Under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 was reënacted[6] in 1870, with the addition that it extended to all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States, and that it provided that all persons should be subject to like taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind.
The same year, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, which declared that the right of citizens of the United States to vote should not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any States on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The Civil Rights Bill[7] of 1875, the most sweeping of all such legislation by Congress, declared that all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States should be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theatres, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude. It also provided that jurors should not be excluded on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
An enumeration of these Federal statutes and constitutional amendments has been made in order to show the efforts of Congress to secure to the Negro every civil and political right of a full-fledged citizen of the United States. Later they will be discussed in detail. By the Civil Rights Bill of 1875, Congress apparently intended to secure not only equal but identical accommodations in all public places for Negroes and Caucasians. If one looks only upon the surface of these several legislative enactments, it would seem impossible to have a race distinction recognized by law which did not violate some Federal statute or the Federal Constitution. But the succeeding pages will show that, under the shadow of the statutes and the Constitution, the legislatures and courts of the States have built up a mass of race distinctions which the Federal courts and Congress, even if so inclined, are impotent to attack.
1 Hen. 146, quoted in Hurd’s “Law of Freedom and Bondage,” I, p. 229.
“I had not been long engaged in the study of the race problem when I found myself face to face with a curious and seemingly absurd question: ‘What is a Negro?’” said Mr. Baker.[8]