Apr 20, 1871: Civil Rights Act of 1871 passes

[Valin]

History.com

 

With passage of the Third Force Act, popularly known as the Ku Klux Act, Congress authorizes President Ulysses S. Grant to declare martial law, impose heavy penalties against terrorist organizations, and use military force to suppress the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

 

(Snip)

 

Most prominent in counties where the races were relatively balanced, the KKK engaged in terrorist raids against African-Americans and white Republicans at night, employing intimidation, destruction of property, assault, and murder to achieve its aims and influence upcoming elections. In a few Southern states, Republicans organized militia units to break up the Klan. In 1871, passage of the Ku Klux Act led to nine South Carolina counties being placed under martial law and thousands of arrests. In 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Act unconstitutional, but by that time Reconstruction had ended, and the KKK had faded away.

 

The 20th century would see two revivals of the KKK: one in response to immigration in the 1910s and '20s, and another in response to the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

[Draggingtree]

Plessy V. Ferguson

 

The Birth of Jim Crow

 

C. Vann Woodward

April 1964 | Volume 15, Issue 3

 

In the spring of 1885, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain’s friend, neighbor, and onetime collaborator from Hartford, Connecticut, visited the International Exposition at New Orleans.

In the spring of 1885, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain’s friend, neighbor, and onetime collaborator from Hartford, Connecticut, visited the International Exposition at New Orleans. He was astonished to find that “white and colored people mingled freely, talking and looking at what was of common interest,” that Negroes “took their full share of the parade and the honors,” and that the two races associated “in unconscious equality of privileges.” During his visit he saw “a colored clergyman in his surplice seated in the chancel of the most important white Episcopal church in New Orleans, assisting in the service.”

 

It was a common occurrence in the i88o’s for foreign travellers and northern visitors to comment, sometimes with distaste and always with surprise, on the freedom of association between white and colored people in the South. Yankees in particular were unprepared for what they found and sometimes estimated that conditions below the Potomac were better than those above. There was discrimination, to be sure, and Negroes were often excluded from first-class public accommodations—as they were in the North. But that was done on the responsibility of private owners or managers and not by requirement of law. According to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 the federal law gave no protection from such private acts.

 

Where discrimination existed it was often erratic and inconsistent. On trains the usual practice was to exclude Negroes from first-class or “ladies’ ” cars but to permit them to mix with whites in second-class or “smoking” cars.

http://www.americanheritage.com/content/plessy-v-ferguson