This Date in History - October 15, 1883 - A Dark Day in US Race Relations

On October 15,1883  the U.S. Supreme Court would have made many of the current justices on the Supreme Court proud, when the Court struck down part of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 The long title of the Act included: An act to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights.. The result of the court's action allowed for individuals and corporations to discriminate based on race. From Wikipedia:

 The Civil Rights Act of 1875 (18 Stat. 335-337),^[2] sometimes called Enforcement Act or Force Act, was a United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction Era that guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation, and prohibited exclusion from jury service.

 The other name for the the other name for the bill was "SumnerLangstonCare" (not really) The bill was drafted by though by Senator Charles Sumner, a dominant Radical Republican in the Senate, with the assistance of John Mercer Langston, a prominent African American who established the law department at Howard University. The bill was proposed by Senator Sumner and co-sponsored by representative Benjamin F. Butler, both, Republicans from Massachusetts, in the 43rd Congress of the United States in 1870. The act was finally passed by Congress in February 1875 and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1875.      Immediately, the ancestors of the Koch Brothers and many of the talking heads currently employed by FOX News.(I think the group included Hannity's and Limbaugh's either 2nd or 3rd great-grandfathers), all began to moan how this legislation would hurt the little businessman and kill jobs, (just kidding again, although I don't know for sure!} Finally, the Supreme Court made Thomas Jefferson roll over in his grave when the SCOTUS....

.... in a nearly unanimous decision declared the act unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) with Justice John Marshall Harlan providing the lone dissent. The Court held the Equal Protection Clause within the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits discrimination by the state, but it does not give the federal government the power to prohibit discrimination by private individuals.^[5] The Court also held that the Thirteenth Amendment was meant to eliminate "the badge of slavery," but not to prohibit racial discrimination in public accommodations. Read Full Article 

The courts decision paved the way for the Jim Crow laws in the south. It would be another 74 years until the next civil rights bill was signed into law, the Civil Rights Act of 1957

Ah, the Court's decision is just another low point in the history of the "land of the free's" race relations.

But  lets find out a little more about John Mercer Langston who was the co-author of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 with Charles Sumner.... From Wikipedia.....

John Mercer Langston (December 14, 1829 – November 15, 1897) was an American abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist and politician. He was the first dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University, a historically black college.   Born a free black in Virginia to a former slave mother of mixed-race and an English planter father, in 1888 Langston was elected to the U.S. Congress as the first representative of color from Virginia. The first Black Congressman, Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina, had been elected in 1870 during the Reconstruction era.   In the Jim Crow era of the later nineteenth century, Langston was one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South before the former Confederate states passed constitutions and electoral rules that essentially eliminated the black vote. After that, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1973, after the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to enforce constitutional rights. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered district lines that southern Democratic State legislatures had drawn to keep blacks from voting. Read More

Not an African-American elected to Congress in almost a hundred years! I'm so proud! (just kidding!)
And yes it was members of the Democratic State legislatures that passed those laws to keep blacks from voting way back when, but remember it was the Republicans that won the war!! It wasn't until Nixon's southern strategy that the south was painted Republican red!!