American Civil Liberties Union

“ Justice Miller, who spoke for the majority, pointed out that the colored race, having been freed from slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment, was raised to the dignity of citizenship and equality of civil rights by the Fourteenth Amendment, and the states were prohibited from abridging the privileges and immunities of such citizens, or depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. ”

“ Its purpose is to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom, a more constant pursuit of justice, and a deeper respect for human dignity.
We will achieve these goals because most Americans are law-abiding citizens who want to do what is right.
This is why the Civil Rights Act relies first on voluntary compliance, then on the efforts of local communities and States to secure the rights of citizens. It provides for the national authority to step in only when others cannot or will not do the job. ”

“ What does “equality of civil rights before the law for all persons” mean?
In fact and in purpose, then, the bill before the House is one to abolish slavery in the United States, and to enfranchise and elevate negroes, and to disfranchise and degrade white men; a bill to change the social and industrial systems and internal policy of eleven States; a bill to take from those States their inherent reserved constitutional right to regulate in their own way their internal policy, not inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States. ”

“ I think, however, the States have the obligation not merely to give lip service to, but to follow both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, and that whenever such qualifications are prescribed, whatever they may be, they should be applied impartially and equitably to every American citizen, regardless of his race, color, creed, or previous condition of servitude. ”

“ A sovereign without the means of enforcing civil rights, or compelling the performance, either civilly or criminally, of public duties on the part of the citizens, would be a most extraordinary anomaly. It would prostrate the Union at the feet of the states. It would compel the national government to become a supplicant for justice before the judicature of those, who were by other parts of the constitution placed in subordination to it. ”

“ If the people in the rebellious States can be made to understand that it is the fixed and determined policy of the Government that the colored people shall be protected in their civil rights, they themselves will adopt the necessary measures to protect them; and that will dispense with the Freedmen's Bureau and all other Federal legislation for their protection. ”

“ Far down the ages, when men shall wish to inform themselves as to the real state of liberty, law, religion, and civilization in the United States at this juncture of our history, they will overhaul the proceedings of the Supreme Court, and read this strange decision declaring the Civil Rights Bill unconstitutional and void. ”

“ The Democratic convention met in July, 1874, and put forth a declaration and a platform declaring that the Radicals had for years inflamed the passions and prejudices of the races until it was now necessary for the whites to unite in self-defence. The convention denied the power of Congress to legislate for the social equality of the races and denounced the Civil Rights Bill then pending in Congress as an attempt to force social union. ”

“ In passing the following resolution, the general assembly refrains from expressing any opinion either in favor or against the principle of slavery; but to support and maintain state rights, which it conceives necessary to be supported and maintained, to preserve the liberties of the free people of these United States, it avows its solemn conviction, that the states already confederated under one common constitution, have not a right to deprive new states of equal privileges with themselves. ”

“ It recognized the equality of all men before the law, and the duty of equal and exact justice; it pledged fidelity to the Union, to emancipation, to enfranchisement, and opposition to any re-opening of the questions settled by the new Amendments to the Constitution; it demanded the immediate and absolute removal of all disabilities imposed on account of the Rebellion; it declared that local self-government with impartial suffrage would guard the rights of all citizens more securely than any centralized power, and insisted upon the supremacy of the civil over the military authorities ”

“ That contest having ended by the success of the Republicans in the election, the struggle was now for and against the Union. "Union is not more the body than liberty is the soul of the nation. Freedom can be saved with the Union, and cannot be saved without it." He deprecated mutual criminations and recriminations, a continuance of the debate over slavery in the territories, the effort to prove secession illegal, and the right of the federal government to coerce seceding States. ”

“ Congress is declared powerless to prohibit slavery from any portion of the Federal Territory, or to authorize the inhabitants to do so; the African race, whether slave or free, are declared not to be citizens, and consequently to be incompetent to sue in the United States' Courts, and the slave-owner is pronounced authorized to carry his rights into every corner of the Union, despite the decrees of Congress or the will of the inhabitants. ”

“ In pursuance of this wise and humane policy the Republicans in Congress enacted, despite Democratic opposition, a bill establishing a Freedmen's Bureau as a part of the national administration, thus giving national guardianship to the negroes as temporary wards of the nation. Following this came a Civil Rights law which recognized negroes as citizens of the United States—they had long been citizens of many of the states—safeguarded them in their rights of person and of property and forbade discrimination against them by any state laws. ”

“ It secures, not to all citizens, but to all races as races who are citizens, equality of protection in those enumerated civil rights which the States may deem proper to confer upon any races. Now, sir, can this Government do this? Can it prevent one race of free citizens from being by State laws deprived as a race of all the civil rights for the securement of which his Government was created, and which are the only considerations the Government renders to him for the Federal allegiance which he renders? ”

“ Last year alone, 4 million poor Americans, the majority of whom were women and children, were helped by LSC offices.
Without laws, our democracy would wither; without access to our legal system, there can be no true justice. We must affirm and strengthen our national legal services system to ensure that all Americans have an equal opportunity to enjoy the rights and liberties guaranteed in our Constitution. ”

“ Besides, if the elective franchise seem “appropriate” to assure the “extirpation” of Slavery, Congress has the same power to secure this right that it has to secure the right to sue and testify in courts, which it has already done. Every argument, every reason, every consideration, by which you assert the power for the protection of colored persons in what are called civil rights, is equally strong for their protection in what are called political rights. In each case you legislate to the same end,—that the freedman may be maintained in the liberty so tardily accorded ”

“ A review of the relevant congressional debates reveals that the concept of civil rights which lay at the heart both of the contemporary legislative proposals and of the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed the right to equal treatment in public places-a right explicitly recognized to be a 'civil' rather than a 'social' right. ”

“ To annihilate the slave system, its codes and usages; to make slavery impossible, and freedom universal,—the 38th Congress submitted to the people an anti-slavery amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The adoption of that crowning measure assures freedom to all. ”

“ If, however, a black Republican should not be elected, then, in pursuance of the policy of making this contest within the Union, we should initiate measures in Congress which should lead to a repeal of all the unconstitutional acts against slavery. ”

“ The Civil Rights Bill was appropriate legislation as defined by the Constitution to forbid any action by private persons which "in the light of our history may reasonably be apprehended to tend, on account of its being incidental to quasi public occupations, to create an institution." ”

“ The Western Democrat, and indeed the average American, thought of democratic liberty chiefly as individual freedom from legal discrimination and state interference in doing some kind of a business. The Abolitionist was even more exclusively preoccupied with the liberty which the Constitution denied to the negro. The Southerners thought only of the Constitutional rights, which the Abolitionists wished to abolish, and the Republicans to restrict. ”

“ Under the shelter of this great liberty, and protected by the laws and usages of the Government they assail, associations have been formed in some of the States of individuals who, pretending to seek only to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery into the present or future inchoate States of the Union, are really inflamed with desire to change the domestic institutions of existing States. ”

“ We cannot expect to create an effective means of protection for human liberties by torturing an 1871 statute to meet the problems of 1960.
Of an enactment like the Civil Rights Act, dealing with the safeguarding and promotion of individual freedom, it is especially relevant to be mindful that, since it is projected into the future, it is ambulatory in its scope, the statute properly absorbing the expanding reach of its purpose to the extent that the words with which that purpose is conveyed fairly bear such expansion. ”

“ The Civil Rights Bill is now a part of the law of the land. But every gentleman knows it will cease to be a part of the law whenever the sad moment arrives when that gentleman's party comes into power. It is precisely for that reason that we propose to lift that great and good law above the reach of political strife, beyond the reach of the plots and machinations of any party, and fix it in the serene sky, in the eternal firmament of the Constitution, where no storm of passion can shake it, and no cloud can obscure it. ”

“ On Thursday, the day that I left Washington, we sent to him a bill which secures to all the colored population of the southern states equal rights before the law, the civil rights bill. It declares that no state shall exclude any man on account of his color from any of the natural rights which, by the Declaration of Independence, are declared to be inalienable; it provides that every man may sue and be sued, may plead and be impleaded, may acquire and hold property, may purchase, contract, sell and convey; all those rights are secured to the negro population. ”