Act of April 9, 1866 Ratified December 6, 1868
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Lyman Trumbull, the author of the Civil Rights Act,
An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication
(Long Version: Italics, bold, underline, increase in font size emphasis – mine)
Civil Rights Act of 1866: This act entitled African-Americans (black, freed chattel slaves citizenship and gave the federal government the power to protect their civil rights. This led to the drafting of the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing those civil rights.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed by one vote over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, granted full citizenship to all persons born on American soil, except Native Americans who were exempt from taxation. The law gave former slaves the rights to own property, enforce contracts, and give evidence in courts–rights not specifically guaranteed in the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.
This Act is actually the origin or the Progenitor and “Rosetta Stone” (interpreter and identifier of the Subject beneficiaries as a mother knows her own child) of the 14th Amendment, Section 1, by which it is codified into the US Constitution.
Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof (speaking of slaves and their children-descendants) are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The 1866 Civil Rights Act (The Act), is the Progenitor of the14th Amendment, by which it is codified-enshrined into the US Constitution, thereby serving as the National Birth and Identity Certificate of citizenship, devised and enacted by Congress and Signed by the President, solely to/for the Subject Beneficiaries identified and described in The Act, as the Americans freed-liberated from chattel slavery or the involuntary servitude system; Freemen (non slave blacks); refugees (of the Civil War and originally Africa); and colored peoples (slaves and Freemen of various shades of black, i.e, African-negroid Americans, of forced, sexual mixing by the primarily white men upon black slave women).
Therefore, the law that essentially empowers-authorizes the Subject Beneficiaries to experience “equal justice-protections under the law” citizenship “as is enjoyed by white citizens” [The Act, Sec 1] is the grand-godfather, foundation, root of all succeeding Civil Rights Laws and movements in the United States, including the famed, 1964 Act which among other matters, ended racial segregation between white and black citizens.