As Americans continue to grapple with racial violence and the legacies of slavery, it is worth remembering the roots of the movement that created the nation’s first federal civil rights law, passed by Congress 155 years ago this week.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 affirmed for the first time that people of African descent who were born in the United States were American citizens, and that citizens “of every race or color” were entitled to the same basic rights as white citizens.
The Civil War was over and slavery had been abolished, but lawmakers who enacted the statute knew that additional measures were needed to secure true freedom. In fact, many had spent years in the movement to end racial discrimination in the free states of the North.
As today, politics varied from state to state. In the early decades of the 19th century, legislatures in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois adopted “black laws” designed to discourage African American migration. Those laws required free Black residents to register with county officials, forbade them from testifying in court cases involving whites, barred Black children from public schools, and reserved the vote for white men only.
Most Americans in that era believed the states were fully entitled to regulate and restrict the rights of their residents in almost any way they chose. Like those who advocate draconian restrictions on immigration today, legislators in the early 19th century insisted that free Black migrants were likely to become dependent on public alms, take jobs from white residents and commit crimes, so they pressed for laws designed to discourage migration.
Early civil rights activists deplored these ideas and demanded the repeal of state laws that explicitly discriminated based on race. The path they faced was almost inconceivably steep. African Americans, the people most hurt by such laws and most motivated to end them, were a tiny proportion of the population in the free states, and Black men and women were not allowed to vote.