Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1883

Civil Rights Cases

109 U.S. 3 | 3 S. Ct. 18 | 27 L. Ed. 835 | 1883 U.S. LEXIS 928

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Takeaway

In short, this case invalidated the public-accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by holding that the Fourteenth Amendment reaches state action, not private discrimination, and that such discrimination was not a Thirteenth Amendment badge of slavery.

Background

These consolidated cases tested §§ 1 and 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The Act guaranteed equal access, without race discrimination, to inns, public conveyances, theaters, and other places of public amusement, and imposed civil and criminal penalties on persons who denied that access.

The cases arose from alleged refusals of accommodations to Black citizens by proprietors or operators of public establishments, including an inn, theaters, and a railroad. Several criminal prosecutions came to the Court on certificates of division from federal circuit courts; Robinson and his wife brought a civil action against the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. Because every case depended on the validity of the Act's first two sections, the Court addressed their constitutionality. It affirmed the judgments in Ryan and Robinson and held the challenged provisions unconstitutional as applied within the states.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Congress could prohibit and punish private racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Holding

No. The Fourteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to enact remedial legislation against unconstitutional state action, not a general federal code governing purely private conduct.

Reasoning

The Fourteenth Amendment is phrased as a prohibition on the states: no state may abridge privileges or immunities, deny due process, or deny equal protection. Its enforcement clause therefore empowers Congress to enforce those prohibitions against state laws, state officials, and other action attributable to the state.

Congress may enact corrective legislation designed to counteract unconstitutional state laws or state action. The Court contrasted the challenged Act with legislation that penalized a state officer for excluding Black citizens from juries, because jury selection by a state officer is state action, and with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which targeted deprivations committed under color of state law, ordinance, regulation, or custom.

Sections 1 and 2 of the 1875 Act did not depend on any discriminatory state law, policy, custom, or official act. Instead, they directly regulated individual proprietors and imposed federal penalties for private refusals of service, even in states whose laws fully protected equal civil rights.

Treating the enforcement power as authority for direct regulation of all private rights would, in the Court's view, displace the states' ordinary authority over local civil and criminal law. Private misconduct, without state sanction or authority, was ordinarily a private wrong for which state law supplied the remedy; it was not itself a Fourteenth Amendment violation.

Issue #2

Whether Congress could prohibit this private discrimination as a badge or incident of slavery under § 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Holding

No. Although Congress may directly legislate to eradicate slavery and its badges and incidents, a private refusal of admission to an inn, conveyance, or theater was not, in the Court's view, slavery, involuntary servitude, or a badge of either.

Reasoning

The Thirteenth Amendment differs from the Fourteenth because it absolutely abolishes slavery rather than merely prohibiting state action. For that reason, Congress may enact direct and primary legislation against private conduct when necessary to eliminate slavery and its incidents.

The Court understood the incidents of slavery to include the core legal disabilities of bondage: compelled labor for a master, restraints on movement, inability to own property or make contracts, exclusion from courts, and similar legal subordination. It regarded the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which protected contracting, property, and court-access rights, as directed to such fundamental elements of civil freedom.

A private proprietor's race-based refusal to provide accommodations, however wrongful, did not impose compulsory service or restore a condition of legal subjection. The Court treated it as an ordinary civil injury rather than a badge of slavery, unless state law itself authorized or enforced the discrimination.

The Court emphasized that its ruling concerned cases arising within states. It did not decide whether Congress could regulate discrimination in the District of Columbia or territories, where Congress has broader legislative power, or whether Congress could regulate interstate public conveyances through its commerce power.

Dissents

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan argued that the majority read the Reconstruction Amendments too narrowly and defeated their central purpose: securing real freedom and equal citizenship for the formerly enslaved. In his view, constitutional provisions adopted to protect liberty should be read in light of the historical condition they were designed to change, not confined by a formal distinction between public and private action.

He maintained that the Thirteenth Amendment did more than end formal ownership of persons. It established universal civil freedom and empowered Congress to remove the badges and incidents of slavery. Race discrimination against Black citizens in fundamental civil rights, he argued, perpetuated the stigma and practical subordination that slavery had created.

Harlan distinguished purely social relations from legal rights. The Act did not require personal association or social intimacy; it required equal treatment in legally regulated public accommodations. Railroads and other common carriers performed public functions, inns owed duties to the traveling public at common law, and licensed places of public amusement operated through authority granted by the public.

He also rejected the majority's Fourteenth Amendment analysis. The Amendment affirmatively created national and state citizenship for formerly enslaved persons and, in his view, secured their exemption from race discrimination in civil rights. Because Congress received express power to enforce all provisions of the Amendment, it could use direct legislation to protect those nationally created rights.

Even if state action were required, Harlan would have found it in the conduct of entities exercising public or quasi-public powers under state authority. A railroad, innkeeper, or licensed amusement business could not use a state-conferred public function to deny citizens equal legal rights on racial grounds without implicating the state.

Finally, Harlan argued that the railroad case independently implicated interstate commerce. The passenger held a ticket for travel from Tennessee to Virginia, and Congress could regulate interstate carriers to require equal treatment of passengers. He warned that the majority's decision left the civil freedom promised by the Reconstruction Amendments vulnerable to discrimination by corporations and individuals wielding public power.