CIVIL RIGHTS CASES

Jim Crow

Since before the turn of the century in the South, black Americans had been relegated to the status of second-class citizens, denied by law and legal subterfuge fundamental civil rights such as the right to vote, the right to free assembly, the right to freedom of speech, and the right to due legal process. The system, known commonly as Jim Crow, had a dubious standing in the law. Since the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution after the Civil War, blacks were entitled to the same legal protections as white citizens. A series of late-nineteenth century Supreme Court interpretations of these amendments, however, reduced the scope of protections. The most important of these decisions was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment in such a manner that it established the legal foundation for Jim Crow.

Segregation

In Plessy v. Ferguson the Court established the legal pattern for the erection of two societies in the South, one white and one black. The men who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment had intended it to prevent state governments from denying black Americans rights guaranteed by the Constitution. In Plessy, however, the Court maintained that so long as state governments provided due legal process and legal freedoms equal to those of white citizens, they could maintain separate institutions to administer these rights. The interpretation opened the way to a segregated society in the South Southern state governments passed laws forbidding blacks and whites from social and institutional association. Blacks and whites rode on different train cars and on different parts of buses, and they waited in separate areas of bus and train stations. Entrances and exits to buildings were segregated, as were public bathrooms and water fountains. There were separate prisons for blacks and whites, separate hospitals, separate churches, even separate homes for the blind. In 1905 Georgia set up separate parks for blacks and whites; in 1935 Oklahoma forbade blacks and whites from boating together; in 1930 Birmingham, Alabama, made it illegal for blacks and whites to play dominoes and checkers together. Most important, state governments set up separate education systems. Nowhere in the South did white and black children attend school together.

Subterfuge

According to Plessy, segregated education was constitutional, so long as the black schools were equal to those of whites. But black and white schools were not equal. Because most blacks were denied the right to vote in most southern states, school boards were comprised of whites. On average they funded white schools at rates twice that of black schools, and white teachers' salaries were on average 30 percent higher than those of black teachers. School boards provided inadequate buildings, textbooks, and buses to black students, and there was almost no graduate education provided for black Americans in most states in the South. The second-class status of black education symbolized the reality of Jim Crow in almost every southern institution: black public restrooms were rare and poorly maintained, black water fountains rusty, and black train cars old and uncomfortable. Separate was not equal in the Jim Crow South. Separate was second-rate. Plessy was used by southern governments as an excuse to neglect their obligations to black citizens.

Violence

Jim Crow used more than Plessy to relegate black Americans to a second-class status. A variety of legal subterfuges, buttressed by popular political assent (in both the North and South) sustained the system. The right to vote was denied blacks through tactics such as the white primary (restricting voting in primaries or membership in the Democratic Party to whites), grandfather clauses (laws that restricted the right to vote to blacks whose ancestors had voted before the Civil War—when blacks were legally denied the right to vote), or through poll taxes (fees ostensibly charged to both black and white voters before they could vote but which actually were assessed against poor blacks, effectively preventing them from voting). Such subterfuges successfully squelched black participation in southern politics. In the election of 1940, for example, only 2.5 percent of southern blacks voted. Such laws were unconstitutional but unchallenged, in part because white public opinion sustained such laws, but also because white violence and political pressure against blacks were constant features in southern life. Blacks who pressed their constitutional rights in the courts risked losing their homes, their jobs, and often their lives. Lynching, the unpunished murder of blacks by white mobs, repeatedly occurred in the South, even into the 1940s. The legal system was often incapable of dealing with lynching and violence against blacks, as all-white juries almost never convicted whites of violence against blacks. Many states reinforced the inability of the law to stop lynching by barring blacks from serving on juries. And the Jim Crow system often implicitly depended upon violence to prevent black challenges to its constitutional legitimacy. Thus, a cycle of unjust application of the law and unpunished violence outside the law effectively denied southern blacks their constitutional rights.

Challenges

In 1935 a northern-based civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), began legal challenges to the Jim Crow system in the South. Led by Howard University law professor Charles Houston, teams of NAACP lawyers including William Hastie, Thurgood Marshall, Leon A. Ransom, Oliver W. Hill, and James M. Nebrit, Jr., challenged state Jim Crow laws concerning voting, criminal rights, and segregation in housing, education, and transportation. They focused their campaign on the upper South, where the risk of violence to black plaintiffs was less than in the Deep South, and amassed a legal-defense fund with assistance from the American Fund for Public Service. They anticipated first challenging the equality of the segregated facilities in the South, setting a precedent for a later challenge to the very notion of segregation itself. Although the NAACP was not the sole civil rights organization challenging Jim Crow in the courts, its program was the best financed and the best planned.

Transportation

As the segregated railcars of Louisiana had occasioned the Plessy case of 1896, civil rights reformers naturally took aim at Jim Crow in transportation. One of the most important of the cases in the 1940s began in 1936, when a black congressman, Arthur Mitchell, took a train from Chicago to Hot Springs, Arkansas. As he entered the South, the Rock Island Railroad forced him to move out of a comfortable, air-conditioned railroad car into a dirty, uncomfortable car reserved for blacks and baggage. When Mitchell returned to Washington, he filed a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission, which replied that the railroad was only complying with the Jim Crow laws. Mitchell filed suit in the courts to challenge the constitutionality of the Jim Crow segregation laws. The 28 April 1941 decision in Mitchell v. United States represented a mixed victory for civil rights reformers. The court required that the accommodations for blacks on interstate trains be equal to those of whites but left in place the Plessy approval of segregated transportation. Less ambiguous was the June 1946 Supreme Court decision in Morgan v Virginia, wherein the Supreme Court outlawed Jim Crow laws requiring the segregation of passengers in interstate transportation. The transportation companies, however, did nothing to comply with the new law, and when several activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) challenged the continuing segregation in interstate transportation in 1947, they were arrested. When their legal funding ran out, they abandoned further challenges, and segregation in interstate transportation continued to be practiced in the South until the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s.

Voting and Criminal Rights

Jim Crow stripped black Americans of two fundamental rights of American citizenship: the right to vote and the right to be tried before a jury of one's peers. Court challenges in the 1940s returned some of these rights, although they would not be successfully recovered until after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lane v. Wilson (1939) struck down Oklahoma's grandfather clause. Two cases, United States v. Classic (1941) and Smith v. Allwright (1944), invalidated the white primary. A series of Supreme Court decisions, beginning in 1935 and culminating in Smith v Texas (1940), overturned convictions of black defendants in the South on the basis that blacks were legally prevented from serving on juries. Another Supreme Court ruling, Chambers v. Florida (1940), halted the common police practice of rounding up blacks and "sweating out"—through the use of force, deprivation, and torture—confessions to crimes they did not commit. The Chambers case began in 1936 in a small Florida town where a white man had been murdered. Town police rounded up twenty-five to forty black men, arrested them without warrants, and confined them to jail for six days Police grilled them incessantly, finally extracting a confession from one man. On the basis of the confession, four men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. When Florida appellate courts upheld the judgment, the NAACP appealed the case to the Supreme Court. On Abraham Lincoln's birthday in 1940, the Court invalidated the confession and the process of using the "third degree" against black Americans. Writing for the Court, Justice Hugo Black offered this opinion: "No higher duty, no more solemn responsibility, rests upon this Court, than that of translating into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution—of whatever race, creed, or persuasion."

Housing

In 1926 the Supreme Court had upheld the right of landowners and real estate agents to bind buyers of property to restrictive covenants. Such covenants obligated the purchaser of land or property not to sell the land at a future date to any member of the "Negro or Mongolian" races. In 1938 a challenge to restrictive covenants before the Illinois Supreme Court by African American homebuyers in Chicago resulted in the partial overturn of the Illinois decision; a follow-up case, Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), abolished restrictive covenants as an infringement of the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection of the laws—an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that returned to its original intent.

Education

The NAACP campaign against segregated schools was the most successful of its anti-Jim Crow efforts. The NAACP first challenged Jim Crow in education by pointing out the unequal quality of black education in the South. The plan was to force southern schools to own up to the obligation in Plessy that black education be equal to white, hoping that the extraordinary expense involved in bringing black schools up to standard would lead southern states simply to abandon segregated schools. When that failed to occur, the NAACP argued that segregated schools inherently disadvantaged students, limiting their ability to gain the skills necessary to be competitive with white students and imparting a debilitating psychological stigma on the student. In a 1939 Missouri case, for example, the NAACP petitioned the state either to integrate its law school or to provide a separate law school for a single black student. It chose to do the latter but only after the Supreme Court ordered it to do so. The NAACP took a similar approach in Sweattv. Painter (1949), a Texas case where the Court abolished a separate black law school on the basis that it was inferior to the state's white law school. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma the Court went further, agreeing with the NAACP that the University of Oklahoma graduate school was acting illegally in segregating a black student within the classroom (by use of a curtain which prevented him from being seen), as well as isolating him in the cafeteria and library. "Such restrictions," ruled the Court, "impair and inhibit his ability to study, engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession." McLaurin set the precedent for the ground-breaking Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling of 1954. Holding that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," the Court finally reversed Plessy v. Ferguson. The long NAACP struggle to abolish the legal foundation of Jim Crow had been won.

Sources:

Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, third edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), submitted on the briefs 7 November 1882, argued 29 March 1883, decided 15 October 1883 by vote of 8 to 1; Bradley for Court, Harlan in dissent. Few decisions better illustrate the Supreme Court's early inclination to interpret narrowly the Civil War Amendments than the Civil Rights Cases. There the Court declared unconstitutional provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement. The decision curtailed federal efforts to protect African‐Americans from private discrimination and cast constitutional doubts on Congress's ability to legislate in the area of Civil Rights, doubts that were not completely resolved until enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Civil Rights Cases presented two conflicting views of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The conservative view saw the amendments in narrow terms: the Thirteenth Amendment simply abolished slavery; the Fourteenth granted the freed people citizenship and a measure of relief from state discrimination. The more radical view believed the amendments helped secure to the freed people and others all rights of free people in Anglo‐American legal culture. Moreover, the amendments gave the national government authority to protect citizens against both state and private deprivations of rights.

Justice Joseph P. Bradley's majority opinion rejected the more radical interpretation of the new amendments. He held that the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibited state abridgement of individual rights. In Bradley's view the 1875 Civil Rights Act was an impermissible attempt by Congress to create a municipal code regulating the private conduct of individuals in the area of racial discrimination. He asserted in dicta that even private interference with such rights as voting, jury service, or appearing as witnesses in state court were not within the province of Congress to control. An individual faced with such interference had to look to state government for relief. Bradley also rejected the contention that the Thirteenth Amendment allowed Congress to pass the 1875 legislation, declaring that denial of access to public accommodations did not constitute a badge or incident of slavery. In his view such a broad construction of the Thirteenth Amendment would make the freed person “the special favorite of the laws.”

In his dissent, Southerner and former slave‐holder Justice John Marshall Harlan rejected the majority's narrow construction of the Civil War Amendments. Asserting that the decision rested on grounds that were “narrow and artificial,” Harlan argued that the Thirteenth Amendment gave Congress broad powers to legislate to insure the rights of freed people (p. 26). He contended that the freedom conferred by the Thirteenth Amendment went beyond the simple absence of bondage. It encompassed freedom from the incidents of slavery, including all “badges of slavery” (p. 35).

Along with the decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), which effectively stripped the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause of significant meaning, and U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), which upheld congressional efforts to protect blacks and others against private deprivations of constitutional rights, the Civil Rights Cases fashioned a Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence considerably less protective of individual rights than many of its framers had envisioned. The extent to which the Court's narrow reading of Fourteenth Amendment protections helped usher in and foster the era of extensive segregation in southern and other states is open to debate. But the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases largely mandated the withdrawal of the federal government from civil rights enforcement. That withdrawal would not be reversed until after World War II.

In 1964 Congress again passed legislation prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. Ironically the Bradley opinion, which expressly did not rule on whether or not the Constitution's Commerce Clause provided a basis for congressional legislation in this area, played a role in the drafting of the 1964 statute (see Commerce Power). The 1964 act's public accommodations provision was based on the Commerce Clause.

See also Race and Racism.

Bibliography

Eugene Gressman , The Unhappy History of Civil Rights Legislation, Michigan Law Review 50 (1952): 1323–1358.

Robert J. Cottrol

CIVIL RIGHTS CASES

A landmark decision, which was a consolidation of several cases brought before thesupreme court of the united statesin 1883 that declared thecivil rights actof 1875 (18 Stat. 336) unconstitutional and ultimately led to the enactment of state laws, such asjim crow laws, which codified what had previously been individual adherence to the practice of racialsegregation. The cases were United States v. Stanley, United States v. Ryan, United States v. Nichols, and United States v. Singleton, 109 U.S. 3, 3 S. Ct. 18, 27 L. Ed. 835.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was passed by Congress in the post-Civil War era in response to the refusal of many whites to afford newly freed slaves equal treatment with whites under federal law. The act mandated that owners of public facilities, such as inns, restaurants, railroads, and other carriers, not discriminate against blacks who sought access to, or service from, them on the basis of their race. Anyone who violated the law was subject to criminal prosecution.

Scores of prosecutions ensued and six cases reached the Supreme Court. The fact patterns of the cases were comparable in that they all were predicated upon the failure of blacks to be treated the same as whites in various establishments such as restaurants, theaters, railroads, and even the New York City Grand Opera House.

The Court consolidated these cases by deciding that the crucial issue in each was whether the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was constitutional, to which it answered "no." In an 8–1 decision, Justice joseph bradley reasoned that neither the Thirteenth nor Fourteenth Amendments empowered Congress to safeguard blacks against the actions of private individuals. To decide otherwise would afford blacks a special status under the law that whites did not enjoy. The Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition of slavery had no application to discrimination in the area of public accommodations. Neither did the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment apply to prohibit racial segregation, since it was as the result of conduct by private individuals, not state law or action, that blacks were suffering.

The only dissenting justice was john marshall harlan, who criticized the majority opinion on a number of grounds, including that the exclusion of blacks from state licensed facilities for no other reason than their race did bring into application both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and that Congress had the authority pursuant to the commerce clause to legislate in those cases involving railroads.

The decision in the Civil Rights Cases severely restricted the power of the federal government to guarantee equal status under the law to blacks. State officials in the South took advantage of the eclipsed role of Congress in the prohibition of racial discrimination and proceeded to embody individual practices of racial segregation into laws that legalized the treatment of blacks as second-class citizens for another seventy years.

cross-references

Civil Rights; Civil Rights Acts; "Civil Rights Cases" (Appendix, Primary Document).

Civil Rights Cases (1883).In the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations. The decision would severely curtail Congressional efforts to protect African Americans from private discrimination until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Justice Joseph P. Bradley's majority opinion represented a conservative view of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. In this view the Thirteenth Amendment simply abolished slavery while the Fourteenth granted former slaves citizenship and relief only from state abridgement of individual rights, not from other forms of discrimination. In writing for the majority, Bradley characterized the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as an impermissible attempt by Congress to create a municipal code regulating the private conduct of individuals in the area of racial discrimination. Even private interference with such rights as voting, jury service, or appearing as witnesses in state court, he further asserted, lay outside Congress's power to control. An individual faced with such interference had to look to state government for relief. Bradley also rejected the contention that the Thirteenth Amendment allowed Congress to pass the 1875 legislation, declaring that denial of access to public accommodations did not constitute a badge or incident of slavery. Such a broad construction, he argued, would make blacks “the special favorite of the laws.”

In his dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave holder, declared that the decision rested on “narrow and artificial” grounds. Harlan argued that the Thirteenth Amendment gave Congress broad powers to legislate to insure the rights of former slaves. The freedom conferred by that amendment, he contended, went beyond the simple absence of bondage: it encompassed freedom from all “badges of slavery.”

Along with the Supreme Court's earlier decisions in the Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank cases (1873 and 1876), the Civil Rights Cases sharply limited the Fourteenth Amendment as a vehicle for protecting the newly freed black population and, many scholars believe, helped to usher in the era of Jim Crow.
See also Civil Rights; Civil Rights Legislation; Civil Rights Movement; Reconstruction; Segregation, Racial; Suffrage.

Bibliography

Eugene Gressman , The Unhappy History of Civil Rights Legislation, Michigan Law Review 50 (1952): 1323, 1329–30.

Robert J. Cottrol