Welcoming Ruin ― The Civil Rights Act of 1875

This Civil Rights Act of March 1, 1875 banned racial discrimination in public accommodations. This first full study demonstrates that the Republicans enacted it believed that civil equality under the law would produce social order in the former rebel South.

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 Delicieux (American Philosophical Society, 1996), and Hammer of the Inquisitors: Brother Bernard Delicieux 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).