Sotomayor, J., dissenting
and equal enjoyment’ of certain public facilities to ‘all citizens,’ ‘regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude.’ ” Masterpiece Cakeshop, 584 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 4–5) (quoting 1885 Colo. Sess. Laws p. 132). “A decade later, the [State] expanded the requirement to apply to ‘all other places of public accommodation.’ ” 584 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 5) (quoting 1895 Colo. Sess. Laws ch. 61, p. 139). Congress, too, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which established “[t]hat 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 … applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” Act of Mar. 1, 1875, §1, 18 Stat. 336.
This Court, however, struck down the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 as unconstitutional. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 25 (1883). Southern States repealed public accommodations statutes and replaced them with Jim Crow laws. And state courts construed any remaining right of access in ways that furthered de jure and de facto racial segregation.[1] Full and equal enjoyment came to mean “separate but equal” enjoyment. The result of this backsliding was “the replacement of a general right of access with a general right to exclude … in order to promote a racial caste system.” Singer 1295.
- ↑ Compare, e.g., Chesapeake, O. & S. R. Co. v. Wells, 85 Tenn. 613, 615, 4 S. W. 5 (1887) (rejecting Ida B. Wells’s claim that she was denied “ ‘accommodations equal in all respects,’ ” when she tried to enter a train car “set apart for white ladies and their gentlemen” on account of tobacco smoke in her car, and was forcibly removed), with Memphis & C. R. Co. v. Benson, 85 Tenn. 627, 632, 4 S. W. 5, 7 (1887) (accepting that a white man would be permitted to ride standing in the ladies’ car on account of tobacco smoke in his car).
