The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 [TEASER]

Hashtag cancel white people.

Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are discussing the civil rights cases of 1883.

The cases are about the 13th and 14th Amendments, which abolished slavery and established that states must provide equal protection to all citizens.

Both amendments were very quickly gutted by the civil rights cases, and the Supreme Court held that they only outlawed discrimination by states, not by private actors.

In doing so, the court helped lay the groundwork for the Jim Crow era and set back the cause of civil rights by nearly 100 years.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have weighed down our Republic like the hundredth opening metaphor for this podcast has weighed down my soul.

100 episodes.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Rhiannon.

Hey, hello.

And Michael.

Hey, everybody.

I'm wearing a party hat to sell.

Nice.

100 episodes based on a very rough count we did.

And I got to say, feels like 200.

Easy.

Feels like thousands.

A lot.

Yeah.

Based on my gray hair, based on my aging soul.

Feels like a lot, folks.

Differences between me now, me two years ago, know more about the law, know a lot more about the Supreme Court, a lot more sad day to day.

And richer, just a lot richer.

I have a real story, though.

Since it's our 100th episode, I want to share something real quick.

When I was shopping this podcast around with Leon, he was like, So, how many episodes are we going to do?

Because, like, aren't we going to run out of cases?

And I was like, Yeah, but like, we don't have to worry about that until like episode 50.

And here we are.

Look at us now.

I don't know how we keep doing it.

Not only did we get to 100 pretty easy, but we have like the entire year scheduled.

Yeah,

yeah, there's content for 50 more at least.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, today's case is the Civil Rights Cases of 1883.

These were a handful of consolidated cases about the scope of the 13th and 14th Amendments.

In short, in order to rein in the private and institutional racism of the post-war South, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

That law, in part, aimed to curb private discrimination by businesses and individuals.

But the court struck the law down, claiming that the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery did not apply, and that the 14th Amendment, which has the Equal Protection Clause, also did not apply because it doesn't apply to private actors, but only to states themselves.

In other words, the 14th Amendment made it illegal for states to discriminate by race, but not for individuals to discriminate by race.

This case is at least in part responsible for the brutal Jim Crow regime that would come to dominate Southern politics until the 1960s when Congress and the courts finally stepped back in to right their wrong.

And it's symbolic of a turning point in American politics where the federal government began to capitulate to the continued belligerence of the South, thus allowing for the rise of entrenched racist institutions at the state and local level.

We're going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about the rejection of the promise of the Reconstruction amendments by the court and the ways in which the law, even in the modern era, has never really reckoned with its post-Civil War failures.

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