V/O John Roy Lynch
When I leave my home to come to Washington I am treated, not as an American citizen, but as a brute. Forced to occupy a filthy railroad car with gamblers and drunkards. And for what? Not that I am unable or unwilling to pay my way; but simply because I happen to be of a darker complexion.

NARRATOR
By early 1875, John Roy Lynch was pushing for a new law protecting the right of blacks to be treated as equals in public facilities: in restaurants, on trains, in hotels and theaters. With the North fast losing interest in the South and the economy unraveling, Lynch faced an uphill fight. Worse, the Democrats had taken back control of the U.S. House in the fall elections. Lynch and his Republican allies had only a short lame duck session to win support for the controversial Civil Rights bill.

BLIGHT
It was a remarkable bill because it had such a modern ring to it. At least it would to us. These were the kinds of public access issues that would later become so much a part of the modern civil rights movement of the twentieth century.

NARRATOR
The Civil Rights bill was taking on the unwritten social codes of everyday life.

WALKER
The social code is that "You are free, but you're not as free as I am free," which is to say that black people will only rise to a certain level, and there they will remain. Whites saw the Civil Rights bill as the opening wedge into the bugbear of nineteenth century society, and that was a belief that if you opened up these places to black people, it would open the door to racial mixing. This is the great anxiety and fear that haunts all of the discussion about civil rights during the Reconstruction period. And this fear is not only a fear in the South; it's a fear in the North also.

NARRATOR
Lynch refused to give up.

LYNCH VO
If this discrimination is to be tolerated, then I can only say that our social system is a disgrace; and our religion a complete hypocrisy.

NARRATOR
The Republicans managed to push the bill through. But it was never widely enforced.
Within a decade, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

FONER
Most of Reconstruction legislation is far ahead of its time. It took another century for this country to try to live up to the ideals that were implemented temporarily in Reconstruction.

NARRATOR
A few weeks after the Civil Rights bill passed, John Roy Lynch went back to Mississippi to campaign for re-election. He found a state in chaos. Democratic vigilantes shot at blacks in broad daylight to keep them away from the polls. Newspapers openly called for assassination. It was a full-scale, open assault on Reconstruction.

WALKER
What you have here now is the overturning of a democratic process by illegitimate means.

NARRATOR
The governor of Mississippi pleaded for help, but President Grant had learned a hard lesson in Louisiana.

AYERS
Grant refuses to help. And it's a political calculation. "No, I'm sorry. You're going to have to face this on your own." And the result of it, of course, is that the Republicans are driven from power.

NARRATOR
John Roy Lynch managed to hang on to his seat -- the only Republican, black or white, elected to Congress from Mississippi. Back in Washington, he called on the President. "It surprises me that you yielded,"Lynch said to Grant. "It is the first time I have ever known you to show the white feather." Grant told him that if he had sent troops to Mississippi the Republicans would have lost the White House. The General who had won the Civil War, was now close to losing the war over Reconstruction. He told Lynch: "I am very much concerned about the future of our country. What you have just passed through in Mississippi is only the beginning of what is sure to follow."