Iowa Civil Rights Act
In 1884, the Iowa General Assembly enacted a law making it a crime to deny any individual "The full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, restaurants, chophouses, eating houses, lunch counters, and all other places where refreshments are served, public conveyances, barber shops, bathhouses, theaters, and all other places of amusement," on the basis of such factors as race, religion, or ethnic background.
Prior to 1884, only Massachusetts, New York, and Kansas had enacted statutes that guaranteed African Americans and other minority groups equal opportunity in "places of public accommodation."
The Iowa state courts, however, tended to interpret narrowly the legislative intent of the 1884 Act. Because the public accommodations provision specifically enumerated types of facilities, the court construed that it necessarily meant to exclude from its operation those facilities not so listed. Many kinds of establishments catering to the public were therefore left untouched by this provision; these establishments retained an unfettered discretion to discriminate among their patrons on such bases as race, religion, or ethnic background. Among establishments that were exempt from the proscriptions of the 1884 Civil Rights Act, were retail stores, beauty shops and salons, parking lots, gas stations, schools, health clinics, doctors' and dentists' offices, hospitals, banks, loan companies, lawyers' offices, real estate brokers' offices, employment agency offices, as well as many others.
Read more about this topic: State Of Iowa V. Katz
Famous quotes containing the words rights act, iowa, civil, rights and/or act:
“If the veil were withdrawn from the sanctuary of domestic life, and man could look upon the fear, the loathing, the detestations which his tyranny and reckless gratification of self has caused to take the place of confiding love, which placed a woman in his power, he would shudder at the hideous wrong of the present regulations of the domestic abode.”
—Lydia Jane Pierson, U.S. women’s rights activist and corresponding editor of The Woman’s Advocate. The Woman’s Advocate, represented in The Lily, pp. 117-8 (1855-1858 or 1860)
“When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.”
—Bill Bryson (b. 1951)
“Deep-seated are the wounds of civil brawls.”
—Marcus Annaeus Lucan (39–65)
“At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“You should try to understand every thing you see and hear; to act and judge for yourselves; to remember you each have a soul of your own to account for; M a mind of your own to improve. When you once get these ideas fixed, and learn to act upon them, no man or set of men, no laws, customs, or combinations of them can seriously oppress you.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)