“The Enjoyment of Public Rights”

John R. Lynch (1847–1939)
From Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality

Interesting Links

Biography: John Roy Lynch (House of Representative History, Art & Archives)

Video: John Marshall Harlan and the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 (Peter Canellos, CSPAN)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Assassination of Senator Charles Caldwell,” Margaret Ann Caldwell
• “The Experts,” W.E.B. Du Bois
• “Thurgood Marshall and the 14th Amendment,” James Poling
• “Ordeal in Levittown,” David B. Bittan

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Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality
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“To Thine Own Self Be True,” political cartoon by Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly, April 24, 1875, commemorating the passage of the Civil Rights Act earlier that year. The act is passed to a Black hand by Columbia, a representation of the United States; the top is inscribed “The Equality of Men Before the Law. Civil Rights Bill. It is the duty of the Government in its dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political. Signed by the President. U. S. Grant.” (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

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John R. Lynch arrived by train in St. Louis at three o’clock in the morning during the summer of 1873. Only twenty-five years old, he had been elected to the U.S. Congress the prior November. He had spent the previous four years in the Mississippi State House of Representatives—including a year as its Speaker—and numerous accounts and records indicate he was both a popular leader of the Republican majority and a successful legislator who earned the respect of many of his Democratic opponents. He was in St. Louis for a convention of Southern and Western officials to discuss the idea of moving the national capital from Washington to the Mississippi Valley. Such meetings had been occurring for several years; although the idea never gained much traction, many Easterners were alarmed in 1868 when a bill supporting the move to St. Louis failed in the U.S. House of Representatives by only 20 votes.

When Lynch checked in at the Planters House, where many of the attendees were staying, he was told there had been a change, that the Mississippi delegation had been moved to the St. Nicholas Hotel. After arriving at the St. Nicholas, however, he was informed there had been no change; the Mississippi visitors were all at the Planters House. “I then realized for the first time the actual situation,” he recalled in his autobiography. “When I returned to the bus from the office of the St. Nicholas and informed the driver that I had to go elsewhere, he exhibited impatience, stating that he could not be driving me all over the city, especially at that hour.” Since the next train did not leave until the following night, Lynch went to the Southern Hotel, with the hope they would let him sit in the reception area for the day. The owner of the hotel instead offered him a room, free of charge, for all three days of the convention—provided Lynch would take his meals in his room and not show himself in any of the hotel’s public areas. Nevertheless, a day later, “the newspapers had a full account of the whole affair, attention being called to the fact that I was the first colored man that had ever been allowed to be a guest at any one of the first-class hotels of that city.” The experience permanently soured him on “the idea that St. Louis was a desirable place for the national capital.”

Lynch was one of three sons born to Patrick Lynch, an Irish immigrant who was the overseer of the Tacony Plantation in Louisiana, and Catherine White, an enslaved woman who was herself the daughter of an enslaved woman and a white man. Patrick planned to move to New Orleans to earn enough cash to purchase his family’s freedom, but he died when John was only two years old. The three surviving members of the Lynch family (one of the boys had died in infancy) were instead sold to a plantation owner in Natchez, Mississippi, and they were not freed until after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and the arrival of the Union Army in Natchez, when John was fifteen. After the war, friends of his father helped him get a job in a photographer’s studio, where he soon rose to the position of manager while taking night classes and teaching himself to read. He became active in Republican Party politics, and in 1869, the year he turned twenty-two, he was appointed a justice of the peace in Natchez and elected to the Mississippi House.

Lynch’s experiences from the humiliating obstacles that lay repeatedly in his path, culminating in his inability to check into a hotel even while a member of Congress, fueled the powerful speech he gave in favor of the passage of a civil rights bill, and we present that speech below as our Story of the Week selection. On May 22, 1874, the Senate passed an amended version of a bill proposed four years earlier by Senator Charles Sumner who had died two months earlier. The version of the bill before the House on February 3, 1875, when Lynch delivered his speech, omitted Sumner’s requirement to integrate public schools and instead included a clause allowing authorities to “establish and maintain separate schools and institutions, giving equal educational advantages in all respects, for different classes of persons.” Even this “schools clause” compromise faced opposition, however, so the House voted to strip out any mention of schools and then approved a final version, 162–100, on February 4. The Senate adopted the House bill, 38–26, on February 27, and it was signed by President Ulysses Grant on March 1. The final bill stipulated “that all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement,” regardless of “race and color,” and included a section forbidding the disqualification of citizens from federal or state jury service on racial grounds.

Eight years later, on October 15, 1883, the provisions regarding public accommodations, conveyances, and places of amusement were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in an 8–1 decision (The Civil Rights Cases). In his majority opinion, Justice Joseph P. Bradley ruled that the power given to Congress by the Fourteenth Amendment to correct racially discriminatory actions by the states did not extend to discriminatory acts by private individuals. Bradley also declared that racial discrimination by individuals was not a “badge of servitude” prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment.

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan—a former slaveholder who had in the past opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, and even the Civil Rights Act itself—wrote that racially discriminatory acts by accommodation, transportation, and amusement facilities operating under state licenses were public, not private, actions and therefore subject to congressional prohibition under the Fourteenth Amendment. Harlan also contended that since slavery was based upon the supposed racial inferiority of black people, acts of racial discrimination were clearly “badges of servitude” prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment. With the addition of those two amendments, Harlan argued, the Constitution decrees that “no authority shall be exercised in this country upon the basis of discrimination, in respect of civil rights, against freemen and citizens because of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. To that decree—for the due enforcement of which, by appropriate legislation, Congress has been invested with express power—everyone must bow.”

Lynch served two terms in Congress before losing in 1876, when Democrats regained the majority in the state legislature, redrew the boundaries of his district, and successfully suppressed or ignored the ballots of Black voters. He ran again in 1880 in a race that, because of fraud, was decided in his favor by Congressional vote only after more than half the term was over. After his final loss in 1882, he studied law, passed the Mississippi bar, and opened an office in Washington, D.C. At the turn of the century, in his fifties, he enlisted in the Army and was appointed paymaster by the McKinley administration; his decade of service included postings in Cuba and the Philippines. Perhaps Lynch’s most enduring legacy after his career as a legislator was the publication of his book, The Facts of Reconstruction (1914), a point by point rebuttal to the arguments of the Dunning school of historians, whose revisionism denied the accomplishments of Reconstruction, reimagined the era as one of misrule by Blacks and Northerners, and minimized or ignored the treatment and achievements of Black citizens. He died in Chicago at the age of 92 in 1939.

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I will now endeavor to answer the arguments of those who have been contending that the passage of this bill is an effort to bring about social equality between the races. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.