Abolitionism is the belief in immediate, unconditional abolition of slavery. Inspired by the Second Great Awakening, an era of religious revival and intense enthusiasm, abolitionists denounced slavery’s practitioners as sinners and thus refused all compromise on the issue. In this respect, abolitionists differed from the majority of their anti-slavery contemporaries, many of whom regarded abolitionists as reckless firebrands who would destroy the Union rather than accommodate slaveholders in any way. As a young fugitive, Douglass shared the abolitionists’ view of slavery as a moral abomination with which no compromise was either possible or desirable, and he devoted 25 years of his life to the abolitionists’ cause. Significantly, however, Douglass’s abolitionism did not prevent him from extolling the myriad virtues of mere anti-slavery men such as Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Douglass joined Lincoln in blaming slavery’s evils on the system itself. If slaveholders were sinners, then slavery was the devil, “for slavery could change a saint into a sinner, and an angel into a demon” (56).

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed equal rights to all Americans regardless of color. It required the federal government to enforce both the letter and the spirit of the 14th Amendment by prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations.