What are the earliest examples of civil rights legislation in the U.S.?
After Congress passed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, it enacted a civil rights act in 1866 that made Blacks citizens and supposedly gave them the rights to make contracts and get married, among other things. It was passed because southerners had immediately started a backlash against emancipation, issuing a series of regulations called Black Codes. This put Blacks back in a position of peonage, and tied them to employers—in many cases the same people as when they were slaves. White folks tried to apprentice ex-slave people’s children and pretend there was some agreement to do it, so as to re-enslave them.
A lot of the northerners, the Unionists, were very upset, which is why they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. However, there was a huge debate in Congress about whether that law could in fact make Blacks citizens without the Constitution being changed, since the Dred Scott Decision stated that anybody who had come to the U.S. as a slave could never be a citizen; and about whether the act could be repealed if the white Confederates ever took over the national government. So the Unionists moved to enact the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship without regard to previous conditions, servitude, et cetera. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 is still on the books.
The Reconstruction era saw the rise of several different factions. Can you describe the political atmosphere of the time?
Ex-Confederates immediately started trying to overthrow Reconstruction legislation. This is where the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellias and other white supremacist organizations come into play. By 1869, Reconstruction was actually over everywhere except Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where it did not end until 1877. Everywhere else, the white supremacists pretty much took over.
In Congress, people like Senator Charles Sumner, from Massachusetts, and Representative Thaddeus Stevens, from Pennsylvania, continued to try to warrant maximum rights for Blacks and to protect them. The Justice Department in Washington tried to enforce punishing the white supremacists, but to no avail. In most cases, even when they arrested somebody or prosecuted them, the judge and jury would not convict them. It’s much like today when we see police officers unnecessarily kill Black people and you can't get them prosecuted. Today we can get civil damages in these cases, but at that time, basically nothing would happen
