866 had accepted its constitutionality. United States v. Rhodes, 27 Fed. Cas. 785 (No. 16, 151); In re Turner, 24 Fed. Cas; 337 (No. 14,247); Smith v. Moody, 26 Ind. 299; Hart v. Hoss & Elder, 26 La. Ann. 90. Contra, People v. Brady, 40 Cal. 198 (compare People v. Washington, 36 Cal. 658); Bowlin v. Commonwealth, 65 Ky. 5.

 As Mr. Justice Black pointed out in the Appendix to his dissent in Adamson v. California, 332 U. S. 46, 68, 107-108:
“Both proponents and opponents of § 1 of the [Fourteenth] amendment spoke of its relation to the Civil Rights Bill which had been previously passed over the President’s veto. Some considered that the amendment settled any doubts there might be as to the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Bill. Cong. Globe, [39th Cong., 1st Sess.,] 2511, 2896. Others maintained that the Civil Rights Bill would be unconstitutional unless and until the amendment was adopted. Cong. Globe, 2461, 2502, 2506, 2513, 2961. Some thought that amendment was nothing but the Civil Rights [Bill] 'in another shape.’ Cong. Globe, 2459, 2462, 2465, 2467, 2498, 2502.”

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 684 (Senator Sumner).

 Id., at 322 (Senator Trumbull). The recurrent references to the right “to go and come at .pleasure” as being “among the natural rights of free men” reflect the common understanding that the concepts of liberty and citizenship embraced the right to freedom of movement, the effective right to travel freely. See id., at 41-43, 111, 475. Blackstone had stated that the “personal liberty of individuals” embraced “the power of locomotion, of changing situation, or moving one’s per*294son to whatsoever place one’s own inclination may direct, without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law.” 1 Blackstone, Commentaries (Lewis ed. 1902), 134. This heritage was correctly described in Kent v. Dulles, 357 U. S. 116, 125-127:
“The right to travel is a part of the ‘liberty’ of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth [and Fourteenth Amendments]. ... In Anglo-Saxon law that right was emerging at least as early as the Magna Carta. . . . Freedom of movement across frontiers in either direction, and inside frontiers as well, was a part of our heritage. Travel abroad, like travel within the country, may be necessary for a livelihood. It may be as close to the heart of the individual as the choice of what he eats, or wears, or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values. See Crandall v. Nevada, 6 Wall. 35, 44; Williams v. Fears, 179 U. S. 270, 274; Edwards v. California, 314 U. S. 160.” See also Aptheker v. Secretary of State, post, p. 500.
This right to move freely has always been thought to be and is now more than ever inextricably linked with the right of the citizen to be accepted and to be treated equally in places of public accommodation. See the opinion of Mr. Justice Douglas, ante, at 250-251.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 474 (Senator Trumbull).

 Id., at 111 (Senator Wilson). See infra, at note 17.

 E. g., id., at 476, 599, 606, 1117-1118, 1151, 1157, 1159, 1264.

 Frank and Munro, supra, note 4, at 148-149: “One central theme emerges from the talk of ‘social equality’: there are two kinds of relations of men, those that are controlled by the law and those that are *295controlled by purely personal choice. The former involves civil rights, the latter social rights. There are statements by proponents of the Amendment from which a different definition could be taken, but this seems to be the usual one.” See infra, at notes 16, 32.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 936. (Emphasis added.) See also id... at 541, 916, App. 70.

 The court continued: “Without doubting that social rights and privileges are not within the protection of the laws and constitutional provisions in question, we are satisfied that the rights and privileges which were denied plaintiff are not within that class. She was refused accommodations equal to those enjoyed by white passengers. . . . She was unobjectionable in deportment and character. . . . She complains not because she was deprived of the society of white persons. Certainly no one will claim that the passengers in the cabin of a steamboat are there in the character of members of what is called society. Their companionship as travelers is not esteemed by any class of our people to create social relations. . . . The plaintiff .. . claimed no social privilege, but substantial privileges pertaining to her property and the protection of her person. It cannot be doubted that she was excluded from the table and cabin . . . because of prejudice entertained against her race .... The object of the amendments of the federal constitution and of the statutes above referred to, is to relieve citizens of the black race from the effects of this prejudice, to protect them in person and property from its spirit. The Slaughter House Cases [16 Wall. 36]. We are disposed to construe these laws according to their very spirit and intent, so that equal rights and equal protection shall be secured to all regardless of color or nationality.” Id., at 157-158. See also Ferguson v. Gies, 82 Mich. 358, 46 N. W. 718.

 The treatise defined an innkeeper as “the keeper of a common inn for the lodging and entertainment of travellers and passengers . . . .” Story, Commentaries on the Law of Bailments (Schouler, 9th ed., 1878), §475. 3 Blaekstone, op. cit., supra, note 10, at 166, stated a more general rule:
“[IJf an inn-keeper, or other victualler, hangs out a sign and opens his house for travelers, it is an implied engagement to entertain all persons who travel that way; and upon thid universal assumpsit an action on.the case will lie against him for damages if he, without good reason, refuses to admit a traveler.” (Emphasis added.) In Tidswell, The Innkeeper’s Legal Guide (1864), p. 22, a “victualling house” is defined as a place “where people are provided with food and liquors, but not with lodgings,” and in 3 Stroud, Judicial Dictionary (1903), as “a house where persons are provided with victuals, but without lodging.”
Regardless, however, of the precise content of state common-law rules and the legal status of restaurants at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the spirit of the common law was both familiar and apparent. In 1701 in Lane v. Cotton, 12 Mod. 472, 484-485, Holt, C. J., had declared:
“[W]herever any subject takes upon himself a public trust for the benefit of the rest of his fellow-subjects, he is eo ipso bound to serve the subject in all the things that are within the reach and comprehension of such an office, under pain of an action against him .... If on the road a shoe fall off my horse, and I come to a smith to have one put on, and the smith refuse to do it, an action will lie against him, because he has made profession of a trade which *298is for the public good, and has thereby exposed and vested an interest of himself in all the king’s subjects that will employ him in the way of his trade. If an innkeeper refuse to entertain a guest where his house is not full, an action will lie against him, and so against a carrier, if his horses be not loaded, and he refuse to take a packet proper to be sent by a carrier .... If the inn be full, or the carrier’s horses laden, the action would not lie for such refusal; but one that has made profession of a public employment, is bound to the utmost extent of that employment to serve the public.” See Munn v. Illinois, 94 U. S. 113, 126-130 (referring to the duties traditionally imposed on one who pursues a public employment and exercises “a sort of public office”).
Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the men who debated the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, were not thinking only in terms of existing common-law duties but were thinking more generally of the-customary expectations of white citizens with respect to places which were considered public and which were in various ways regulated by laws. See infra, at 298-305. Finally, as the Court acknowledged in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 310, the “Fourteenth Amendment makes no attempt to enumerate the rights it designed to protect,” for those who adopted it were conscious that a constitutional “principle to be vital must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth.” Weems v. United States, 217 U. S. 349, 373. See infra, at 315.

 Similarly, in 1874, Senator .Pratt said:
“No one reading the Constitution can deny that every colored man is a citizen, and as such, so far as legislation may go, entitled to equal rights and privileges with white people. Can it be doubted that for a denial of any of the privileges or accommodations enumerated in the bill [proposed supplement to the Civil Rights Act of 1866] he could maintain a suit at common law against the inn-keeper, the public carrier, or proprietor or lessee of the theater who withheld them ? Suppose a colored man presents himself at a public inn, kept for the accommodation of the public, is decently clad and behaves himself well and is ready to pay the customary charges for rest and refreshment, and is either refused admittance or treated as an inferior guest — placed at the second table and consigned to the garret, or compelled to make his couch upon the floor — does any one doubt that upon an appeal to the courts, the law if justly administered would pronounce the inn-keeper responsible to him in damages for the unjust discrimination? I suppose not. Prejudice in the jury-box might deny him substantial damages; but about the law in the matter there can be no two opinions. The same is true of public carriers on land or water. Their engagement with the public is to carry all persons who seek conveyance on their cars or boats to the extent of their facilities for certain established fares, and all persons who behave themselves and are not afflicted with any contagious disease are entitled to equal accommodations where they pay equal fares.
“But it is asked, if the law be as you lay it down, where the necessity for this legislation, since the courts are open to all ? My answer is, that the remedy is inadequate and too expensive, and involves too much loss of time and patience to pursue it. When a man is traveling, and far from home, it does not pay to sue every innkeeper who, or railroad company which, insults him by unjust discrimination. Practically the remedy is worthless.” 2 Cong. Rec. 4081-4082.

 The statute specifically referred to “the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, restaurants, eating-houses, barber-shops, public conveyances on land and water, theaters, and all other places of public accommodation and amusement, subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to all citizens.” 82 Mich. 358, 364, 46 N. W. 718, 720.

 The court also emphasized that the right under consideration was clearly a “civil” as distinguished from a “social” right. See 82 Mich., at 363, 367-368, 46 N. W., at 720-721; see also supra, at notes 13-14, 16 and infra, at note 32.

 After the Civil War, Southern States enacted the so-called “Black Codes” imposing disabilities reducing the emancipated Negroes to the status of “slaves of society,” even though they were no longer the chattels of individual masters. See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 39, 516-517; opinion of Mr. Justice Douglas, ante, at 247, n. 3. For the substance of these codes, see 1 Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction (1906), 273-312; McPherson, The Political History of the United States During the Period of Reconstruction (1871), 29-44.

 See Lewis, supra, note 5, at 146: “It was assumed by more than a few members of Congress that theaters and places of amusement would be or could be opened to all as a result either of the Equal Protection Clause or the Privileges and Immunities Clause. Why would the framers believe this? Some mentioned the law’s regulation of such enterprises, but this is not enough. Some other standard must delineate between the regulated who must offer equal treatment and those who need not. Whites did not have a legal right to demand admittance to [such] enterprises, but they were admitted. Perhaps this observed conduct was confused with required conduct, just as the observed status of the citizens of all free governments— the governments that Washington, J., could observe — was mistaken for inherent rights to the status. The important point is that the framers, or some of them, believed the Amendment would open places of public accommodation, and study of the debates reveals this belief to be the observed expectations of the majority, tantamount in practice to legal rights. . . .”

 E. g., The Supplementary Freedmen’s Bureau Act, Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 318; The Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27; The Enforcement Act of 1870, 16 Stat. 140; The Civil Rights Act of April 20, 1871, 17 Stat. 13; 42 U, S. C. § 1983. See also the language of the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 17 (quoted infra, at note 25).

 Of the five cases involved in the Civil Rights Cases, two concerned theatres, two concerned inns or hotels and one concerned a common carrier. In United States v. Nichols (involving a Missouri inn or hotel) the Solicitor General said: “I premise that upon the subject of inns the common law is in force in Missouri . . . .” Brief for the United States, Nos. 1, 2, 4, 460, October Term, 1882, p. 8. In United States v. Ryan (a California theatre) and in United States v. Stanley (a Kansas inn or hotel), it seems that common-law duties applied as well as state antidiscrimination laws. Calif. Laws 1897, p. 137; Kan. Laws 1874, p. 82. In United States v. Singleton (New York opera house) a state statute barred racial discrimination by “theaters, or other places of amusement.” N. Y. Laws 1873, p. 303; Laws 1881, p. 541. In Robinson v. Memphis (a Tennessee railroad parlor car), the legal duties were less clear. The events occurred in 1879 and the trial was held in 1880. The common-law duty of carriers had existed in Tennessee and, from what appears in the record, was assumed by the trial judge, in charging the jury, to exist at the time of trial. However, in 1875 Tennessee had repealed the common-law rule, Laws 1875, p. 216, and in 1881 the State amended the law *307to require a carrier to furnish separate but equal first-class accommodations, Laws 1881, p. 211.

 Reasoning from this same basic assumption, the Court said that Congress lacked the power,to enact such legislation: “[U]ntil some State law has been passed, or some State action through its officers or agents has been taken, adverse to the rights of citizens sought to be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, no legislation of the United States under said amendment, nor any proceeding under such legislation, can be called into activity: for the prohibitions of the amendment are against State laws and acts done under State authority.” 109 U. S., at 13. And again: “[I]t is proper to state that civil rights, such as are guaranteed by the Constitution against State aggression, cannot be impaired by the wrongful acts of individuals, unsupported by State authority in the shape of laws, customs, or judicial or executive proceedings. The wrongful act of an individual, unsupported by any such authority, is simply a private wrong, or a crime of that individual; an invasion of the rights of the injured party, it is true . . . ; but if not sanctioned in some way by the State ... his rights remain in full force, and may presumably be vindicated by resort to the laws of the State for redress.” Id., at 17. (Emphasis added.)
The argument of the Attorney General of Mississippi in Donnell v. State, 48 Miss. 661, explicitly related the State’s new public accommodations law to the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. He stated that the Amendments conferred a national “power to enforce, ‘by appropriate legislation,’ these rights, privileges and immunities of citizenship upon the newly enfranchised class . . he then concluded that “the legislature of this state has sought, by this [anti-discrimination] act, to render any interference by congress unnecessary.” Id., at 668. This view seems to accord with the assumption underlying the Civil Rights Cases.

 Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), 15-26, points out that segregation in its modern and pervasive form is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although the speed of the movement varied, it was not until 1904, for example, that Maryland, the respondent in this case, extended Jim Crow legislation to railroad coaches and other common carriers. Md. Laws 1904, c. 110, p. 188; Md. Laws 1908, c. 248, p. 88. In the 1870’s Negroes in Baltimore, Maryland, successfully challenged attempts to segregate transit facilities. See Fields v. Baltimore City Passenger R. Co., reported in Baltimore American, Nov. 14, 1871, p. 4, col. 3; Baltimore Sun, Nov. 13, 1871, p. 4, col. 2.

 Not until 1887 did Florida, the appellee in Robinson v. Florida, ante, at 153, enact a statute requiring separate railroad passenger facilities for the two races. Fla. Laws 1887, c. 3743, p. 116. The State, in following a pattern that was not unique, had not immediately repealed its reconstruction antidiscrimination statute. Fla. Digest 1881, c. 19, pp. 171-172; see Fla. Laws 1891, c. 4055, p. 92; Fla. Rev. Stat. 1892, p. viii.

 This Court has frequently held that rights and liberties protected by the Fourteenth Amendment prevail over state common-law, as well as statutory, rules. “The fact that [a State’s] policy is expressed by the judicial organ . . . rather than by the legislature we have repeatedly ruled to be immaterial. . . . '[R]ights under [the Fourteenth] amendment turn on the power of the State, no matter by what organ it acts.’ Missouri v. Dockery, 191 U. S. 165, 170-71.” Hughes v. Superior Court, 339 U. S. 460, 466-467. See also Ex parte Virginia, 100 U. S. 339, 346-347; American Federation of Labor v. Swing, 312 U. S. 321; New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 265.

 Letter from Justice Bradley to Circuit Judge (later Justice) William B. Woods (unpublished draft), Mar. 12, 1871, in the Bradley Papers on file, The New Jersey Historical Society, Newark, New Jersey; Supplemental Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae, Nos. 6, 9, 10, 12 and 60, October Term, 1963, pp. 75-76. For a convenient source of excerpts, see Roche, Civil Liberty in the Age of Enterprise, 31 U. of Chi. L. Rev. 103, 108-110 (1963). See notes 30-31, infra.

 A comparison of the 1871 Bradley-Woods correspondence (and the opinion that Judge Woods later wrote, see note 31, infra) with Justice Bradley’s 1883 opinion in the Civil Rights Cases indicates that in some respects the Justice modified his views. Attached to a draft of a letter to Judge Woods was a note, apparently written subsequently, by Justice Bradley stating that: “The views expressed in the foregoing letters were much modified by subsequent reflection, so far as relates to the power of Congress to pass laws for enforcing social equality between the races.” The careful wording of this note, limiting itself to “the power of Congress to pass laws,” supports the conclusion that Justice Bradley had only modified, not abandoned, his fundamental views and that the Civil Rights Cases should be read, as they were written, to rest on an explicit assumption as to the legal rights which the States were affirmatively protecting.

 The background of this correspondence and the subsequent opinion of Judge Woods in United States v. Hall, 26 Fed. Cas. 79 (Cas. No. 15,282), are significant. The correspondence on the subject apparently began in December 1870 when Judge Woods wrote Justice Bradley concerning the constitutional questions raised by an indictment filed by the United States under the Enforcement Act of 1870, 16 Stat. 140. The indictment charged that the defendants “did unlawfully and feloniously band and conspire together, with intent to injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate” certain citizens in their exercise of their “right of freedom of speech” and in “their free exercise and enjoyment of the right and privilege to peaceably assemble.” The prosecution was instituted in a federal court in Alabama against private individuals whose conduct had in no way involved or been sanctioned by state action.
In May of 1871, after corresponding with Justice Bradley, Judge Woods delivered an opinion upholding the federal statute and the indictment. The judge declared that the rights allegedly infringed were protected under the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: “We think . . . that the right of freedom of speech, and the other rights enumerated in the first eight articles oí amendment to the constitution of the United States, are the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, that they are secured by the constitution . . . .” 26 Fed. Cas., at 82. This position is similar to that of Justice Bradley two years later dissenting in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 111, 118-119. More important for present purposes, however, is the fact that in analyzing the problem of “private” (nonstate) action, Judge Woods’ reasoning and language follow that of Justice Bradley’s letters. The judge concluded that under the Fourteenth Amendment Congress could adopt legislation: “to protect the fundamental rights of citizens of the United States against unfriendly or insufficient state legislation, for the fourteenth amendment not only prohibits the making or enforcing of laws which shall abridge the privileges of the citizen, but prohibits the states from denying to all persons within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Denying includes inaction as well as action, and denying the equal protection of the laws includes the omission to protect, as well as the omission to pass laws for protection.” 26 Fed. Cas., at 81.

 The approach is reflected in the reasoning stated by the Supreme Court of Michigan in 1890:
“Socially people may do as they please within the law, and whites may associate together, as may blacks, and exclude whom they please from their dwellings and private grounds; but there can be no separation in public places between people on account of their color alone which the law will sanction.
“The man who goes either by himself or with his family to a public place must expect to meet and mingle with all classes of people. He cannot ask, to suit his caprice or prejudice or social views, that this or that man shall be excluded because he does not wish to associate with them. He may draw his social line as closely as he chooses at home, or in other private places, but he connot [sic] in a public place carry the privacy of his home with him, or ask that people not as good or great as he is shall step aside when he appears.” Ferguson v. Gies, 82 Mich., at 363, 367-368, 46 N. W., at 720, 721. See supra, at notes 13-14.

 Cf. Munn v. Illinois, 94 U. S. 113, 125-126: “Looking, then, to the common law, from whence came the [property] right which the Constitution protects, we find that when private property is ‘affected with a public interest, it ceases to be juris privati only.’ This was said by Lord Chief Justice Hale more than two hundred years ago, in his treatise De Portibus Maris, 1 Harg. Law Tracts, 78, and has been accepted without objection as an essential element in the law of property ever since. Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large.”

 See Lewis, supra, note 5, at 148.

 See supra, at note 17.

 See Bickel, The Original Understanding and the- Segregation Decision, 69 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (1955).

 2 De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Bradley ed. 1948), 101.

 “Any person or persons who shall enter upon or cross over the land, premises or private property of any person or persons in this State after having been duly notified by the owner or his agent not to do so shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor Md. Code, Art. 27, § 577.

 Mr. Hooper testified this as to his reasons for adopting his policy:
“I set at the table with him and two other people and reasoned and talked to him why my policy was not yet one of integration and told him that I had two hundred employees and half of them were colored. I thought as much of them as I did the white employees. I invited them back in my kitchen if they’d like to go back and talk to them. I wanted to prove to them it wasn’t my policy, my personal prejudice, we were not, that I had valuable colored employees and I thought just as much of them. I tried to reason with these leaders, told them that as long as my customers were deciding who they wanted to eat with, I’m at the mercy of my customers. I’m trying to do what they want. If they fail to come in, these people are not paying my expenses, and my bills. They didn’t want to go back and talk to my colored employees because every one of them are in sympathy with me and that is we’re in sympathy with what their objectives are, with what they are trying to abolish . . . .”

 227 Md. 302, 176 A. 2d 771 (1962).

 374 U. S. 804, 805 (1963). Probable jurisdiction was noted in Robinson v. Florida, 374 U. S. 803 (1963), rev’d, ante, p. 153. Certiorari had already been granted in Griffin v. Maryland, 370 U. S. 935 (1962), rev’d, ante, p. 130.

 Ordinance No. 1249, June 8, 1962, adding § 10A to Art. 14A, Baltimore City Code (1950 ed.).

 Md. Acts 1963, c. 227, Art. 49B Md. Code § 11 (enacted March 29, 1963, effective June 1, 1963). A later accommodations law, of statewide coverage, was enacted, Md. Acts 1964, Sp. Sess., c. 29, § 1, but will not take effect unless approved by referendum.

 Hamm v. City of Rock Hill, 377 U. S. 988; Lupper v. Arkansas, 377 U. S. 989. The same question was presented but is not decided in seven other cases which the Court today disposes of in various ways. See Drews v. Maryland, post, p. 547; Williams v. North Carolina, post, p. 548; Fox v. North Carolina, post, p. 587; Mitchell v. City of Charleston, post, p. 551; Ford v. Tennessee, 377 U. S. 994; Green v. Virginia, post, p. 550; Harris v. Virginia, post, p. 552.

 Winters v. New York, 333 U. S. 507, 512 (1948); Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296, 307-308 (1940).

 See Garner v. Louisiana, 368 U. S. 157, 185 (1961) (Harlan, J., concurring).

 See Martin v. City of Struthers, 319 U. S. 141, 147 and n. 10 (1943).

 E. g., §5: “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

 Citing Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3 (1883); United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629 (1883); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542 (1876).

 See Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 365 U. S. 715 (1961).

 See Shelley v. Kraemer, supra, 334 U. S., at 14-15 (1948), particularly notes 13 and 14.

 The use in this country of trespass laws, both civil and criminal, to allow people to substitute the processes of the law for force and *328violence has an ancient origin in England. Land law was once bound up with the notion of “seisin,” a term connoting “peace and quiet.” 2 Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (2d ed. 1909), 29, 30. As Coke put it, “he who is in possession may sit down in rest and quiet . . . .” 6 Co. Rep. 57b. To vindicate this right to undisturbed use and enjoyment of one’s property, the law of trespass came into being. The leading historians of the early English law have observed the constant interplay between “our law of possession and trespass” and have concluded that since “to allow men to make forcible entries on land ... is to invite violence,” the trespass laws’ protection of possession “is a prohibition of self-help in the interest of public order.” 2 Pollock and Maitland, supra, at 31, 41.

 On this subject the Solicitor General in his brief says: “The series of covenants becomes in effect a local zoning ordinance binding those in the area subject to the restriction without their consent. Cf. Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U. S. 60. Where the State has delegated to private persons a power so similar to law-making authority, its exercise may fairly be held subject to constitutional restrictions.”

 42 U. S. C. § 1982, deriving from 14 Stat. 27, § 1 (1866), provides : “All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State and Territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.” 42 U. S. C. § 1981, deriving from 16 Stat. 144, § 16 (1870), provides: "All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right ... to make and enforce contracts . . . as is enjoyed by white citizens . . . .” The constitutionality of these statutes was recognized in Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 317-318 (1880), and in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U. S. 60, 79-80 (1917).

 Harmon v. Tyler, 273 U. S. 668 (1927); Richmond, v. Deans, 281 U. S. 704 (1930).

 Compare Robinson v. Florida, ante, p. 153; Peterson v. City of Greenville, 373 U. S. 244 (1963); Lombard v. Louisiana, 373 U. S. 267 (1963).

 Compare Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 365 U. S. 715 (1961).

 In fact, as pointed out in Part I of this opinion, Maryland has recently passed a law prohibiting racial discrimination in restaurants in Baltimore and some other parts of the State, and Baltimore has enacted a similar ordinance. Still another Maryland antidiscrimination law, of statewide application, has been enacted but is subject to referendum. See note 6, swpra.

 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., 1159 (1864) (Senator Morrill).

 Id., at 1157-1158 (Senator Saulsbury).

 Id., at 1158. In response to a question put by Senator Carlile of Virginia, Sumner stated that it had taken a statute to assure Negroes equal treatment in Massachusetts:
“That whole question, after much discussion in Massachusetts, has been settled by legislation, and the rights of every colored person are placed on an equality with those of white persons. They have the same right with white persons to ride in every public conveyance in the Commonwealth. It was done by positive legislation twenty-one years ago.” Ibid. (Emphasis supplied.)
A few minutes later, Senator Davis of Kentucky asked Sumner directly if it was not true that what treatment was extended to colored people by “public hotels” incorporated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was left to “the judgment and discretion of the proprietors and managers of the hotels.” Sumner, who had answered immediately preceding statements by Davis, left this one unchallenged. Id., at 1161.

 A number of the remarks quoted as having been made in relation to Negroes’ access to privately owned accommodations in fact dealt with other questions altogether. For example, Senator Trumbull of Illinois is quoted, ante, p. 293, as having said that the Negro should have the right “to go where he pleases.” It is implied that such remarks cast light on the question of access to privately owned accommodations. In fact, the statement, made in the course of a debate on a bill (S. 60) to enlarge the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau, related solely to Black Laws that had been enacted in some of the Southern States. Trumbull attacked the “slave codes” which “prevented the colored man going from home,” and he urged that Congress nullify all laws which would not permit the colored man “to go where he pleases.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 322 (1866). Similarly, in another debate, on a bill (S. 9) for the protection of freedmen, Senator Wilson of Massachusetts had just told the Senate about such laws as that of Mississippi which provided that any freedman who quit his job “without good cause” during the term of his employment should, upon affidavit of the employer, be arrested and carried back to the employer. Speaking of such relics of slavery, Wilson said that freedmen were “as free as I am, to work when they please, to play when they please, to go where they please . . . .” Id., at 41. Senator Trumbull then joined the debate, wondering if S. 9 went far enough and saying that to prevent States “from enslaving, under any pretense,” the freedmen, he might introduce his own bill to ensure the right of freedmen to “go and come when they please.” Id., at 43. It was to the Black Laws — and not anything remotely to do with accommodations — that Wilson, Trumbull, and others addressed their statements. Moreover, in the debate on S. 9, Senator Trumbull expressly referred to the Thirteenth Amendment as the constitutional basis both for the pending bill and for his own bill, ibid., showing that the Senate’s concern was with state laws restricting the movement of, and in effect re-enslaving, colored people.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 47-L476 (1866) (Trumbull of Illinois), 599 (Trumbull), 606 (Trumbull), 1117 (Wilson of Iowa), 1151 (Thayer of Pennsylvania), 1154 (Thayer), 1157 (Thornton of Minnesota), 1159 (Windom of Minnesota).

 See id., at 211-212.

 Id., at 1151 (Thayer).

 Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 2d Sess., 381-383 (1872).

 18 Stat. 335.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2459, 2462, 2465, 2467, 2538 (1866).

 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., 839 (1864) (debate on.,bM to repeal law prohibiting colored persons from carrying the mail); Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., 1156-1157 (1864) (debate on amending the charter of the Metropolitan Railroad Co.); Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 322, 541, 916, 936 (1866) (debate on bill to amend the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, S. 60); Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 474-476, 599, 606, 1117-1118, 1151, 1154, 1157, 1159, 1263 (1866) (debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, S. 61); Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 41, 111 (1866) (debate on bill for the protection of freedmen from Black Codes, S. 9); Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 2d Sess., 381-383 (1872) (debate on Sumner’s amendment to bill removing political and civil disabilities on ex-Confederates, H. R. 380); 2 Cong. Rec. 4081-4082 (1874) (debate on bill to give all citizens equal enjoyment of inns, etc., S. 1). One cited passage, Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 684 (1866), consists of remarks made in debate on a proposed constitutional amendment having to do with apportionment of representation, H. R. 51.

 Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 2d Sess., 383 (1872).

 2 Cong. Rec. 4081 (1874).

 Donnell v. State, 48 Miss. 661 (1873); Coger v. North West. Packet Co., 37 Iowa 145 (1873); Ferguson v. Gies, 82 Mich. 358, 46 N. W. 718 (1890). The Mississippi case does contain this observation pertinent to a court’s duty to confine itself to deciding cases and interpreting constitutions and statutes and to leave the legislating to legislatures:
“Events of such vast magnitude and influence now and hereafter, have gone into history within the last ten years, that the public mind is not yet quite prepared to consider them calmly and dispassionately. To the judiciary, which ought at all times to be calm, delib*341erate and firm, especially so when the public thought and sentiment are at all excited beyond the normal tone, is committed the high trust of declaring what are the rules of conduct and propriety prescribed by the supreme authority, and what are the rights of individuals under them. As to the policy of legislation, the judiciary have nothing to do. That is wisely left with the law-making department of the government.” 48 Miss., at 675.

 The Attorney General of Mississippi is quoted as having argued in Donnell v. State, 48 Miss. 661 (1873), that the Mississippi Legislature had “sought, by this [antidiscrimination] act, to render any interference by congress unnecessary.” Ante, p. 307, n. 25. This very statement shows that the Mississippi Attorney General thought in 1873, as we believe today, that the Fourteenth Amendment did not of itself guarantee access to privately owned facilities and that it took legislation, such as that of Mississippi, to guarantee such access.

 Brother Goldberg’s opinion in this ease relies on Munn v. Illinois, 94 U. S. 113 (1877), wMch discussed the common-law rule that “when private property is devoted to a public use, it is subject to public regulation.” Id., at 130. This statement in Munn related, of course, to the extent to which a legislature constitutionally can regulate private property. Munn therefore is not remotely relevant here, for in this case the problem is, not what legislatures can do, but rather what the Constitution itself does. And in fact this Court some years ago rejected the notion that a State must depend upon some rationalization such as “affected with a public interest” in order for legislatures to regulate private businesses. See Nebbia v. New York, 291 U. S. 502 (1934).

 McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 407 (1819). (Emphasis in original.)

 Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264, 377 (1821).

 McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 415 (1819).

 That the English common law was not thought altogether “good” in this country is suggested by the complaints of the Declaration of Independence, by the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and by observations of Thomas Jefferson. The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia 163 (Foley ed. 1900).

 It is said that our holding “does not do justice” to a Constitution which is color blind and to this Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954). Ante, pp. 287-288. We agree, of course, that the Fourteenth Amendment is “color blind,” in the sense that it outlaws all state laws which discriminate merely on *343account of color. This was the basis upon which the Court struck down state laws requiring school segregation- in Brown v. Board of Education, supra. But there was no possible intimation in Brown or in any other of our past decisions that this Court would construe the Fourteenth Amendment as requiring restaurant owners to serve all races. Nor has there been any intimation that the Court should or would expand the Fourteenth Amendment because of a belief that it does not in our judgment go far enough.

 Cf. Colorado Anti-Discrimination Comm’n v. Continental Air Lines, Inc., 372 U. S. 714 (1963).

 The opinion of our Brother Goldberg characterizes our argument as being that the Constitution “permits” Negroes to be denied access to restaurants on account of theiT color. We fear that this statement *344might mislead some readers. Precisely put, our position is that the Constitution of itself does not prohibit discrimination by those who sell goods and services. There is of course a crucial difference between the argument — which we do make — that the Constitution itself does not prohibit private sellers of goods or services from choosing their own customers, and the argument — which we do not make — that the Constitution affirmatively creates a right to discriminate which neither state nor federal legislation could impair.