what did the civil rights act of 1875 say
Civil Rights Act of 1875 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 in response to civil rights violations to African Americans, "to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights", giving them equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation, and to prohibit exclusion from jury service. The bill was passed by the 43rd United States Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1875. The law was generally opposed by public opinion, but blacks did favor it. It was not effectively enforced and historian William Gillette says the passage of the law was an "insignificant victory."[3] Eight years later, the Supreme Court ruled in Civil Rights Cases (1883) that the public accommodation sections of the act were unconstitutional, saying Congress was not afforded control over private persons or corporations.
Civil Rights Act of 1866 Senator Lyman Trumbull was the Senate sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and he argued that Congress had power to enact it in order to eliminate a discriminatory "badge of servitude" prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment.[13] Representative John Bingham, principal author of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, was one of several Republicans who believed (prior to that Amendment) that Congress lacked power to pass the 1866 Act.[14] In the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately adopted Trumbull's Thirteenth Amendment rationale for congressional power to ban racial discrimination by states and by private parties, in view of the fact that the Thirteenth Amendment does not require a state actor.[13]