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Welcoming Ruin

Welcoming Ruin

The Civil Rights Act of 1875

Studies in Critical Social Sciences

by Alan Friedlander and Richard Allan Gerber

Published by: Haymarket Books

Imprint: Haymarket Books

692 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in

Paperback
9781642590746
Published: February 2020

$60.00

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Description
Contents
Authors

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, enacted March 1, 1875, banned racial discrimination in public accommodations—hotels, public conveyances, and places of public amusement. In 1883 the US Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, ushering in generations of segregation until 1964. This first full-length study of the Act covers the years of debates in Congress and some forty state studies of the midterm elections of 1874 in which many supporting Republicans lost their seats. They returned to pass the Act in the short session of Congress. This book utilizes an army of primary sources from unpublished manuscripts, rare newspaper accounts, memoir materials, and official documents to demonstrate that Republicans were motivated primarily by an ideology that civil equality would produce social order in the defeated southern states.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations and Maps

1 Prologue

1 The Civil Rights Act of 1875 in the History of Reconstruction

2 Rights-For-Order

3 Historiographical Perspectives

4 Precedent: The Civil Rights Act of 1866

5 Charles Sumner's Quest

2 A Muster of Moths: The Forty-Third Congress of the United States

3 Charge at New Market Heights: Debate in the House of Representatives

4 Purblind Child of Darkness: Sumner's Civil Rights Bill Passes the Senate

5 The Deadest Corpse: No Exit in the House

6 Horace Redfield's Journey: The Long Hot Summer of 1874

7 The Shirt of Nessus: Elections in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia

1 Georgia

2 North Carolina

3 Virginia

8 Quintessence of Abominations: Elections in Tennessee and Alabama

1 Tennessee

2 Alabama

9 Carry the News to Hiram: Elections in Florida and Louisiana

1 Florida

2 Louisiana

10 Greeley's Ghost: Elections in Arkansas, Texas, Missouri Maryland

1 Arkansas

2 Texas

3 Missouri

4 Maryland

11 Taliaferro's Ghost: Border States and the North; Obituary

Delaware

1 West Virginia

2 Illinois

3 Indiana

4 Ohio

5 Pennsylvania

6 New Jersey

7 Obituary

12 Suffer the Little White Children: Vox Populi Reconsidered

13 If Ruin Comes from This: A House Decided

14 Dear Tom's Deception: Birth of the Civil Rights Act

15 De Pervisions, Josiar: Civil Rights Dawn

16 Epilogue: Then and Now

Appendices

A.Chronology

B.Civil Rights Proposals - Texts

Bibliography

Index

Alan Friedlander, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (1982), is Professor Emeritus in History at Southern Connecticut State University. He is the author of Processus Bernardi Delitiosi: The Trial of Fr. Bernard Délicieux (American Philosophical Society, 1996), and Hammer of the Inquisitors: Brother Bernard Délicieux and the Struggle Against the Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century France (Brill, 2000).

Richard Allan Gerber, Ph.D., University of Michigan (1967), is Professor Emeritus in History at Southern Connecticut State University, and Adjunct Professor in History at Charter Oak State College. He is the author of The System: The American Constitution in Historical Perspective (Cengage Learning, 2009) and Revolution and Union: The American Dilemma 1763-1877 (Cengage Learning, 2008). He has received a Scholarship award from the Organization of American Historians and the Teaching Excellence award from Lehman College (CUNY).