Frederick Douglass called the Supreme Court’s decision on the 1883 Civil Rights Cases “a concession to race pride, selfishness and meanness that will be received with joy by every upholder of caste in the land”. These cases all involved black patrons denied service at hotels, theaters and train cars suing on the grounds that racial discrimination by such institutions was prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
In Justice Joseph P. Bradley’s majority opinion, he argued that this act, which allowed Congress to forbid racial discrimination by businesses of a private nature, was unconstitutional, as the Fourteenth Amendment only endowed states with this power. Although Bradley was known for his support of federal supremacy during his time at the bar, he was willing to reverse these views in the Civil Rights Cases in order to keep blacks in a position of social and legal inferiority.
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered the famous dissenting opinion, in which he argued that the court was erroneous to decide that Congress did not have the power under the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure United States citizens of all races equal rights to “the accommodations and facilities of inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement”.
His opinion’s lack of support from other justices and the criticism it received for too widely stretching the language of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments was indicative of the Supreme Court majority’s motives to construe the language of the Constitution in favor of the legality of private racial discrimination. The 8-1 majority’s narrow interpretation of these amendments and disregard of their purpose of securing blacks’ freedom in order to nullify the Civil Rights Act of 1875, as well as their opposition to Harlan’s issenting opinion reflected the Supreme Court’s partiality to the public sentiment of whites at the time over the protection of the rights of all American citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to all people “born or naturalized” in the United States and forbade states from denying anybody “within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” was proposed by Congress in 1866.
The legislators who suggested this amendment were mainly Radical Republicans who had been fighting for control over Reconstruction with Andrew Johnson, who they feared would relinquish power over the future of former slaves to white southerners. The amendment was passed in 1868 after excluding southern legislatures from voting in order to achieve the necessary two-thirds support of Congress. Most of its public support stemmed from northerners who were frustrated with the South’s refusal to acknowledge the newfound rights of black citizens.
However, by the early 1870s, a few years after the amendment’s ratification, many northern whites believed they had done their part in helping black Americans and fervor about Reconstruction and equality dissipated. Newspapers of the time conveyed this fading excitement. The Chicago Tribune asked, “Is it not time for the colored race to stop playing baby? The whites of America have done nobly in outgrowing the old prejudices against them,” displaying the apathy with which the north treated Reconstruction.
With Republican power over the South fading and the public losing interest in black rights, white supremacy and black disenfranchisement of the Democratic party was able to regain control in all but two former Confederate States. White southerners were threatened by the revolutionary changes of Reconstruction, specifically the spike of black voters after the 14th amendment was passed, and some even resorted to violent tactics to maintain blacks’ inferior position in society.
Despite the radical growth of black rights after the Civil War, racist public sentiments and ambivalence about Reconstruction hindered the process of integrating blacks into American society. Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, who voiced the majority opinion in the Civil Rights Cases, was known to be one of the most innovative and meticulous justices of his time in his beliefs about the supremacy of federal government and support of American commercialism. However, most of his opinions about the rights of minorities during his time at the bar were in line with racist public sentiments.
His career as a Supreme Court justice, which spanned from 1870 to 1892, was originally characterized by his consistent assertion of the sovereignty of the federal government and his broad interpretations of the Constitution. During his first few years at the bar, the Slaughterhouse Cases came to the Supreme Court, in which the majority, represented by Justice Samuel Taylor Miller, ruled that the “privileges and immunities” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment were limited to those explicitly stated in the Constitution, but not those guaranteed by specific states.
Bradley vigorously supported Justice Stephen Field’s dissenting opinion, arguing for a broader interpretation of the Amendment’s language and the protection of citizens’ natural rights by Congress. However, after the large defeat in the cases and his recognition of opposing public sentiment, his opinion on the Amendment underwent an extreme reversal. He no longer supported his previous opinion that it was “possible that those who framed the [Fourteenth Amendment] were not themselves aware of the far reaching character of its terms. In his later career as a justice, he advocated for American citizenship, federalism and fulfillment of civil liberties. However, he focused on ensuring these privileges only for the white race, while excluding blacks from this narrative. In later Supreme Court decisions, including the Civil Rights Cases, Bradley took on a different interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, using it to further rights of white Americans but limit those of blacks.
His change in views after Miller’s deliverance of his majority opinion and its roots in public opinion symbolized a shift in his approach to his time at the bar as becoming more reflective of the public’s ambivalence on the progress of black rights and maintenance of blacks on the outskirts of society. In Bradley’s majority opinion in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, he selectively read the language of the amendments and ignored their general purpose as a limiting agent of racial discrimination in order to outlaw the Bill and prevent its goals from being the fulfilled.
He ruled the provisions of Civil Rights Act of 1875 beyond Congress’s constitutional authority based on Fourteenth Amendment, also known as the State Action doctrine. He argued that the doctrine “does not invest Congress with power to legislate upon subjects which are within the domain of State legislation, but to provide modes of relief against State legislation,” later writing that “an inspection of the law shows that it makes no reference whatever to any supposed or apprehended violation of the Fourteenth Amendment on the part of the States”.
This decision is widely criticized for analyzing too literally the language of the amendment and not examining its purpose to ensure blacks equal protection under the law. Throughout Bradley’s opinion, he barely acknowledged the significance of the amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as a means of ensuring all citizens, despite their race, equal rights and treatment by commercial enterprises. He instead “inspected” and searched for loopholes in the language of the Constitution barring Congress from intervening in the actions of the establishments mentioned in the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
For example, one of his most crucial arguments maintained that the act’s conference of power upon Congress to prohibit legislation by local businesses and individuals in society was “repugnant of the Tenth Amendment” because it extended Congress’s powers beyond those directly delegated to it by the Constitution. He also made the very specific point that, according to the Constitution and previous Supreme Court cases, no federal legislation could be passed extending Congressional authority unless it acted as a remedy to a state law passed “adverse to the rights of citizens sought to be protected by” the amendment.
Despite these close readings of the Constitution, Bradley neglected to acknowledge that the commercial enterprises to which the Civil Rights Act referred all depended on State resources in order to operate successfully, but instead relied on the State Action doctrine to enforce antidiscriminatory policies. Through these narrow interpretations of the Constitution’s language, it is clear that Bradley was ignoring the broader meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment in order to prevent the Civil Rights Act from staying alive.
Bradley’s opinion that the federal government should only be able to monitor discrimination perpetrated by States contradicted his ideas about federal sovereignty but instead reflected the desire of most whites at the time to limit the effects of Reconstruction amendments and to keep free blacks in a position of inferiority in society. The Court, including Bradley, was composed of all white men who shared the same sentiment about blacks as the general public: they should be free from slavery but still did not deserve same opportunities and privileges as white Americans.
In order to keep blacks on the outskirts of society, Bradley reversed his opinions about governmental authority and construed the Constitution against the protection of black American citizens in order to be more in line with prevailing white beliefs. Although he believed in ultimate power of federal government over United States citizens as a Supreme Court Justice, he favored the “State Doctrine” in his 1883 decision, which ultimately limited the power of Congress, in order to revoke the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
At the end of his opinion, he said, “There comes a time when, after the emergence of slavery, a person must take on the role of mere citizen and cease being a special favorite of the law. ” In doing so, he made it very clear that his time of defending black rights was over and that he, like whites in both the north and south, relinquished any responsibility he once had to uplift newly freed slaves in American society.
His ruling, by rescinding the powers and spirit of Reconstruction amendments, gave Congress the ability to ignore racial discrimination not overtly perpetrated by states institutions and indicated its prioritization of white privileges over the protection of the liberties of black Americans. Justice Harlan argued as the sole dissenter in the case that the amendments should have been viewed in a broader sense as a means of protecting the rights of blacks and preventing racial discrimination.
He began his dissent by claiming that arguments of majority were based on “grounds entirely too narrow and artificial,” arguing that the purpose of the amendments was ignored in Bradley’s opinion. He followed by stating that all the establishments about which the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was concerned–theaters, inns, and railroads–all relied on the consent and cooperation of the states in order to function properly, and therefore the act could easily be deemed constitutional under the State Action Doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment.
By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment’s spirit of protecting the civil rights of all United States citizens and the pitfalls of Bradley’s argument, Justice Harlan defied racism that plagued the Supreme Court and the white American population. The lack of support within federal court for Harlan’s dissent and the delay of its impact represented the Supreme Court’s role in upholding the beliefs of the majority and the racism that plagued American legislature decades after the Civil War. Harlan’s strong opinion about the equality of blacks was unprecedented in the judicial sphere.
However, the fact that Harlan was the sole dissenter against the majority opinion’s harsh denial of rights to black citizens showed that even the more liberal proponents of black rights on the Supreme Court, like Bradley once was, were most concerned about staying in line with public ideas than expressing support for former slaves. Additionally, the premise of Harlan’s dissent was not accepted as truth until the 1950s and 1960s, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which resembled the act Harlan deemed unconstitutional more than 80 years previously.
It was only at this time in American history, when the majority of the population supported equal opportunity for all, that Harlan’s revolutionary opinion was legally reinforced. The Supreme Court of the United States is revered as one of the country’s most progressive institutions and entrusted to make its most momentous decisions on civil rights. Its justices are known to set transformative social policies with far-reaching implications.
However, the court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases did not conform to its dynamic reputation. Instead, the majority’s declaration of the unconstitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 showed that the mere endowment of black citizens with the basic rights of service from hotels, trains and theaters was too radical for the justices of the time, who were more concerned with appeasing whites who were unhappy with the already large bolstering of black rights after the Civil War.
The court in this case cannot be viewed as a reformist institution but rather a defender of the popular white supremacist beliefs that plagued the nation. The fact that the rights denied to blacks in these cases were not granted to them until almost a century after the Civil War, at a time during which support for black rights was much more universal and organized, confirmed that the court is far less progressive than its reputation suggests.
