What role did the Supreme Court play in the collapse of Reconstruction?

0:05The Supreme Court was complicitous, let's put it that way, in the retreat from reconstruction, a series of Supreme Court decisions starting with the Slaughterhouse case, 1873 all the way into the 20th century. Briefly, the Slaughter-House case, the first case to actually adjudicate the meaning of the fourteenth Amendment was a kind of strange case because it was an effort to overturn a law passed by the biracial legislature of Louisiana. As a public health measure, they had required butchers, people slaughtering animals, which there were big slaughterhouses in New Orleans, which were filling Mississippi River with all sorts of junk. It was very unhealthy. But so the Legislature said, from now on, there's going to be one monopoly slaughterhouse up river or away from where it is now, and people have to bring their cattle there to be slaughtered,

1:03not just on the banks of the river. White butchers claimed that they were being deprived of their livelihood, that the right to pursue free labor was part of the abolition of slavery and part of the privileges and immunities of citizens that the 14th Amendment was meant to protect. The Supreme Court said, no, actually, that's not the case. First of all, the 14th Amendment is really for black people, not a bunch of white butchers. Second of all, the basic rights of citizens are still protected by the states, not the federal government. Basically, they restricted the 14th Amendment to applying to only a handful of basic rights, like the right to go to Washington to petition the government or even the right to be protected on the high seas from pirates. There weren't that many pirates trying to attack former slaves at this time.

1:58But the basic rights of citizens, they said, still are state matters. Federal enforcement was weakened by the federal interpretation of the 14th Amendment was weakened by the Slaughterhouse decision. The other cases, U. S. V. Cruikshank, that arose from the Colfax massacre, one of the most violent altercations in reconstruction where armed whites massacred over 100 members of a black militia in Colfax, Louisiana.

2:32A few of them were indicted in federal court under the Enforcement Act. They had committed these murders in order to deprive people of their constitutional rights. Only a handful of murderers were convicted. Supreme Court overturned their convictions, partly on a technical ground that there was something wrong with the indictment. But more importantly, they said, again, it's really up to the states to prosecute murder, violent crime.

3:02It's not the federal responsibility to maintain law and order, so to speak, in the South. This seriously impeded further federal efforts to protect the basic rights and livelihood of former slaves in the South. It made it much more difficult for the federal government to stop prosecuting lynchings and things like that. The civil rights cases of 1883, one of the last reconstruction legislation was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned racial discrimination in a series of public venues like theaters and hotels and transportation. These were private enterprises. This was not the government discriminating. And that's what the Supreme Court said that the 14th Amendment only applies to governmental action or what they call state action. It does not apply to discrimination by private individuals against other private individuals.

4:07If a hotel owner doesn't want to have black clientele, that's his business it's not the government operating. African Americans and many others were very outraged by this decision because they said, "This kind of discrimination places a stigma on black citizens". It means that they are unworthy to associate with other Americans. That itself is a legacy of slavery. You should think about this, not just in terms of the 14th Amendment, but the 13th Amendment. That banning such discrimination is part of the ending of slavery, which is still an ongoing process. But the court did not take that view. As I say, so this kind of private discrimination it was only in 1964, long later that in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress again, prohibited discrimination by businesses, by public accommodations, etc.

5:05Now how did they do that? It the Supreme Court had said you can't do it. What happened was a different Supreme Court, 100 years later, almost, said, actually, Congress can do this, but under the interstate commerce clause, it's not a 14th Amendment matter. It's not a 13th Amendment matter. Discrimination like this interferes with interstate commerce. Therefore, Congress has the right to abolish it because the original Constitution gives Congress control over interstate commerce. It took 80 years, more or less to get back to where Congress had left off in the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and then overturned by the civil rights cases.