October 16, 1883

Civil Rights Cases

The Supreme Court voids the 1875 public-accommodations protections in the Civil Rights Cases

Four of the five cases reached the Supreme Court without appearances or briefs from the defendants.

15 October 1883, five cases at once

The Supreme Court decided the five consolidated Civil Rights Cases on 15 October 1883 — not 16 October, the date this entry lists — reported at 109 U.S. 3. By 8–1 it held sections 1 and 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional as applied within the states.

Four were federal criminal proceedings over alleged denials at hotels and theatres. One theatre indictment did not even state the excluded person's colour. The fifth, Robinson and wife v. Memphis & Charleston Railroad, was a private civil action after Sallie Robinson was excluded from a railroad's ladies' car because she was of African descent.

Bradley's line between state and private action

Justice Joseph P. Bradley's majority opinion held that the Fourteenth Amendment authorized corrective federal legislation against state action, not direct regulation of purely private refusals by innkeepers, theatres and public conveyances.

The majority accepted that Congress could legislate against slavery's badges and incidents under the Thirteenth Amendment, but held that denial of equal public accommodations was not such a badge or incident. The $500 statutory penalty went with the sections.

Harlan alone

Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, arguing that licensed inns, public conveyances and places of amusement exercised public or quasi-public functions, and that the majority read the Reconstruction Amendments too narrowly. He contrasted the national power once used to protect slaveholders with the majority's refusal to use national power for freed citizens.

The Court affirmed the judgments in Ryan and Robinson and directed that the remaining indictments be disposed of on the ground that sections 1 and 2 were void. It expressly left questions involving the territories and Congress's interstate-commerce power undecided.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 8 sources 2 audit passes Date corrected

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date corrected. The research places this at 1883-10-15.

What the sources leave uncertain

The decision date is not genuinely disputed: the official United States Reports and GovInfo give October 15, 1883. The slug and listed date are one day late.
Some online transcriptions contain erroneous decision metadata; the official reporter should control.
The decision’s later doctrinal fate is mixed: its Fourteenth Amendment state-action requirement remains influential, while later cases adopted broader Thirteenth Amendment enforcement power.