The
Civil Rights Act of 1875 passed Congress in the waning days of
Reconstruction on March 1, 1875. The statute, intended to benefit
the recently freed African-American population, banned racial
discrimination in public accommodations- hotels, public conveyances
and places of public amusement. Restaurants were not included,
except for those located within hotels or inns.
The original proposal had also
included public school desegregation, but that section was stricken
at the last moment. Then the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 declared
the entire 1875 law unconstitutional. Not until 1964 would racial
equality in public accommodations once again become law.
For those readers not baptized
in this particular historical church, it may be useful to remember
that in the 1860s and 1870s the Republican Party was the progressive
force, the Democrats the more conservative one. Republicans were
more willing to use governmental power to advance causes such
as civil rights and civil service reform; Democrats were the
party of laissez-faire.
There is always a temptation to
claim too much for one's research. That said, we think that our
work changes a direction in the historiography of Reconstruction.
Our research, based on an array of primary materials, indeed
challenges the current core interpretation of that most significant
period in American history.
The prevailing word on the historiographical street, the conventional
interpretation of Reconstruction, holds that Reconstruction was
a failure, because the Republicans provided insufficient guarantees
for the freed people. That viewpoint holds that Republicans who
claimed to believe in justice for a people oppressed for centuries,
and who believed in liberty and equality-and who had the votes-nonetheless
abandoned their ideology and left the newly freed former slaves
to the tender mercies of the white South.
One variety of this argument contends
that Congressional Republicans limited their programs to mild
and less controversial enactments related to civil and legal
equality, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, for example, the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, and analogous state-based
programs. But because Republicans weakened in their commitment
to the freed people, or lacked the moral determination to pursue
social or economic programs on their behalf, they declined to
take on the tough issues. They enacted no public school integration
and no land reform for freedmen; no forty acres with or without
a mule.
Alternatively, the American public
became distracted from Reconstruction efforts because of new
issues, such as the rise of corporate power, a huge economic
depression, westward expansion and corruption in government.
Congressional Republicans, we are told, reflected that distraction.
Or further, even that many Republicans, particularly Liberal
Republicans, had already achieved their Reconstruction objectives
with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. They had enacted
the measures by which African Americans could protect themselves.
It was time to let them do it.
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