On March 13, 1866 the House of Representatives passed the First Civil Rights bill. It had been passed by the Senate in February. Imagine that. The first civil rights legislation passed by Congress dealing with discrimination based on race was passed four score and ten years after the nation’s founding. The bill was opposed by Andrew Johnson and he would veto it. I will go into his veto in a later post, but Congress kept at it and overrode the veto.
I remember as a young law student studying Civil Rights Law and seeing the “Civil Rights Act (1866)” in a citation in a modern equal rights case. I assumed it was a misprint. Surely the progressive law being relied on was passed in the 1960s and not the 1860s. I was happily surprised to see that I was wrong. It is good to know that notions of non-discrimination are not modern, they have been a part of how some Americans think for 153 years, at least.
Just as the Freedmen’s Bureau Act was the first instance of a broad Federal program being set up to provide material aid education for a disadvantaged sector of our society, the Civil Rights Act placed Congress and the Federal government on the side of diminishing legal discrimination against African Americans. In future posts I will look at the way the act accomplished its work, how it did the groundwork for other civil rights bills, and its contribution to the 14th and 15th Amendments.
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