United States v. Stanley (1883): Ruling, Dissent, and Legacy

United States v. Stanley was one of five racial discrimination disputes the Supreme Court consolidated and decided together in 1883 under the collective name the Civil Rights Cases. The 8–1 ruling struck down the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and established what is now called the state action doctrine: the Fourteenth Amendment restricts government conduct, not private discrimination. The decision left African Americans without federal protection against discrimination by hotels, railroads, and theaters for more than eighty years.

The Case and Its Four Companions

Stanley was a hotel owner indicted under federal law for refusing to give lodging to a Black traveler. The Supreme Court grouped his case with four others that raised the same constitutional question, and decided them in a single opinion.

United States v. Stanley and United States v. Nichols: both defendants were hotel owners charged with refusing rooms to Black guests.
United States v. Ryan: Ryan was charged with refusing a Black patron admission to the dress circle at Maguire’s Theatre in San Francisco.
United States v. Singleton: Singleton was indicted for denying a person full enjoyment of the Grand Opera House in New York.
Robinson v. Memphis & Charleston Railroad Company: a married couple sued a railroad after a conductor refused to let the wife, a Black woman, ride in the ladies’ car, seeking the $500 penalty the 1875 Act provided for each violation.

Every defendant made the same argument. Congress, they said, had no constitutional authority to tell private business owners whom they had to serve.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875

The statute at the center of Stanley was formally titled “An Act to Protect All Citizens in Their Civil and Legal Rights.” Its preamble declared that “it is essential to just government we recognize the equality of all men before the law.”¹ The law guaranteed all people, regardless of race or prior enslavement, equal access to hotels, railroads, theaters, and similar public-facing businesses.²

Enforcement was serious. A business owner who denied service based on race owed $500 to the person turned away and faced misdemeanor charges carrying a fine of between $500 and $1,000, plus up to a year in jail.² Congress passed the law to push back against the racial segregation forming across the country after the Civil War.

The Court’s Ruling

Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote for the 8–1 majority, and his opinion rested on two conclusions: neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Thirteenth authorized the 1875 Act.³

On the Fourteenth Amendment, Bradley pointed to the text of Section 1, which begins “No State shall” before listing prohibitions on denying equal protection, due process, and the privileges of citizenship.⁴ The word “State,” he wrote, meant what it said. The amendment restricted government action, not private choices. A hotel owner turning someone away committed what Bradley called “simply a private wrong, or a crime of that individual,” not a constitutional violation.³

Bradley also drew a line between “corrective” and “primary” legislation. Congress could pass laws to remedy unconstitutional state action, like striking down a discriminatory state statute. It could not bypass the states and directly regulate how private citizens treated one another. The 1875 Act, in his view, did exactly that, taking “immediate and absolute possession of the subject” rather than responding to any state wrong.⁵

On the Thirteenth Amendment, Bradley concluded that refusing someone a seat in a theater or a room in a hotel “has nothing to do with slavery or involuntary servitude.” Being turned away was unpleasant, but it was not enslavement.⁵ He closed with a remark that drew outrage for generations: at some point, he wrote, a formerly enslaved person “ceases to be the special favorite of the laws” and must fend for himself without federal protection.

The State Action Doctrine

The rule the Court announced in Stanley is the state action doctrine, and it still shapes constitutional law. The Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection and due process apply only when a government entity is responsible for the challenged conduct. Private individuals and businesses, however discriminatory, fall outside its reach.

The distinction is straightforward on its face. If a state legislature passed a law ordering hotels to refuse Black guests, that statute would violate the Fourteenth Amendment and Congress could strike it down. When a hotel owner made the same decision on his own, without any government backing, the Constitution did not apply. The victim’s only remedy was a lawsuit under state law, which across much of the South meant no remedy at all.³

Bradley framed the rule as a structural limit on federal power. The Fourteenth Amendment let Congress counteract discriminatory state laws and policies, but “it does not authorize Congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights.” Private conduct remained the business of the states.³

Justice Harlan’s Dissent

Justice John Marshall Harlan was the sole dissenter. He accused the majority of reasoning on “grounds entirely too narrow and artificial,” sacrificing “the substance and spirit of the recent amendments of the Constitution” through “a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism.”³

Harlan built his argument on the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and gave Congress power to enforce that abolition through legislation.⁶ Ending slavery, Harlan argued, meant more than striking chains. It meant eliminating the “badges of servitude,” and denying Black Americans equal access to hotels, railroads, and theaters was one such badge. Congress had every right to wipe them away.³

Harlan also attacked the majority’s sharp line between private and state action. Railroads, he argued, were “governmental agencies, created primarily for public purposes and subject to be controlled for the public benefit.” Innkeepers operated under special legal privileges and bore duties to the public that made them quasi-public actors. Theaters were the same. All were, in Harlan’s words, “agents or instrumentalities of the State” when carrying out their public functions, and the Fourteenth Amendment should reach their conduct the way it reached the conduct of state officials.³

Harlan warned that the decision would leave Black citizens in “practical subjection to another class” with the power “to dole out to the former just such privileges as they may choose to grant.” History proved him right.

What the Ruling Unleashed

The decision was met with mass protest meetings in cities across the country. Some northern states filled the gap with their own public accommodation laws modeled on the 1875 Act. In the South, the ruling did the opposite. State legislatures took the Court’s logic as an invitation: if the federal government could not regulate private discrimination, and if state governments chose not to, segregation could proceed unchecked.

What followed was Jim Crow. States mandated segregated schools, then extended segregation to railroads, streetcars, restaurants, and virtually every public space.⁷ Thirteen years after the Civil Rights Cases, the Court completed the legal architecture of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, holding that “separate but equal” facilities satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment. Stanley opened the door; Plessy walked through it.

How the State Action Doctrine Has Evolved

The doctrine survived Stanley, but later courts expanded what counts as government involvement, blurring Bradley’s clean line.

Judicial Enforcement Counts as State Action

The most significant shift came in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). White homeowners in a St. Louis neighborhood had signed private covenants agreeing never to sell their homes to Black buyers. When a Black family bought a home covered by one of these covenants, the white neighbors went to court to enforce it. The Supreme Court held that the covenants themselves did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, since they were private agreements. But the moment a state court stepped in to enforce one, that judicial action became state action, and the equal protection clause applied.⁸ Private parties could no longer use the machinery of government to carry out discrimination, even where the discrimination itself began in a private agreement.

The Modern Tests

Courts now use several tests to decide whether private conduct is entangled enough with government to trigger constitutional protections:⁹

The public function test asks whether a private party is exercising a power “traditionally exclusively reserved to the State.” Running a company town’s municipal functions qualifies; providing a service that happens to benefit the public does not.
The nexus test asks whether the connection between the state and the challenged private conduct is close enough that the private action can fairly be treated as the state’s own. The state must be involved in the specific activity causing the harm, not just with the entity in general.
The entanglement test asks whether the government has given “significant encouragement” to private discrimination, or whether its involvement goes beyond the routine services available to everyone.

These tests are demanding, and courts have tightened them over the decades. Plaintiffs have to show more than a loose relationship between government and the discriminating party. Still, they represent a real evolution from Bradley’s blanket rule that private conduct is beyond the Constitution’s reach.

How Congress Finally Got Around Stanley

The workaround came in 1964. The Civil Rights Act of that year banned racial discrimination in public accommodations, but instead of relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress grounded the law in its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article I.¹⁰

Title II covers hotels, restaurants, gas stations, theaters, and similar businesses whose operations affect interstate commerce. Hotels that serve out-of-state travelers, restaurants that use food shipped across state lines, and theaters that show films produced elsewhere all fall within its reach. The Commerce Clause gave Congress authority over these businesses regardless of whether their discrimination involved any state action.¹⁰

The Supreme Court upheld the approach almost immediately. In Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), the Court ruled that a hotel drawing most of its guests from out of state clearly affected interstate commerce, making the anti-discrimination provisions constitutional.¹¹ In Katzenbach v. McClung, decided the same year, the Court applied the same reasoning to a family-owned restaurant in Birmingham, holding that because the restaurant served food that had moved through interstate commerce, Congress could regulate it.¹²

By shifting the constitutional foundation from the Fourteenth Amendment to the Commerce Clause, Congress sidestepped Stanley’s state action requirement entirely. The result was essentially what the 1875 Act had tried to accomplish, achieved through a different constitutional doorway nearly ninety years later.

1
National Constitution Center. Civil Rights Act of 1875
2
GovTrack. 18 Stat. 335 – Civil Rights Act of 1875
3
Justia. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3
4
Congress.gov. Constitution of the United States – Fourteenth Amendment
5
Legal Information Institute. The Civil Rights Cases, United States v. Stanley
6
Congress.gov. Constitution of the United States – Thirteenth Amendment
7
National Archives. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
8
Justia. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1
9
Legal Information Institute. State Action Doctrine, U.S. Constitution Annotated
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 U.S. Code 2000a – Prohibition Against Discrimination or Segregation in Places of Public Accommodation
11
Oyez. Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States
12
Oyez. Katzenbach v. McClung