By Garry Blanson
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court case “Plessy v. Ferguson” establishing the principle of “separate but equal” as the law of the land was handed down. A few months later, “The Dibble Act of 1897″ was passed into state law in San Francisco, California. This law mandated that all citizens “of every color or race whatsoever” would be entitled to full and equal facilities of all shared places of public accommodation and amusement.
The Dibble Act was introduced to the California legislature by San Francisco Assemblyman and abolitionist Henry Clay Dibble. Dibble was a former soldier in the Union military who ended up staying in Louisiana after the American Civil War. However, he had to leave the South after President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the federal troops from the South.
On July 4, 1897, a Negro domestic worker by the name of John Harris tried on two separate occasions to pay his entrance fee into the newly opened “Sutro Baths” with a group of his White friends. The manager returned his money to him and asked him to leave.
Since John Harris was connected to groups like the Franchise League, formed in 1852, the Assembly Club, the Colored American McKinley Club, the Afro-American League, and the Excelsior Republican Club, he was able to file his discrimination lawsuit only two weeks after his second attempt to enter the Sutro Baths.
What was just important as the lawsuit itself was that a Black man wasn’t afraid to stand up for what he believed in! Furthermore, because John Harris went forth with his lawsuit, other Black People came forth and sued!
Their lawsuits lead to a similar piece of civil rights legislation that was passed in California in 1959, known as the “Unruh Act“ which helped pave the way for the “Historic 1964 Civil Rights Act” signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964.
By the way, John Harris won his lawsuit, and even though the amount he won didn’t even cover the court costs, his lawsuit went down in history as “The Test Court Case For Black Civil Rights in America!”
In closing, I would like to remind everyone that we need to keep a careful eye on the bills, ordinances, and laws that these government officials and government leaders are “presenting and passing” into law because these very same laws can be used against American citizens of all races!
