{"id":47978,"date":"2016-06-27T00:03:18","date_gmt":"2016-06-27T00:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47978"},"modified":"2016-06-27T00:03:18","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T00:03:18","slug":"anti-miscegenation-laws-and-the-dilemma-of-symmetry-the-understanding-of-equality-in-the-civil-rights-act-of-1875","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47978","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Dilemma of Symmetry: The Understanding of Equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1875"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Dilemma of Symmetry: The Understanding of Equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1875<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Legal Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 2: Issue 1<\/a>, Article 12 (January 1995)
\npages 303-344<\/p>\n

Steven A. Bank<\/strong><\/a>, Paul Hastings Professor of Business Law
\nUniversity of California, Los Angeles<\/em><\/p>\n

The Civil Rights Act of 1875<\/a>, which was introduced by two Republicans\u00a0from Massachusetts<\/a>, Charles Sumner<\/a> in the Senate and Benjamin Butler<\/a> in the\u00a0House, sought to overturn many of the bars to interaction between the races\u00a0after the end of slavery. In its final form, the Act provided that “all persons\u00a0… shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations,\u00a0advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on\u00a0land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to\u00a0the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens\u00a0of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.”\u00a0No provision of the Act, however, explicitly addressed state anti-miscegenation\u00a0statutes, or laws that prohibit “intermarriage and all forms of\u00a0illicit intercourse between the races.” Proponents of the Act confined their\u00a0arguments largely to the issue of desegregating public places such as railroad\u00a0cars, steamships, inns, cemeteries, churches, and public schools. Continued\u00a0prejudice, distaste for miscegenation<\/a> among both races, and a declining post-Civil\u00a0War<\/a> rate of miscegenation, combined to persuade supporters of the bill\u00a0not to address these laws in the push to desegregate public institutions.<\/p>\n

This decision, albeit a wise one politically, left Republicans open to attack.\u00a0Republicans argued that symmetrical equality, where blacks are prohibited\u00a0from doing what whites can do, but whites are equally prohibited from doing\u00a0what blacks can do, was insufficient to satisfy the requirements of the Fourteenth\u00a0Amendment<\/a>. They contended that under the Equal Protection Clause<\/a>,\u00a0blacks should have the same right as whites to enter any public place. This\u00a0argument, however, inescapably included anti-miscegenation statutes within the\u00a0confines of its logic. While such statutes provided symmetrical equality, since\u00a0they prohibited both blacks and whites from participation in interracial\u00a0relationships, they denied blacks the same right to marry whites as whites\u00a0enjoyed. If segregation of public places was unconstitutional, anti-miscegenation\u00a0statutes must be as well. Opponents of Reconstruction<\/a> seized upon this logical\u00a0extension of the Republican principle of equality to suggest that the Civil\u00a0Rights Act of 1875 would result in increased miscegenation. The charge\u00a0became intertwined with the claim that Republicans sought to legislate “social”\u00a0equality between the races. Thus, Republican treatment of miscegenation was\u00a0watched closely. Accepting symmetrical equality in anti-miscegenation laws\u00a0would weaken their argument against segregation. Conversely, arguing that\u00a0anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional might arouse opposition to\u00a0attempts to protect the civil rights of the freedmen…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Dilemma of Symmetry: The Understanding of Equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1875 The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Volume 2: Issue 1, Article 12 (January 1995) pages 303-344 Steven A. Bank, Paul Hastings Professor of Business Law University of California, Los Angeles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1467,8,20],"tags":[24308,15486,24307,24305,24306,24304,24303],"class_list":["post-47978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-benjamin-butler","tag-charles-sumner","tag-civil-rights-act-of-1875","tag-steven-a-bank","tag-steven-bank","tag-the-university-of-chicago-law-school-roundtable","tag-the-university-of-chicago-law-school-roundtable-a-journal-of-interdisciplinary-legal-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47979,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47978\/revisions\/47979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}