rivileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement;...and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude" (Belknap, 57.)
             Essentially, Congress was trying to enforce the Civil War Amendments, (13th, 14th, 15th,) with more detailed language referring to specific places. However, upper echelon whites lawyers in five different states decided to challenge the statute on grounds that the Act did not limit a state action, as it should, but limited private actions of individuals instead. Thus, the Civil Rights Cases were argued before the upper echelon white justices of the Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, the Court's majority stated that the acts of individuals cannot be construed as imposing slavery upon freedmen, and further, that "there must be some stage in the process of his [the freedman] elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws" (Belknap, 59.) Somehow, the Court found a technicality, which today looks fairly unstable, with which to invalidate the Act. Undoubtedly, the interests of those protesting the Act, white-collar and white-skinned lawyers, found an audience with the white collar lawyers of the Court. This decision hurt the blacks chances of legal equality, while at the same time helping the whites set up an attack on the status of blacks in the coming years.
             Even before the Court had struck down the Civil Rights Act, many Southern states, such as Mississippi, had enacted laws in regards to the actions of blacks called the Black Codes, which put poor and homeless blacks in jail, limited their firearms to next to nothing, and essentially made discrimination in the South legal. Again, we see the elite white lawmakers of the upper crust of society using their power to sustain their position by keeping the just-freed slaves in a position nearly as infe...