Today in Supreme Court History: October 15, 1883

10/15/1883: The Civil Rights Cases are decided.

The Grand Opera House in New York denied "another person, whose color is not stated, the full enjoyment of the accommodations."

Comments

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Justice Harlan's dissent in the Civil Rights Cases should be honored today as much or more than his Plessy dissent. But the majority is still good law.

[For instance, the Plessy dissent has a bit of white supremacy, and a statement reflecting his bias against Chinese.]

Harlan's wife said that he had problems writing the Civil Rights Cases dissent. She gave him the inkwell used by Taney to write Dred Scott. Harlan was going to give the inkwell to a Taney relative, but his wife hid it, thinking Harlan should keep it. Then his writer's block was lifted.

It was, I think, a bit of ‘poetic justice’ that the small inkstand in which Taney’s pen had dipped when he wrote that famous (or rather infamous) sentence in which he said that ‘a Black man had no rights which a White man was bound to respect,’ should have furnished the ink for a decision in which the Black man’s claim to equal civil rights was as powerfully and even passionately asserted as it was in my husband’s dissenting opinion in the famous ‘Civil Rights’ case.

https://the-artifice.com/an-inkwells-symbolic-influence-on-the-civil-rights-decisions-of-john-marshall-harlan/