Caleb Pennington
Ph.D. candidate, UI Dept. of History
July 2021
From its inception, the state of Iowa struggled to clearly define the legal status of free African Americans. A free territory, Iowa created its legal underpinnings at a time when African Americans were rarely afforded the benefits of citizenship. The act of Congress that established the Iowa territory provided that only “free white male citizens” were entitled to vote or hold office within the territory.1 In addition, the new territory inherited certain racial covenants that were prevalent in the Wisconsin territorial code. The “Act to Regulate Blacks and Mulattoes, and to Punish the Kidnapping of Such persons” held that Black or mulatto people could not settle in the territory without filing with the county clerk a court-attested certificate of freedom. The act also permitted visitors to Iowa to bring their slaves into the territory without relinquishing their title.2 The territorial government continued to pass racial covenants into the middle of the 19th century. As late as 1840, the territorial legislature passed a law declaring marriages between white and Black people to be illegal.3
It was the duty of the Iowa courts to interpret the territory’s laws on race, though there were instances where the courts affirmed the rights of African American defendants. In 1839, the Iowa Supreme Court forbade slavery in any form within the state in the case of In Re the Matter of Ralph. Ralph was an enslaved person who lived in Missouri with his enslaver, a Missouri resident named Montgomery. In 1834, Montgomery provided written permission to Ralph to reside in Iowa. Ralph was ordered to work-for-pay in the Iowa territory. Once he earned $550 plus interest, he was eligible to pay that money to Montgomery to procure his freedom. That same year, Ralph traveled to Dubuque and began working in the lead mines. Ralph lived in Dubuque for over five years, but made no payments back to Montgomery.
Still residing in Missouri, Montgomery hired a pair of bounty hunters to abduct Ralph and return him to enslavement in Missouri. The agents found and captured Ralph, but a fellow miner named Alexander Butterworth sought a writ of habeas corpus on Ralph’s behalf from the Iowa Supreme Court. The presiding justice, Judge Wilson, ordered that Ralph be removed from the boat and held in custody until the matter could be resolved. On July 4, 1839, the court ordered Ralph to pay Montgomery the sum of $550 plus interest, but found that he could not be returned to slavery while living in the free state of Iowa. By allowing Ralph to leave Missouri and reside in Iowa, the court argued, Montgomery could no longer claim dominion over the former slave.4 Despite the Supreme Court’s holding, instances of slavery in Iowa continued to be reported until the Civil War.5
In anticipation of statehood, Iowa hosted a constitutional convention in the Fall of 1844. At the convention, a delegate offered a resolution to exclude “from the state all persons of color, or admitting them under severe restrictions.”6 That measure was eventually defeated because some delegates feared that it would be found unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution. When the state constitution was finally drafted in 1846, however, it did include other discriminatory provisions. Freed Africans were unable to vote in Iowa, nor could they serve in the state Assembly or militia. In addition, the Constitution preserved all existing territorial laws until they could be reviewed, meaning that several other racial covenants remained on the books after statehood.
One discriminatory law that the state legislature sought to preserve was the exclusion of African American children from the public schools. The constitutionality of that statute was challenged in 1867 with Clark v. the Board of Directors. This case arose when Muscatine’s white “Grammar School No. 2” denied Susan Clark, a twelve-year-old girl from the district, admittance into the school because of her race. Susan’s father Alexander Clark was a prominent member of the city’s Black middle class. Eighty-seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Iowa Court found segregated schools were unconstitutional and that “the law makes no distinction as to the right of children … to attend the common schools.”7 The court ordered that Muscatine could not prevent Susan from attending school in the fall. Following the desegregation ruling, Susan’s father and older brother would go on to study law at the University of Iowa.
The post-Civil War era saw an expansion of legal rights for African Americans within the state. In 1868, the state Constitution was amended to remove the word “white” from the article on suffrage. The Assembly voted in favor of the change through three successive sessions despite heavy opposition. Members were influenced by outspoken public support among African Americans. Then, in 1880, the Assembly ended the restriction against African Americans in the legislature. In 1884, the Iowa state assembly passed a law which criminalized segregated business. It was now a crime to deny someone “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 race or ethnicity. But the legislature was not moving fast enough for Iowa’s growing Black population.
Instead, Black advocacy groups challenged the segregation of public spaces in the streets and in the courtroom. One of the first challenges to segregation arose in 1873 with Coger v. the North Western Union Packet Co. Emma Coger, a Black school teacher from Quincy Illinois, was removed from the dining car of a passenger steamboat traveling to Iowa. The captain of the ship noticed Coger during dinner and had her forcibly removed from the table. It was common policy on the steamboat that African Americans could not sit in the dining car. Coger brought suit against the company for assault and battery and an Iowa district court awarded her $250 in damages. The Iowa Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision, finding that a private steamboat could not legally exclude passengers on the basis of race.
The Iowa Courts, however, were not uniform in their stance against segregation. In 1885, two Black men were denied entry to a Cedar Rapids skating rink on account of their race. The 1884 Civil Rights Act had been passed but had not yet taken effect. A meeting of influential members of the African American community took place at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cedar Rapids. There, community leaders convinced the two men to bring suit against the skating rink for unlawful discrimination. In the resulting case, Bowlin v. Lyon, the Iowa Supreme Court found that the owner’s conduct did not violate any laws that were on the books at the time that the incident occurred. Furthermore, the justices reasoned that the civil rights law was meant only to govern certain public spaces, not including skating rinks.
Despite the Coger decision, the segregation of public spaces in Iowa would continue into the mid-20th century. From 1884 to 1923, only three criminal convictions were obtained under the Iowa Civil Rights bill.8 One of the major problems with the bill was that much like in the Bowlin decision, the Iowa courts had narrowly interpreted the statue to govern only those places of business specifically listed in the text of law. This changed on July 7, 1948, when an African American woman named Edna Griffin, her infant daughter Phyllis, and two African American men, Leonard Hudson and John Bibbs, attempted to order ice cream at the Katz Drug Store in Des Moines. Griffin, Hudson, and Bibbs were all members of the Progressive Party of Iowa. Katz had maintained a segregated pharmacy for years, and the manager refused to serve Griffin and the others. The story of this encounter quickly spread, and the party organized sit-ins and pickets of the Katz drug store. Given the public discontent, the Polk County District Attorney filed charges against Katz for violation of the civil rights law. The district court found Katz guilty and fined him $50. On December 13, 1949, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the conviction.
Despite the victory in Katz, the Iowa Civil Rights Bill was still regularly unenforced. Civil rights leaders recognized that the bill would have to be amended in order to prevent discrimination within the state. In August of 1963, more than 2,000 people held a rally in Davenport in support of the national civil rights movement. Similar protests continued throughout the 1960s, leading newly elected Governor Harold Hughes to propose a Human Rights Commission in his 1964 inaugural address. The Commission was officially created by the Iowa Civil Rights Act of 1965. The commission was empowered to hold hearings and address complaints of unfair or discriminatory practices in public accommodations and employment because of race, color, national origin, or religion.9 Dissatisfactory rulings could be challenged in the state’s courts.
The first Commission ruling to reach the Iowa Supreme Court was Iron Workers Local No. 67 v. Hart. This case arose when the manager of a construction company complained that the Des Moines based union engaged in unfair and discriminatory practices against Black workers. The commission agreed that discrimination had occurred, and the district court affirmed their decision. The union questioned whether employment practices were within the scope of the 1965 Iowa Civil Rights Bill, and the court replied affirmatively. Recognizing that the act was part of a larger effort to “right prevailing wrongs,” the court found that “the law should be construed broadly to effectuate its purposes.”10 In rendering its decision, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected the union’s argument that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional.
Footnotes
1 An Act to Divide the Territory of Wisconsin and to Establish the Territorial Government of Iowa, sec. 5, U.S. Statutes at Large, vol. 5, 235, 237. The Act was approved on June 12, 1838.
2 An Act Establishing the Territorial Government of Wisconsin, sec. 10, 12, 15.
3 An Act Regulating Marriages, sec. 13, Laws of the Territory of Iowa (Burlington: J.H. M’Kenny 1840), 39, 42.
4 Twenty-four years later the U.S. Supreme Court undermined the In Re Ralph decision with its holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
5 For a more detailed account of the Ralph case, see Richard Lord Acton and Patricia Nassif Acton, To Go Free: A Treasury of Iowa’s Legal Heritage (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1995), 40-48.
6 Benjamin F. Shambaugh, ed., Fragments of the Debates of the Iowa Constitutional Conventions of 1844 and 1846.
7 Alexander Clark v. The Board of Directors of the Independent District Township of the City of Muscatine, Musser Public Library, Muscatine, Iowa.
8 Robert Edward Goostree, “Civil Rights in Iowa: The Statute and Its Enforcement,” Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1950, 24.
9 An Act to Establish a Civil Rights Commission to Eliminate Unfair and Discriminatory Practices in Public Accommodations, Employment, Apprenticeship Programs, On-the-Job Training Programs, and Vocational Schools and to Permit the Study of Discrimination, Acts of the Sixty-first Genral Assembly, 1965, ch. 121.
10 Iron Workers Local No. 67 v. Hart, 191 N.W. 2d 758, 761 (Iowa 1971).
