April 20, 1871
By ANDREW GLASS 04/20/2019 09:54 AM EDT
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution sought to extend legal protections to former slaves while barring states from disenfranchising voters “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
But there was opposition, especially in the South, to granting African Americans their constitutionally mandated legal rights. Members of the Ku Klux Klan terrorized blacks for seeking to exercise their right to vote, running for public office, and serving on juries.
In response, in 1870 and 1871, the Reconstructionist Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts in (also known as the Force Acts) to curb such violence and empower the president to use military force to protect the rights of African Americans.
The Third Force Act, also known as the KKK or the Civil Rights Act of 1871, empowered President Ulysses S. Grant to use the armed forces to combat those who conspired to deny equal protection of the laws and, if necessary, to suspend habeas corpus to enforce the act. Grant signed the legislation on this day in 1871. After the act’s passage, the president for the first time had the power to suppress state disorders on his own initiative and suspend the right of habeas corpus. Grant did not hesitate to use this authority.
Shortly after Congress approved the law, nine counties in South Carolina, where KKK terrorism was rampant, were placed under martial law and thousands of persons were arrested.
In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that it was unconstitutional for the federal government to penalize crimes such as assault and murder. It declared that the local governments have the power to penalize these crimes.
In United States v. Harris, also known as the Ku Klux case, four men were removed from a Crockett County, Tenn., jail by a KKK-affiliated group led by County Sheriff R.G. Harris. They were beaten and one of them was killed. A deputy sheriff tried, but failed, to prevent what occurred. The court ruled that an act to enforce the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause applied only to state action and not to state inaction. Under this thinking, the 14th Amendment authorized the federal government to take remedial action only when state actions, not those of individuals, violated the amendment.
Since then, the Civil Rights Act of 1871 has been the subject of voluminous interpretation by the courts. The legal pendulum swung back in 1961, when the high court ruled that the statute could be applied to “override certain kinds of state laws”; to offer “a remedy where state law was inadequate”; and to provide “a federal remedy where the state remedy, though adequate in theory, was not available in practice.”
Today, sections of the 1871 Civil Rights Act that have survived court scrutiny can be invoked whenever a state actor violates a federally guaranteed right. They are most commonly employed to redress violations of constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure and in lawsuits alleging false arrest and police brutality.
