Legal scholars and historians have long puzzled over what to make of Buchanan v. Warley, the 1917 Supreme Court decision striking down a Louisville residential segregation ordinance. A central point of dispute is whether we should understand it as a "civil rights" decision. Some argue that Buchanan is best understood as a foundation

stone of the civil rights canon, a precursor to the later breakthroughs of the civil rights era. Others argue that it should not be categorized as a civil rights decision, that it turned on property rights, not a norm of racial nondiscrimination or a commitment to racial justice. Buchanan, according to this interpretation, is best explained as a companion to Lochner v. New York and other decisions of this period defending economic liberty. The terms of this debate would have puzzled people at the time of Buchanan. It assumes a definition of civil rights-as synonymous with antidiscrimination policy or, more

generally, racial justice-that Americans did not use until decades after Buchanan. In 1917, the public meaning of the term civil rights was such that it would not have made sense to debate the contents of a

civil rights tradition.

In this Essay, I use Buchanan as a lens to study the changing meaning of the term "civil rights" in United States history. I argue that while the debate over whether Buchanan is a civil rights case is historically anachronistic, engaging the question with an eye toward the evolving history of the meaning of civil rights helps to explain

why the Court ruled as it did in this case. Looking back to the meaning of civil rights in the Reconstruction Era offers an alternative to the modern civil-rights-versus-property-rights framework for explaining the case. In this alternative framework, Buchanan was indeed a civil rights case, but one based on the distinctive meaning of civil rights that developed in the 1860s, rather than its more familiar modern meaning.