—has held that the Fourteenth Amendment applies only to "state action," because of the phrasing of the Equal Protection Clause ("No state shall... deny... the equal protection of the laws").

The amendment "clothes Congress with power to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States."

—the principle has become firmly embedded in our constitutional law that the action inhibited by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment is only such action as may fairly be said to be that of the States.

This is also true of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court has compared to the Thirteenth Amendment in the context of congressional enforcement.

In those cases the Court invalidated sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that made it a crime to deny equal access to "inns, public conveyances, theaters and other places of public amusement."

—but it is equally well settled that the prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment apply only to state action and not to "individual invasion of individual rights."

The Supreme Court has held the Amendment "is not a mere prohibition of State laws establishing or upholding slavery, but an absolute declaration that slavery or involuntary servitude shall not exist in any part of the United States."

"I cannot resist the conclusion that the substance and spirit of the recent amendments of the Constitution have been sacrificed by a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism... Constitutional provisions, adopted in the interest of liberty, and for the purpose of securing, through national legislation, if need be, rights inhering in a state of freedom, and belonging to American …

The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, focused primarily on citizenship and echoed Republicans' understanding of equal citizenship: "Citizenship in this country necessarily imports at least equality of civil rights among citizens of every race in the same State. It is fundamental in American citizenship that, in respect of such rights, there shall be no …

—invalidated the first federal public accommodation statute, California joined a number of other states in enacting its own initial public accommodation statute, the statutory predecessor of the current version of section 51.[Citation.]...[T] he 1897 statute, by its terms, specifically granted the right to `full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges' in a …