of public resort for instruction or amusement, the civil rights, privileges, and immunities of American citizens of African descent have stood, in different sections of the country, and stand to-day, in a certain abeyance, notwithstanding "that series of constitutional amendments securing to them the full and equal enjoyment of all the civil rights which the superior (white) race enjoys." The Civil-Rights Bill of 1866, the Enforcement Act of 1870, and the Civil-Rights Bill of 1875, have been confessedly ineffectual in removing the disabilities which the colored race everywhere encounters.
However deeply experienced in disordering or destroying the framework of jurisprudence, however profoundly versed in the artificial reasoning and in the broad general principles of law, a foreigner, landing for the first time upon our shores, without experience of the chill blasts of racial adversity, and unacquainted with the long-established order of white civil rights in America, would be curiously perplexed at the anomalous status of the civil rights of our citizens of African descent. After acquainting himself with the national legislation upon this subject, he would learn that thus far the learned courts have discovered no solid ground for controversy respecting the interpretation of the terms employed by the national legislators, such as "citizens," "immunities," "civil rights," and "privileges;" and that the sovereign authority of the Supreme Court has again and again asserted the proposition, that in the equality of the civil rights, privileges, and immunities of all citizens lies the fundamental principle of all American liberty.
After a careful review of the comprehensive language used by the Supreme Court, in the legal construction of those constitutional amendments conferring civil rights and equality upon the citizens of the nation's adoption, such a stranger would rationally conclude that, in every lawsuit about the civil rights, immunities, and privileges of any American citizen, there would be for trial only the single issue of fact, whether or not these rights, privileges, or immunities had suffered unjust discrimination. He would be slow to understand why the color of the plaintiff's skin, whether copper-colored, pink, purple, white, black, bottle-green, blue, or resplendent with all the colors of the rain-
