On March 1, 1875, Congress enacted a truly sweeping Civil Rights Act. The first section asserted, affirmatively, that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of ... inns, public conveyances on land or water, theatres, and other like places of amusement.” Five cases testing the law came together before the Supreme Court for decision in October 1883. Harlan alone dissented from an opinion of the court declaring that the act went beyond the boundaries of the power vested in the Congress by the fifth section of the Fourteenth Amendment. What was this power? In the view of the majority, it boiled down simply to this--a power to enforce. To enforce what? To enforce the prohibitions laid upon the States--that is, to adopt “corrective legislation such as may be necessary and proper for counteracting such laws as the States may adopt or enforce and which, _by the amendment_, they are prohibited from making or enforcing.” [Emphasis added.] The Civil Rights Act did not vest in the Congress any power to adopt general legislation dealing with the rights of the citizens, or to establish any code of municipal law. Any such assumption, said the court, “is certainly unsound.” The intention of the Fourteenth Amendment was to prohibit the States from denying to any person “those fundamental rights which are the essence of civil freedom, namely, the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, and convey property.” Whenever a State attempted by its own action to deny a Negro such rights as these, a State would be in violation of the Constitution; but until a State transgressed upon some right _secured by the amendment_, a State could do as it wished. Was a right to attend an integrated public school such a right? The _Civil Rights Cases_ do not suggest it for a moment. On the contrary, the construction placed upon the Fourteenth Amendment by the court suggests precisely the opposite. Whatever doubts might have been lingering in any quarter were put at rest by the Supreme Court’s opinion of May 1896 in _Plessy_ v. _Ferguson_. The Fourteenth Amendment had been in operation nearly twenty-eight years. Plessy, one-eighth Negro, challenged a Louisiana State law requiring separate facilities for whites and Negroes on railway lines; his principal contention was that he was thereby denied equal protection of the laws. With only Harlan dissenting (Brewer did not participate), the Supreme Court expounded in clear and simple terms the “understanding” and “contemplation” of the Fourteenth Amendment: