Reconstruction and Jim Crow:
The language of the Reconstruction Amendments [XIII, XIV, and XV] empowered Congress with the responsibility for enforcing rights for blacks by passing appropriate laws. The most important of these laws were the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed to blacks the same rights as whites to "make and enforce contracts" and to "purchase, lease, [or] hold property;" the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts), which attempted to deal with the violent efforts of southern whites to terrorize blacks to keep them from voting; and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which barred discrimination in public accommodations. African Americans believed the laws were absolutely necessary to counter the terrorist efforts of those southern whites willing to use violence to intimidate and subjugate blacks.
The federal reconstruction of the South outraged southern whites, producing in response a concerted effort to undermine, if not block. the enforcement of the Reconstruction-era laws and amendments. This resistance ranged from the economic intimidation of blacks to outright acts of terror. Southern blacks, by 1870, had become a class of landless and impoverished agricultural laborers or tenant farmers, known as sharecroppers. This happened principally because federal programs included no meaningful economic aid for the formerly enslaved, economic support that might have helped them achieve self-sufficiency or economic independence. No lands owned by the former Confederates, for example, were redistributed to the formerly enslaved. Nor were long-term economic subsidies provided to prevent blacks from falling into the trap of debt-peonage to southern merchants. As a result, it was almost impossible for the formerly enslaved to stand independent in the face of efforts by Southern whites to intimidate them or to terrorize them into submission.
Two Supreme Court decisions weakened significantly the role of the federal government in enforcing civil rights for African Americans: United States v. Cruikshank (1876) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
United States v. Cruikshank(1876)involved the most brutal slaughter of African Americans by a white mob in American history. At least 100, and possibly as many as 280, black men were killed when they surrendered to a band of whites that had surrounded them in the Colfax Courthouse in Grant Parish, Louisiana. Ninety-eight men were eventually indicted for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act (Enforcement Act) of 1870, which outlawed conspiracies to deny the constitutional rights of citizens. Of these only nine stood trial and only three were convicted, one being William Cruikshank. Because murder was not a federal crime, the defendants were convicted in federal courts of violating rights guaranteed to blacks by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, namely of (1) "the free exercise and enjoyment of the right to peaceably assemble," and (2) "due process of the law." Interfering with the rights of the murdered blacks to vote and assemble was a federal offense under the Enforcement Acts of 1870 in the opinion of the lower courts. The defendants appealed to the Supreme Court on the grounds that as private individuals they had not denied to the murdered blacks any federally protected rights. The Court agreed, ruling unanimously that the right to "due process and equal protection" was a constitutional limit on state actions not on private actions. Moreover, because the indictment did not accuse the defendants of being motivated in their actions by race, there could be no grounds for federal intervention under the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. And finally, the Court held that the right to the freedom of assembly was a privilege of national citizenship (meaning a right protected by federal law) only when it is exercised for the purpose of petitioning Congress, which was not the case in Colfax. Therefore punishment for the Colfax massacre rested with the state of Louisiana not the federal government. This ruling essentially made the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 unenforceable by federal authority; it promoted continued violence by whites against blacks in the Reconstruction South, culminating in an epidemic of public lynching and the torture murder of African Americas that plagued the nation for the next 50 years.
In the landmark segregation case of Plessy v. Ferguson, decided on May 18, 1896, the Court ruled that the Reconstruction-era amendments protected the political equality of blacks but not their social equality. Homer Plessy, a light-skinned, resident of New Orleans with African ancestry challenged the state law segregating blacks from sitting with white passengers on municipal trains. Plessy was arrested because he refused to sit in the "colored only" section of the train, It was the most notorious legal challenge to the wave of Jim Crow laws that swept over the nation in the 1890s, beginning with those in Mississippi aimed at segregating blacks in public facilities that were theoretically "separate-but-equal" to those afforded whites.
The Court ruled against Plessy 7 to 1, contending that the segregation laws in question did not discriminate on racial grounds but merely recognized a distinction between the races. It agreed that state laws could not deprive blacks of political rights, but it held that social rights were not considered fundamental in the same sense as political rights. Moreover, according to the Court, states are constitutionally empowered to protect the public's health, welfare, and morals by passing reasonable laws; segregation laws met this test as a reasonable exercise of the state's police powers. In the opinion of Plessy's lawyer, Albion Tourgee, the decision destroyed for all practical purposes the Fourteenth Amendment and "emasculated the Thirteenth."Plessy put the Supreme Court on the side of segregation and disfranchisement, giving credibility to a flood of Jim Crow laws that engulfed the southern states and many parts of the rest of the nation.
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