Fighting Separate but Equal

The New York Times predicted that northern blacks would not demand strict enforcement of the civil rights bill’s provisions. “As a rule the negroes in this part of the country,” it stated in a condescending manner, “are quiet, inoffensive people who live for and to themselves, and have no desire to intrude where they are not welcome.” The Times, however, underestimated blacks’ determination to file suit against those who refused them access to theaters, hotels, restaurants, and other public facilities. Notwithstanding their doubts concerning the relevance of the act’s provisions to their daily lives, African Americans in Illinois, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, California, Indiana, Kansas, and other states across the North during the first few years following its passage went to court in order to defend their civil rights.2

Black litigants were, at times, successful in cases where they had been excluded from—as opposed to being segregated within—public facilities because of their race. But such victories proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Although the Civil Rights Act granted broad powers to the federal courts, numerous obstacles stood in the path of effective legal action. The law placed the burden of court action primarily on black litigants, who generally had little political influence and few economic resources and often encountered hostile white public opinion.3 Equally important, the number of lawsuits declined after a few years because federal attorneys often advised African Americans to take civil action rather than pursue matters in the federal courts. Many federal officials did not in fact believe that exclusion from privately owned establishments warranted prosecution under the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In fairness to these federal attorneys and judges, the 1873 Slaughterhouse ruling had undermined the constitutional theory that permitted federal officials to interpret their powers broadly. Consequently, they frequently limited their jurisdiction to cases involving state-sponsored discrimination. By the mid-1870s, such uncertainty regarding the scope of federal jurisdiction generally led the federal courts and the Justice Department to decide against attempting to enforce the civil and political rights of litigants.4

Their reluctance to prosecute those who discriminated against African Americans, in turn, increasingly discouraged aggrieved blacks from filing lawsuits and encouraged whites, including government officials, to disregard the law. Moreover, when blacks turned to the courts, they often lost. For example, in a ruling that the Pacific Appeal denounced as a “Judge Taney decision” (a reference to the lamentable Dred Scott ruling in 1857), a U.S. Circuit Court judge in California concluded that Congress could not require equal access to private businesses. Even more disturbing was the federal courts’ consistent conflation of “separate but equal” with “equal.” The final version of Sumner’s bill—in accord with most northern state supreme court decisions on school integration—prohibited only exclusion from, but not segregation within, public facilities.5

The message to African Americans that they should not expect to be treated as the equals of whites came not only from Congress and the courts but also from other white officials, including those who organized the national celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1876. Frederick Douglass was among the dignitaries—including President Grant, the secretary of state, members of Congress, governors, and representatives of foreign countries—seated on the platform at the opening ceremonies of the Centennial Exposition. Yet in a compromise struck by members of the Centennial Commission in the name of sectional reconciliation, Douglass, one of the greatest orators of his time, was not permitted to speak. The invitation to be visibly silent was, to say the least, humiliating for such a powerful speaker. To make matters worse, because the white organizers of the Exposition assumed that African Americans could not show proficiency in the arts and sciences, blacks were excluded from the Centennial’s exhibits.6

Hayes and the Election of 1876

This very public, and painful, reminder by the Republican-dominated Centennial Commission that African Americans must not be allowed to stand in the way of reconciliation between northern and southern whites, coupled with the party’s backsliding on the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Grant administration’s failure to act vigorously to protect southern blacks from white vigilantism, led a growing number of blacks to question whether they should support Republican candidates in the 1876 elections. Some were prepared to leave the party. For example, on the eve of the elections, a group of New York blacks declared that, given the perfidy of the Republicans, “there is only one resource left to the Negro, and that is to abandon the party that betrayed him, then to go to the Democratic Party.” Others, including a number of African Americans in Detroit, argued that, in the name of fair play, blacks should at least listen to Democrats’ calls for switching party allegiance. Still others, such as a group of black Liberal Republicans in Detroit, opted for an independent course. Convinced that African Americans’ decision to affiliate exclusively with one party “tends to destroy their influence and injures them as a people,” these Liberals resolved to support only those candidates who would best serve the interests of Africans Americans.7

Many northern blacks indeed remained profoundly ambivalent toward the Republican Party. Northern and southern delegates to the National Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Nashville in April 1876, expressed such conflicted feelings. The convention, which probably was organized by the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons, engaged in extensive debate on where African Americans should stand in relation to the party. Many delegates bitterly complained about the party’s decision to water down the civil rights legislation and its failure to protect the rights of southern blacks. They also were deeply troubled by those white Republican politicians who talked one line and voted another, yet still expected blacks to support them. In the final analysis, most delegates were unwilling to defect to the Democrats. But their tepid endorsement of the Republican Party, after urging blacks to engage the leaders of both parties, reflected the deep sense of distrust and disillusionment that had taken root among African Americans.8

Some northern blacks harshly condemned the Nashville Convention. For example, a group of Columbus blacks denounced the convention’s leaders as “disappointed office-seekers, sore heads and malcontents,” and Peter Clark, who had distanced himself from the Republican Party during the previous several years, reported that, following the convention, the most vocal Nashville delegates had been threatened and harassed by black Republican loyalists. Clark warned that such coercion would mean that “the slavery into which we shall sink will be worse than that from which we have arisen.” While Clark had moved farther than most northern African Americans toward an independent political position, blacks shared a very difficult, and recurring, dilemma: their fear of the consequences of a Democratic victory and their anger at white Republicans for betraying their trust. A Massachusetts activist articulated this quandary when, at a Boston rally for Republican candidates, he denounced the Democrats’ “venomous opposition” to blacks’ rights and declared that he was a Republican “from nature and on principle”; at the same time, he charged that the Republican leadership had “tragically” lowered their standards by refusing to provide political or moral support for southern blacks in their time of need. In the final analysis, most northern blacks seemed resigned to vote Republican because there was no viable alternative. Benjamin Tanner spoke to this tendency to endorse the Republican Party because it was the lesser of two evils when he stated pragmatically in the Christian Recorder: “A negative friend is to be preferred to a positive enemy. Such friends may not pull us up; but they will not push us down.”9

The most pressing question that African Americans confronted in 1876 was whether to support Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican nominee for president. For more than a decade, he had thrown his support behind equal rights for blacks. As governor of Ohio in 1867, he endorsed black male suffrage when it was unpopular with many party members. Moreover, he welcomed the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, informing Peter Clark of his wish that, with the Constitution now in harmony with the Declaration of Independence, “may the intelligence, virtue, and patriotism of the enfranchised people be so conspicuous in all our future history that no good citizen will ever doubt the justice or wisdom” of that amendment.10 However, during the early and mid-1870s, Hayes, like many other northern Republicans, increasingly vacillated between supporting the progressive policies of the 1860s and reconciling with southern whites. He especially became disillusioned with Radical Republican Reconstruction policies—particularly the use of federal troops to prop up the few remaining Republican governments in the South. Thus, he came to embrace what Eric Foner has termed a “let alone policy,” which would remove federal troops as an active force in the South, thereby allowing southern whites to determine the course of race relations and the status of blacks in the region.11

African Americans were understandably disturbed by Hayes’s position, which appeared to presage the end of Reconstruction. John D. Bagwell, chairman of the Colored Republican Committee of New Jersey, which represented seven thousand black voters in the state, informed Hayes in July 1876 that, while blacks wished to support his candidacy, they could not do so intelligently without knowing where he stood with regard to equal civil and political rights and the core principles of the Republican Party. African Americans’ status as citizens, he asserted bluntly, would not be fully established until their rights guaranteed by the Constitution had been attained “in complete liberty and exact equality.”12

It is not known whether Hayes responded to this urgent request for a clear statement of his views on this matter, which Bagwell hoped would remove doubts and confusion among African Americans throughout the nation. But most blacks, fearful that the Democrats might win a close contest for the presidency—perhaps even, as the Christian Recorder warned, stealing the election and seeking to take control of the federal government by force—ultimately endorsed Hayes’s candidacy. Even Douglass, who appealed to delegates at the Republican national convention to nominate Oliver Morton, an Indiana senator, and was troubled by the convention’s refusal to recognize several southern black delegations, accepted Hayes’s nomination as a reality. Indeed, during the campaign he frequently told African American audiences that the election was a contest between liberty and slavery and consciously downplayed Hayes’s clear indications that he favored home rule for the South. Some northern black leaders even went so far as to endorse Hayes enthusiastically. For example, after Hayes’s assurance that he would honor his pledge to protect and promote the welfare of southern blacks, John Mercer Langston, who had known Hayes since the 1850s, pledged to work “to make your election certain and triumphant.”13

Following a prolonged constitutional and political crisis, Hayes won a razor-thin victory in the Electoral College in early 1877. The creation of an electoral commission, with a slim majority of Republican members, ultimately decided the election.14 Once in office, Hayes continued to promise blacks that, as he informed a delegation from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he would “care equally for all our people, and I assure you that the race represented by you will never be neglected by my Administration.”15 He also acted to strengthen his standing among African Americans by meeting with James Poindexter and Douglass while the outcome of the election was still unknown. Hayes recorded in his diary that both men approved of his “firm assertion and maintenance” of the rights of southern blacks under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and his expressed willingness to recognize all Southerners regardless of their past actions. Moreover, he appointed Douglass as U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia and Langston as Minister to Haiti. These appointments, which many whites—including most of his Cabinet—opposed, were welcomed by northern black leaders and cemented Douglass’s support for Hayes during the rest of his term. Hayes, Douglass informed a man who congratulated him on his appointment, “is a just man, and his policy embraces the welfare of both races, and I rejoice at any evidence of support whether from the North or the South.”16

Northern blacks urged the Hayes administration to appoint other African Americans—including Peter Clark, Henry Highland Garnet, and John Jones—to government positions, not only because they were eminently qualified but also, as the Christian Recorder pointedly reminded white Republicans, because the black vote had been instrumental in electing Hayes and saving the government and the party. A black laborer in Indianapolis wrote Hayes that, while he did not seek a patronage job, he wished “to see my race elevated and men of ability and character and honeste appointed to plases of trust and profit.” But others, such as George Downing, emphasized more practical considerations: that these appointments would make Hayes’s southern policy more palatable to northern friends of blacks and, perhaps above all, that he and other northern black leaders deserved and needed such political rewards.17

The Collapse of Reconstruction

Although Hayes dispensed little additional patronage to northern or southern blacks during his presidency, he continued to assure southern blacks that they would be safer than when federal troops had been present. Whites, he told a Nashville audience, had no desire to “invade” blacks’ rights, and blacks would be “cheerfully accorded” every right guaranteed by the Constitution.18 Yet it was painfully clear to most northern blacks and their few remaining white Radical Republican allies that, for all intents and purposes, Reconstruction had come to an end. Nothing upset Hayes more than the allegations that his southern policy seriously jeopardized southern blacks’ civil and political rights. But his stated belief that their fundamental rights should be protected was in fact at odds with his support for sectional reconciliation and the creation of a truly national Republican Party; securing those rights would have required additional troops in the South, which white Southerners adamantly rejected and the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives would not permit. Indeed, his conciliatory approach failed to divide southern whites or attract southern Democrats to the Republican ranks, and white outrages against southern blacks inflicted no political damage on northern Democrats. Beyond this, most northern white Republicans, tired of Reconstruction, agreed with southern whites that the freed people were not prepared for equality. Thus, a broad consensus existed among white Americans that white Southerners should deal with the race issue in their own way.19

With the inauguration of Hayes, the South’s rulers could, with no threat of federal intervention, manage the region’s domestic affairs. The federal withdrawal of troops was an irreversible step, for any request for troops to quell election disturbances had to be made by state officials. All of these officials were now Democrats, who would not act. The Democrats—who termed themselves Redeemers—were committed to dismantling the Republican governments, reducing the political power of blacks, and reshaping the South’s legal system for the purpose of establishing labor control and racial subordination. They proceeded to put in place new systems of class, political, and race relations. This was not accomplished immediately; southern blacks indeed continued to vote and hold office after 1877. But it became increasingly difficult for them to enjoy their rights as citizens. The new state constitutions that the Redeemers had put in place during the previous several years severely restricted the scope and expense of government, especially funding for public education for blacks. Equally important, in the Deep South and then in the rest of the region, blacks’ political rights were progressively eroded through electoral fraud and the threat of violence. As a result of these developments, it became extremely difficult for southern blacks to mobilize politically. Thus, economic, political, and social oppression became the dominant reality in their lives.20

Hayes’s southern strategy contributed significantly to this debacle. He not only remained silent when southern Republicans were brutally massacred by white vigilantes, he also appointed many more southern Democrats than Republicans to federal positions. This accelerated the demise of the Republican Party in the region, for it depended heavily on federal patronage for its existence. Thus, soon after Hayes was inaugurated, the Republican organization in the South was effectively dismantled.21

The collapse of Reconstruction was so painful and discouraging to northern blacks that some were reduced to fantasizing that either the “better classes” of white Southerners would someday act to protect the rights of southern African Americans or that blacks would eventually gain the respect of whites through education and uplift. Desperately seeking to understand, rationalize, and accept Hayes’s southern policy, Downing shortly after the inauguration gave the president credit for “acting with good judgment” by attempting to divide white Southerners. Yet he was forced to acknowledge to Douglass that “for a time, I know not how long, there will be a continuance of confusion and outrage, including murders in the South,” until the southern white elite would step forward to assist the landless and illiterate freed people. The editor of the Christian Recorder was even more inclined to engage in wishful thinking regarding the impact of Hayes’s policy on race relations in the South. He not only clung to the conviction that Hayes would “put down all Ku-kluxism and Bull-dozing” and hold the “intelligent class” in both the North and South accountable for the way it governed but also even expressed the unfounded belief that “in the end, we will be the chief gainers thereby; even as we have been the chief sufferers in the past.”22

Many African Americans, however, rejected such unrealistic visions of the freed people eventually advancing under the benign guidance of the southern white elites and the doctrine of self-improvement. Instead, feeling abandoned and betrayed, they proceeded to bombard the Hayes administration with complaints, organize boycotts of elections, and pass resolutions condemning the president’s southern policy. As a black Ohioan angrily informed John Sherman, “Nineteen out of every twenty colored men I know believe the Republican Party wishes to unload them.” A number of black Democratic clubs also were formed in response to Hayes’s policy, and even the Christian Recorder was outraged by Hayes’s decision to abandon Daniel Chamberlain, who had been elected as the Republican governor of South Carolina. This decision, Benjamin Tanner warned, would send the dangerous signal that, in the future, any elected official might be forced from office by armed mobs. Indeed, the editor soon expressed regret that Hayes had been elected. Even Langston concluded by late 1876 that, however sincere his motives, the president had effectively subordinated blacks’ citizenship rights to national peace and prosperity.23

Some northern blacks felt so betrayed and devastated by white indifference toward the welfare of African Americans that they could see virtually no hope for a brighter future. Writing to William Lloyd Garrison as “an able, consistent and influential friend of the colored race” following the 1876 election, Downing and several other blacks in Newport, Rhode Island, poured out their pain and sadness about how northern white Republicans they trusted and respected had turned their backs on African Americans. “We are depressed,” they confessed to Garrison, “things seem sadly out of joint; we are sick at heart through hope deferred. The declarations and advancement in civilization that are true of our country and that may be referred to make our condition deplorable. They make us more sensible as to the outrage we endure.” While these men were all too familiar with hatred and poor treatment from whites, what distressed them most was the indifference to their rights shown by leading New England men who had once been their collaborators and friends. African Americans could, they acknowledged, endure, “with a certain degree of complacency,” the insults they were constantly subjected to, but “the indifference as to the weak, as to our rights, and sympathizing with those who are outraging us . . . make cold chills come over us.” What particularly enraged them was that, during the 1876 campaign, the Republican leadership had frequently told African Americans that the party could get along without them. In fact, it had desperately clung to the despised black man as its only hope. In light of all this, these men could foresee no other relationship with the party than “that which the South exacts of the colored man to become his defender though he is lord.”24

The Struggle Continues in the Schools

Most African Americans probably could identify with the deep sense of betrayal expressed by Downing and his colleagues. In the wake of the Slaughterhouse ruling, the limited enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Democrats’ control of the House of Representatives, and the implementation of Hayes’s southern policy, they, too, had largely lost hope that the federal government would protect their fundamental rights. In a letter he wrote to Douglass two weeks after Hayes assumed office, Downing suggested that, given the mood of white Americans, blacks perhaps should become less active politically.25 While Downing remained adamant in demanding equal rights, he indeed became less involved in the movement. Having played a leading role in the cause for many years, he now chose not to go to Washington to lobby Congress. Other black activists likewise turned their attention away from Congress. Consequently, the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons appears to have become far less influential and active than it had been during the first half of the decade. Yet, unlike Downing, most northern blacks were not prepared to abandon their agitation for equal rights—especially unfettered access to the public schools—in their own states. Congress’s decision to remove the school integration clause from the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Justice Department’s reluctance to enforce the act’s provisions meant that it was necessary to focus their energies on state and local policies. Moreover, they still enjoyed political rights, and they were determined to use the vote as leverage to pressure the political parties to end racial discrimination, especially in the public schools.

Despite their serious doubts concerning the Republican Party’s commitment to equal rights for all citizens, most northern blacks remained loyal to the party. They did so in part because they realized that whatever success they had achieved on the equal rights front had come at the hands of the Republicans. At the same time, they were increasingly alarmed by the resurgence of the Democratic Party in key northern states such as Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania. For these reasons, the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League adopted a new constitution in 1878 that included, as a condition for membership, a pledge to support all Republican candidates. In a similar vein, Peter Anderson urged blacks to give up their separate Republican clubs and work hand in hand with whites in the party.26 Nevertheless, blacks occasionally supported Democratic candidates in order to punish Republicans. In Philadelphia, for example, black voters, angered by white Republicans’ refusal to dispense patronage to African Americans, helped to elect a Democrat as city controller in 1877. In the same year, Connecticut blacks reacted to Republicans’ refusal to make black battalions regular members of the state militia by providing the margin of victory for the Democrats in municipal elections in Hartford and Bridgeport.27

During the last half of the 1870s, northern blacks used the vote, as well as mass meetings, petitions, and boycotts, to achieve progress on the school issue in several northern states. One of their most notable triumphs occurred in California. Undeterred by the state supreme court’s ruling in Ward v. Flood in 1874, which upheld the constitutionality of racially separate public schools, African American parents in San Francisco launched a boycott of the city’s black schools. The Board of Education resisted this pressure. However, faced with a prolonged boycott and the cost of maintaining a dual school system in the midst of an economic depression, the board opened all of the city’s schools to blacks in 1875. African Americans quickly took advantage of the new policy, as shown by the dramatic drop in absentee rates for black students, from 40 percent in 1875 to 17 percent in 1880. Across the state, African Americans emulated the strategy employed in San Francisco.28

African Americans in Stockton pursued a similar course. Separate black elementary schools were maintained in Stockton until 1876, and a high school education continued to be unavailable to African American students. In order to delay admitting blacks to the white high school, the superintendent facilitated the admission of black pupils to the San Francisco high school. But blacks continued to press for full access to the city’s public schools, holding public meetings, circulating petitions, and writing letters to both black and white newspapers in the area. They finally prevailed in the face of stiff white resistance. In 1878, Republican officials relented and permitted black students to attend the two highest grammar school grades; two years later, the Stockton Board of Education abolished separate schools throughout the city.29

Such pressure by African Americans had a significant impact on public officials throughout California. The state’s superintendent of public instruction reported in 1880 that the number of black public schools in the state had declined from thirteen in 1876, to seven in 1878, to none at the end of the decade. In 1880, the Republican-dominated legislature acknowledged this reality by repealing all statutes that mandated separate schools for African Americans (though not for the Chinese). This move prompted the 1880 State Colored Convention to urge all black parents to send their children to the nearest schools, with the expectation that they would be admitted.30

There were similar successes in other states as well. In Ohio, where African Americans could determine the outcome of closely contested elections, they succeeded in 1878 in pressuring the Democrats, whose “New Departure” strategy included attempts to attract black voters, to repeal the statute excluding blacks from the public schools where fewer than twenty school-age black children resided. In addition, persistent lobbying and petitioning by African Americans in Kansas prompted the legislature in 1876 to strike the clause in the state constitution that mandated racially separate public schools.31

As the 1870s came to a close, northern black equal rights activists in many states could point to real progress on the school issue: no black child was prohibited by law from attending a public school, and a growing number of northern states had banned racially separate schools.32 Yet, unlike the situation in the South, where Reconstruction effectively ended with the collapse of the last of the Republican state governments in 1877, there was no clear dividing line that pointed to the conclusion of Reconstruction in the North. Indeed, the equal rights struggle continued into the 1880s, not only on the school issue but also on state civil rights legislation.

After years of failing to convince legislators to end racial segregation in the public schools, equal rights activists in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio finally prevailed during the 1880s. Following the lead of congressional Republicans who supported Charles Sumner’s civil rights bill, Republican legislators in Pennsylvania had taken up the school issue in 1874, and the Republican majority in the state senate repealed the law that mandated racially separate schools. However, Democrats in the House, who were joined by a number of Republican legislators, chose not to vote on the bill. In spite of annual petition campaigns by the PSERL demanding an end to segregated public schools, the state legislature did not even debate the issue for the remainder of the decade.33 The situation changed dramatically in 1881, however, when a black parent in Meadville sued school officials who refused to admit his children to a white grammar school in his district. He petitioned the County Court of Common Pleas for a writ of mandamus ordering them to admit his children, arguing that the Board of Education’s policy violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. School officials insisted that they were in compliance with the 1854 state law by providing an equal, albeit separate, education for black children. But the judge ruled in 1881 that, because black and white schools in Meadville were not of equal quality, the policy violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He then ordered the school directors to admit the plaintiff’s children to the nearest public school. While this case was pending, the PSERL sent several petitions to the state senate calling for an end to racially separate public schools. In the end, the court ruling, black pressure, and the black vote’s importance in determining the outcome of some elections help to explain why, after refusing for many years to enact a school integration law, the Pennsylvania legislature did so in 1881 by a unanimous vote in the Senate and a large majority in the House.34

In the same year, the black vote was instrumental in enabling New Jersey black activists to persuade the legislature to enact a school integration bill.35 The struggle in Ohio, however, continued well into the 1880s. Here, as in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the desire by both political parties to attract black voters played an important role in deciding the issue, though opposition from many Democrats and Republicans, especially in the southern part of the state, where most blacks lived, delayed passage of a school integration bill for several years. During the early and mid-1880s, black activists held numerous public meetings, lobbied and petitioned the legislature, and reminded both parties that the black vote could tip the balance in elections. This pressure was sufficient to convince both a Democratic governor and his Republican successor to endorse school integration in the mid-1880s. In 1887, most Republicans and some Democrats in the legislature voted to repeal the state law that mandated racially segregated public schools.36

Northern black equal rights activists enjoyed even greater success in their efforts on behalf of state civil rights legislation. This agitation was spurred by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases in 1883, which declared the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional on the grounds that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to state-sponsored discrimination, not to acts committed by individuals or groups functioning in a private capacity. Although the Civil Rights Act had seldom been enforced, with the consequence that blacks continued to be denied equal access to most public facilities and private businesses, they were outraged by the court’s ruling. It was, Douglass charged, “one more shocking development of that moral weakness in high places which attended the conflict between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of slavery.”37

Even more clearly than the congressional Republicans’ decision in 1875 to remove key provisions from Sumner’s civil rights bill, the court’s decision signaled that blacks could not count on the federal government to protect their civil rights. But, rather than become so discouraged that they ceased to protest against racial discrimination, northern blacks launched a vigorous campaign in the mid-1880s on behalf of state civil rights laws. In every northern state, they mobilized the black community and applied relentless pressure on both parties to enact such legislation. Their efforts were quite successful: eighteen state legislatures—from New England to California—passed civil rights laws, often with broad bipartisan support. These laws closely followed the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1875: all of them applied to public accommodations, while most included provisions related to theaters, inns, and public transportation. In all, they provided more protection for African Americans’ rights than had the Civil Rights Act of 1875 because few people doubted that state legislatures had the constitutional authority to enact such legislation.38

A divergence between these school laws and broader civil rights legislation and their application, however, often limited their ability to eliminate longstanding patterns of racial discrimination. The persistence of racially segregated schools in some northern communities can be explained in part by the steadfast support among a minority of African Americans for retaining their own separate schools.39 However, other factors—including vaguely written or weak legislation, lax enforcement, gerrymandering of school districts, intimidation, and creative interpretations of legislation by local officials—appear to have played a far greater role in either limiting or precluding school integration and, in some cases, even access to the public schools in parts of the North.40 The civil rights laws enacted by many northern states were also beset by problems, such as dependence on white juries to punish violators, minimal fines for offenders, haphazard enforcement, and vague language.41

Notwithstanding these limits, when northern blacks looked back over the years since the launch of the equal rights movement at the Syracuse Convention in 1864, they could justifiably be proud of their accomplishments. Though constituting a mere 2 percent of the northern population, the black community had aggressively challenged the pervasive and deeply rooted patterns of racial discrimination. As a result of their relentless pressure on the white power structure at all levels of government, they had persuaded Congress to enact suffrage rights for black men as well as a sweeping civil rights act. Moreover, the campaign they waged from the 1860s to the 1880s against segregation within, and exclusion from, the public schools had produced impressive results in numerous northern states. Finally, in the 1880s they vigorously responded to the U.S. Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by convincing a majority of northern state legislatures to enact far-reaching civil rights laws. Their struggle indeed stands as the most important African American crusade for full citizenship rights prior to the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.