This article supplements Reconstruction, a Slate Academy. To learn more and to enroll, visit Slate.com/Reconstruction. Adapted from “Slave Emancipation and the Revolutionizing of Human Rights” by Amy Dru Stanley, originally published in The World the Civil War Made edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur. Published by the University of North Carolina Press. Did the abolition of slavery create a right to go to the theater? The question arose in the long debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a measure enacted by Congress to sweep away the vestiges of chattel bondage.