In the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that Congress had no power to prohibit racial discrimination by private businesses, striking down the public-accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The decision, reported at 109 U.S. 3 and handed down on October 15, 1883, bundled five disputes involving hotels, theaters, and a railroad that had refused to serve Black patrons. Justice Joseph P. Bradley’s majority opinion established what became known as the state action doctrine: the Fourteenth Amendment restrained governments, not private citizens or companies. The practical result was that Black Americans lost federal protection against everyday discrimination and would not regain it for eighty-one years.1Legal Information Institute. 109 US 3 The Civil Rights Cases
What the 1875 Act Had Guaranteed
To understand what the Court took away, you need to know what Congress had put in place eight years earlier. Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed all people “the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement,” regardless of race or prior enslavement. Section 2 backed the guarantee with real penalties: a $500 civil award to any victim, plus criminal misdemeanor charges carrying fines of $500 to $1,000 or imprisonment of 30 days to one year.2U.S. Senate. Landmark Legislation: Civil Rights Act of 1875
The Act was Congress’s most direct attempt to use the Reconstruction Amendments to reach private conduct. Its sponsors argued that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments empowered the federal government to dismantle not just slavery itself but the social barriers slavery had produced. Opponents argued the Constitution gave Congress authority over states, not over who a hotel owner had to serve. That disagreement is what the Court set out to resolve.
The Five Cases the Court Consolidated
The five cases came from across the country, and the pattern mattered as much as any single set of facts. Two involved hotels: United States v. Stanley from Kansas and United States v. Nichols from Missouri, both arising from refusals to accommodate Black guests. Two involved theaters: United States v. Ryan, charging a San Francisco operator with denying a Black patron a seat in the dress circle of Maguire’s Theatre, and United States v. Singleton, involving the Grand Opera House in New York. The fifth, Robinson v. Memphis & Charleston Railroad Co., arose when a conductor barred Mrs. Robinson from the ladies’ car because she was Black.1Legal Information Institute. 109 US 3 The Civil Rights Cases
By deciding them together, the Court signaled that its ruling would settle the constitutional question for every kind of public accommodation the 1875 Act covered.
The State Action Doctrine and Why the Act Fell
Justice Bradley’s majority opinion rejected both of the federal government’s constitutional arguments.
The Fourteenth Amendment argument failed first. Bradley wrote that the amendment was “prohibitory” in character: it told states what they could not do. It did not give Congress a general license to write rules governing how private citizens treated one another. If a business owner refused to serve someone, that was a private wrong for state law to address, not a constitutional violation the federal government could punish.1Legal Information Institute. 109 US 3 The Civil Rights Cases
The Thirteenth Amendment argument failed next. The government had contended that the amendment let Congress destroy the “badges and incidents of slavery,” meaning the entire apparatus of legal and social subordination slavery had created. Bradley acknowledged the concept but defined those badges narrowly, limiting them to forced labor, restrictions on movement, inability to own property or make contracts, and legal incapacity to testify. Being denied a theater seat or a hotel room, the Court concluded, “imposes no badge of slavery or involuntary servitude upon the party.” It was an ordinary civil injury.3Constitution Annotated. Defining Badges and Incidents of Slavery
Both Sections 1 and 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 fell. The right of equal access, the $500 civil penalty, the criminal fines, and the possible jail time all disappeared in a single ruling.2U.S. Senate. Landmark Legislation: Civil Rights Act of 1875 Victims of discrimination were told to seek relief in state courts, which in much of the country were controlled by the same political establishment that tolerated segregation.
Justice Harlan’s Dissent
Justice John Marshall Harlan stood alone, and his dissent has become one of the most cited in Supreme Court history because later law adopted much of what he said.
On the Thirteenth Amendment, Harlan argued that racial exclusion from public life was precisely the kind of servitude the amendment targeted. Discrimination “practised by corporations and individuals in the exercise of their public or quasi-public functions,” he wrote, “is a badge of servitude the imposition of which Congress may prevent.”4Justia. Jones v Alfred H Mayer Co, 392 US 409 (1968)
He also advanced what scholars later called the public function theory. Railroads, inns, and theaters were not purely private, he argued. They served the general public, operated under government-granted charters and licenses, and performed functions essentially governmental in character. Because these businesses depended on the state for their authority to operate, they should be bound by the same constitutional obligations as the state itself.5Justia. Civil Rights Cases, 109 US 3 (1883)
Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson
With the 1875 Act dismantled, racial discrimination in housing, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and employment became increasingly entrenched. State legislatures, especially in the South, began passing laws mandating racial separation in public spaces. These Jim Crow statutes built on the foundation the Court had laid: if the federal government could not regulate private discrimination, and the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to state action, states could use their own power to require segregation rather than merely tolerate it.
The logic reached its endpoint thirteen years later. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” on railroads. The majority explicitly cited the Civil Rights Cases, repeating the 1883 language that a private refusal of service “cannot be justly regarded as imposing any badge of slavery or servitude upon the applicant.”6National Archives. Plessy v Ferguson (1896) The “separate but equal” doctrine would remain the law until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Harlan dissented in Plessy as well, the lone voice for a second time.
How the State Action Doctrine Eroded
The wall Bradley erected in 1883 did not stay rigid. The Court gradually recognized situations where nominally private conduct carried enough government involvement to trigger constitutional protections.
In Marsh v. Alabama (1946), the Court held that when a private corporation owned an entire town and operated it like a municipality, residents remained “free citizens of their State and country” entitled to First and Fourteenth Amendment protections. A private owner performing a government function could not shed the Constitution.7Justia. Marsh v Alabama, 326 US 501 (1946)
Two years later, in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Court held that while homeowners could privately agree not to sell property to Black buyers, a state court’s enforcement of such a covenant was itself state action under the Fourteenth Amendment. The moment a judge ordered enforcement, the “full coercive power of government” was being used to deny property rights on the basis of race.8Justia. Shelley v Kraemer, 334 US 1 (1948)
Then in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968), the Court took the step Harlan had urged eighty-five years earlier. It held that Congress had power under the Thirteenth Amendment to “rationally determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation.” Private racial discrimination in the sale of property was exactly the kind of badge Congress could prohibit. The broad reading of the Thirteenth Amendment that the 1883 majority had rejected was finally the law.4Justia. Jones v Alfred H Mayer Co, 392 US 409 (1968)
How Congress Finally Got Around the 1883 Ruling
Congress did not try to relitigate the Fourteenth Amendment argument the Court had rejected. It found a different constitutional route. Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned racial discrimination in public accommodations, but it rested on the Commerce Clause rather than the Reconstruction Amendments. If racial discrimination disrupted interstate commerce, Congress could regulate it the same way it regulated any other commercial activity that crossed state lines.9Constitution Annotated. Civil Rights and Commerce Clause
The Court unanimously upheld the approach in Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964). The motel sat near two interstate highways in Atlanta, drew most of its guests from out of state, and openly refused Black travelers. The Court found Congress justified in removing the “disruptive effect” racial discrimination had on interstate travel and commerce. It did not matter that Congress also acted on moral grounds; the Commerce Clause gave Congress power to regulate local businesses whose operations had “a substantial and harmful effect upon” interstate commerce.10Justia. Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc v United States, 379 US 241 (1964)
The coverage was broad. Hotels and motels serving transient guests were included. Restaurants qualified if they served interstate travelers or if a substantial portion of the food they served had moved through interstate commerce. The state action doctrine was simply irrelevant to the new statute, because Congress was no longer claiming the Fourteenth Amendment let it regulate private conduct. It was exercising its long-recognized power over commerce, and the 1883 precedent had nothing to say about that.9Constitution Annotated. Civil Rights and Commerce Clause
The protections Congress had first tried to create in 1875 finally became enforceable eighty-nine years later, built on a constitutional foundation the Court could not knock down. The state action doctrine still exists, and it still limits the Fourteenth Amendment’s reach to government conduct. But for the practical question the 1883 plaintiffs cared about, whether a hotel or a railroad or a theater could turn you away because of your race, the answer became no.