Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

The delegates from the Louisville convention had hardly returned home when the U.S. Supreme Court landed a bombshell in the lap of black America. A group of civil rights cases had been pending before the Supreme Court throughout the year, including one in Kansas and another in Missouri of blacks denied accommodations at inns, a case from California of rejection from a theater, and a variety of instances of exclusion from first-class railway cars. The ruling in United States v. Stanley (also known as the civil rights cases) held that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to states; a person wronged by racial discrimination, therefore, could look for redress only from state laws and courts. In effect, the decision meant that the discriminatory acts of private persons were beyond the safeguards of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal jurisdiction. In relegating enforcement of civil rights laws only to state authority, the court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, rendering the entire meaning and intent of the Civil War Constitutional Amendments “sacrificed,” as the lone dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, put it. The door was now open for the eventual passage of Jim Crow laws across the South.