Bus stop and civil rights

The right to travel is fundamental in the United States, protected implicitly by the Constitution and reaffirmed by case law. However, throughout American history that right has often been restricted for certain classes of people, usually on the basis of race. Sometimes these restrictions were informal, upheld by societal norms and the threat of violence, but in many cases they had the weight of the law behind them. This too has roots in the Constitution, which in its unamended form explicitly forbade states from facilitating individuals attempting to escape slavery: Attempts to restrict and control the movements of slaves came to a head in the 19th century with the passage of laws like the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which penalized free states that failed to actively enforce runaway slave laws and heightened tensions between North and South in the buildup to the Civil war.