An act to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights.
Acronyms (colloquial)
CRA 1875
Nicknames
Enforcement Act, Force Act, and Sumner Civil Rights Bill
Enacted by
the 43rd United States Congress
Citations
Statutes at Large
18 Stat. 335-337
Legislative history
Committee consideration by Senate Judiciary
Passed the House on February 4, 1875 (162–100)
Passed the Senate on February 27, 1875 (38–26)
Signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1875
United States Supreme Court cases
Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883)
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, sometimes called the Enforcement Act or the Force Act, was a United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction era in response to civil rights violations against African Americans. The bill was passed by the 43rd United States Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1875. The act was designed to "protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights", providing for equal treatment in public accommodations and public transportation and prohibiting exclusion from jury service. It was originally drafted by Senator Charles Sumner in 1870, but was not passed until shortly after Sumner's death in 1875. The law was not effectively enforced, partly because President Grant had favored different measures to help him suppress election-related violence against blacks and Republicans in the Southern United States.
The Reconstruction era ended with the resolution of the 1876 presidential election, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the last federal civil rights law enacted until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled in the Civil Rights Cases that the public accommodation sections of the act were unconstitutional, saying Congress was not afforded control over private persons or corporations under the Equal Protection Clause. Parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 were later re-adopted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, both of which cited the Commerce Clause as the source of Congress's power to regulate private actors.
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