The beginnings of modern civil rights in the Midwest:

• All Midwestern states repealed the remnants of their black codes at the end of the Civil War.  Several Midwestern states gave black males the right to vote before the 15^th Amendment to the U.S. Consitution (ratified in 1870) extended that right to all states.

• In 1875 Congress, at the urging of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, enacted a federal “accommodations law” prohibiting racial discrimination in restaurants, hotels and other public places.  The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in 1883; in reaction, many Midwestern states enacted their own versions of the accommodations law.

Key cases:

State ex rel. Garnes v. McCann – Ohio, 1871 (21Ohio St. 198); Cory v. Carter – Indiana, 1874 (48 Ind. 327)

• Ohio and Indiana were the slowest states to implement new civil rights laws after the war. In McCann, Ohio's supreme court allowed two school districts to combine in order to take advantage of a law permitting large districts to establish separate schools for black students.  The court said that "[e]quality of rights does not involve the necessity of educating while and colored persons in the same school."  

• Similarly, in Cory, Indiana's supreme court upheld an 1869 law that required school segregation and held that federal civil rights laws did not require integration.  However, in a later case the court held that the “equal” component of “separate but equal” had teeth:  if black schools did not have the higher grade levels that white schools had, black students who qualified for the higher grades must be allowed to attend white schools.

Chicago & Northwestern Railroad Co. v. Williams – Illinois, 1870 (55 Ill. 185); Chase v. Stephenson – Illinois, 1874 (71 Ill. 383); Baylies v. Curry – Illinois, 1889 (21 N.E. 595)

• Illinois courts supported integration, but only cautiously.  In Williams, which postwar Southern courts cited frequently (but inaccurately) to show that racial discrimination existed in the North, the Illinois supreme court held that a black woman ejected from the parlor car of a train in Chicago was entitled to damages but suggested segregation might be legal if it was necessary to avoid disruption on trains.  In Chase, the court rejected a school district’s attempt to implement segregation by building a new school for black students, but only because the existing building had enough room for all district students.
   
• In Baylies, the court took a stronger line when it enforced the state’s accommodations law against a Bloomington theater that attempted to segregate black and white patrons.  Again the court did not explicitly condemn the separate-but-equal doctrine, but it stated that “it would be difficult to employ more comprehensive and sweeping language to abolish all distinctions in accommodations” than the language of the Illinois law.

Clark v. Board of Directors – Iowa, 1868 (24 Iowa 266); People ex rel. Workman v. Board of Education of Detroit – Michigan, 1869 (18 Mich. 400); Coger v Northwestern Union Packet Co. – Iowa, 1873 (37 Iowa 145); Ferguson v Gies – Michigan, 1890 (82 Mich. 358, 46 N.W. 718)

• Michigan and Iowa took firm stands against segregation shortly after the war.  In Workman, the Michigan supreme court interpreted a state law giving all children “an equal right to attend any school” as prohibiting segregation in the Detroit schools, even though the law also allowed school officials to “classify” students in each district.  In Clark, the Iowa supreme court struck down school segregation in Muscatine, warning that to do otherwise would “sanction a plain violation of the spirit of our laws not only, but would tend to perpetuate the national differences of our people and stimulate a constant strife, if not a war of races.”     

• In Coger (involving steamboats) and Ferguson (restaurants), the Iowa and Michigan courts also rejected segregation in other public places.  However, the Iowa court inadvertently  revealed that racial paternalism still prevailed even in the most liberal northern states:  it denied that allowing Ms. Coger to sit with white passengers in a steamboat saloon would upset social order, because she "could not have attained any social standing by being permitted to share the treatment awarded to other passengers."