Congress in 1875 explicitly designed damages for race-discrimination victims

Evidence

Applying the letter of the law should have made it an easy case. Section 1 of the 1875 Civil Rights Act provided that all persons were “entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement…applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” Likewise, Section 2 stipulated that anyone who violated the rights of a citizen, as stated in Section 1, would be legally obligated to “pay the sum of $500 to the person aggrieved thereby” and would be liable to additional consequences if found guilty of this misdemeanor. Congress understood that victims of race discrimination should be compensated for their harm. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 376

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reparations-as-accounting frame in ‘On Sacrifice’: the 1875 Act shows an early legislative attempt to price civil-rights harm in explicit dollar terms.