Passed by the Reconstruction Congress in April 1866 over President Andrew Johnson's veto, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 declared all persons born in the United States to be citizens and guaranteed the equal right to make contracts, sue, own property, and receive equal benefit of the laws. It was Congress's answer to the Black Codes enacted across the former Confederacy. Doubts about whether the Thirteenth Amendment alone supported the statute became the direct impetus for the Fourteenth Amendment, which was framed and sent to the states weeks later. The Act's core provisions survive today as 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1982 and were reaffirmed in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968).