by Ron Nehring
Democrats often highlight the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the centerpiece of their party’s legacy on equality, pointing to its ban on discrimination in public accommodations, transportation, and employment. Yet nearly a century earlier, in 1875, it was Republicans who first wrote those protections into federal law. Passed in the face of unified Democratic opposition and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 stood as one of the boldest assertions of equal rights in the nation’s history — until the Supreme Court struck it down eight years later.
The Republican Party was born in crisis. It rose in direct response to the Kansas–Nebraska Act’s attempt to expand slavery and undo the Missouri Compromise. Within six years, this new party won the presidency, and Abraham Lincoln led the nation through the Civil War. Refusing to let the war’s sacrifice yield an ambiguous peace, Lincoln pushed hard for the Thirteenth Amendment, permanently abolishing slavery. He understood the Emancipation Proclamation needed constitutional bedrock, lest it be subject to being overturned by the courts.
Following Lincoln’s assassination, congressional Republicans pressed boldly pressed forward with a constitutional refounding. In 1866 they sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states guaranteeing citizenship and equal protection and in 1869 they approved the Fifteenth Amendment, barring race-based denials of the franchise. The Republican Party forced both measures through, using their two-thirds majority in each chamber. Democrats uniformly opposed both in the House.
Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Democratic running mate who became president upon Lincoln’s passing, vetoed major civil-rights measures and urged rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment. Voters rebuked him in the 1866 midterms, handing Republicans a Congressional landslide and veto-proof majorities. In April 1866, Congress enacted the first federal civil rights law over Johnson’s veto, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared citizenship for the freedmen and guaranteed equal legal rights. Those veto overrides were possible because Republicans held more than two-thirds of both chambers in the 40th Congress.
Even so, equality on paper did not mean equality in daily life. In the former Confederacy, freedmen faced intimidation, exclusion, and “Black Codes.” The Republican Congress answered with the Reconstruction Acts, placing the South under military rule and conditioning readmission on ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment and adopting new, rights-protective state constitutions.
Which brings us to 1875. Spearheaded by Republican Senator Charles Sumner and Republican Representative Benjamin Butler, the Republican Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The final law guaranteed all persons “full and equal enjoyment” of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement, and it barred exclusion from jury service on account of race. Republican President Ulysses S. Grant signed the measure on March 1, 1875, making him the first president in American history to sign a civil rights bill into law.
The Republican-led fight for civil rights also landed Democrat President Johnson in the history books, both for becoming the first president to be impeached, and the first president to have his veto overridden on major legislation when Congress overrode his rejection of the 1866 Civil Rights Act.
The votes on the 1875 Act were hard-fought and overwhelmingly Republican: the Senate approved the bill 38–26; the House, 162–99 over unified Democratic opposition. Whatever one’s party today, the historical record is plain about who carried the bill across the finish line.
Unfortunately, eight years later, the Supreme Court struck down the public-accommodations sections of the 1875 Act (Sections 1–2) in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), holding that the Fourteenth Amendment restricted state action, not private discrimination. The 1883 decision helped open the door to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and nearly a century of legalized segregation in the Democrat-controlled “solid south.”
When Congress returned to the issue of public accommodations in 1964, it took a different constitutional path, grounding Title II in the Commerce Clause, and the Court upheld that strategy the same year in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States and Katzenbach v. McClung. In short: the 1964 Act succeeded in the courts where 1875 had been cut down.
None of this diminishes the bipartisan coalition that ultimately passed the 1964 Act, which was overwhelmingly supported by Republicans in both houses.
Republicans didn’t invent slavery; Republicans ended it. And then went on to rewrite the Constitution to secure citizenship and voting rights, and enacted the nation’s first and second civil-rights statutes (1866 and 1875). That is a heritage worth remembering, and commemorating, on the 150th anniversary of the 1875 Act.
Ron Nehring served as Chairman of the California Republican Party from 2007 to 2011.