Editing Civil Rights Cases (section)

==Significance==
The decision met with public protest across the country, and led to regular "indignation meetings" held in numerous cities.<ref>[[Alexander Tsesis]], ''The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom: A Legal History''; New York University Press, 2004; p. 74; {{ISBN|0814782760}}</ref> State officials in the South took advantage of the eclipsed role of Congress in the prohibition of racial discrimination and proceeded to embody individual practices of racial segregation into laws that legalized the treatment of blacks as second-class citizens for another seventy years. The court's decision thus ultimately led to the enactment of state laws, such as [[Jim Crow Laws]], which codified what had previously been individual adherence to the practice of racial segregation.<ref name="FOLD20131023" /> Several northern and western states however did not follow suit and began instead enacting their own bans on discrimination in public places.<ref name="13tham">{{cite book |last1=Lehman |first1=Jeffrey |last2=Phelps |first2=Shirelle |title=West's Encyclopedia of American Law, Vol. 10 |date=2005 |publisher=Thomson/Gale |location=Detroit |isbn=9780787663674 |page=20 |edition=2}}</ref>

Harlan correctly predicted the decision's long-term consequences: it put an end to the attempts by [[Radical Republicans]] to ensure the civil rights of blacks and ushered in the widespread segregation of blacks in housing, employment and public life that confined them to second-class citizenship throughout much of the United States until the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s in the wake of the [[Civil Rights Movement]].

Furthermore, 
<blockquote>In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, the federal government adopted as policy that allegations of continuing slavery were matters whose prosecution should be left to local authorities only – a de facto acceptance that white southerners could do as they wished with the black people in their midst.<ref>''Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II'', Douglas A. Blackmon, Anchor Books 2009, p.&nbsp;93.</ref></blockquote>

The decision that the Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Acts were unconstitutional has not been overturned; on the contrary, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this limited reading of the Fourteenth Amendment in ''[[United States v. Morrison]]'', {{ussc|529|598|2000}}, in which it held that Congress did not have the authority to enact parts of the [[Violence Against Women Act]].

The Court has, however, upheld more recent civil rights laws based on other powers of Congress. Title II of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] generally revived the ban on discrimination in [[Public accommodations in the United States|public accommodations]] that was in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, but under the [[Commerce Clause]] of Article I instead of the 14th Amendment; the Court held Title II to be constitutional in ''[[Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States]]'', {{ussc|379|241|1964}}.