Existing comment:
1875 Civil Rights Act:
This law gives African Americans equal rights in public places and bans their exclusion from juries. Only eight years later, it will be struck down by the US Supreme Court.
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act:
Chinese laborers are barred from entering the US, and Chinese are excluded from citizenship. This act will not be repealed until 1943.
"You are continually objecting to [the] morality [of the Chinese]. Your travelers say he is depraved; your missioners call him ungodly; your commissioners call him unclean ... Yet your housewives permit him to wait upon them at table; they admit him to their bedchambers; they confide to him their garments and jewels; and even trust their lives to him by awarding him supreme control over their kitchens and the preparation of their food. There is a glaring contradiction here."
-- Kwang Chang Ling, letter to the San Francisco Argonaut, 1878
1883 States' rights:
The US Supreme Court rules the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional on the grounds that, by passing it, Congress exceeded its authority in an area where states alone had the right to make laws. This decision opens the door to legalized racial segregation.
"The world has never witnessed such barbarous laws entailed upon a free people ... For that decision alone authorized and now sustains all the unjust discriminations, proscriptions and robberies perpetuated by public carriers upon the millions of the nation's most loyal defenders."
-- Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, 1883
1884 Elk v Wilkins:
John Elk, a Native American, sues Charles Wilkins for refusing to let him register to vote in Omaha. Elk argues that the facts that he was born in the US and has severed ties with his tribe make him a citizen -- protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. The US Supreme Court rules against him, stating that Native Americans are not citizens because they come under the jurisdiction of, and own allegiance to, their tribes.
"[The] Fourteenth Amendment has wholly failed to accomplish, in respect of the Indian race, what, we think, was intended by it; and there is still in this country a despised and rejected class of persons [who] ... are yet not members of any political community, nor entitled to any of the rights, privileges, or immunities of citizens of the United States."
-- Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion, 1884
1887 Dawes Severalty Act:
Under this law, Indian reservation land is divided into parcels (called "allotments") and a system of private land ownership is imposed on tribes. Proponents say the law will encourage Indians to become independent farmers. But allotment creates opportunities for white settlers and the US to buy Indians' land, often fraudulently. When the allotment system finally ends in 1934, their landholdings have been reduced from 138 million acres to 48 million acres.
1896 Plessy v Ferguson:
Homer A Plessy, an African American, is arrested when he boards a "Whites Only" train car in an effort to challenge segregation laws. The US Supreme Court decides against Plessy, ruling that states may provide blacks with "separate but equal" facilities for transportation, education, and public accommodations. |