Grant’s Enforcement Acts were designed to do one thing: prosecute the Klan.
The Supreme Court then gutted them within a decade.
United States v. Cruikshank (1876) said the federal government cannot protect Black citizens from private white violence. Why? Only states can do that. Southern states, well you know, conveniently “declined”.
The doctrine that saved the Klan from Grant’s punishing blows was that concept of “state action.” When state actors put on hoods, they became private, as in non-state. Private terror was just a sheet’s throw away yet beyond federal reach.
It’s why ICE wears masks today.
This protection of domestic terrorists worked exactly as intended. Trump’s father was arrested at a violent Klan march in 1927. Look how that turned out.
The law couldn’t stop white mobs as long as killers wore sheets and called themselves private citizens. Black Americans died en masse. War veterans were murdered and dumped into unmarked graves after the 1921 Tulsa massacre, without federal remedy. The Klan built a celebratory hall on the ruins of Black Wall Street.
Trump talks about the White House East Wing the same way.
Now watch what happens when you reverse the polarity, and put the enemies of President Grant in the White House.
The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating… charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence. Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers.
Black organizers protested violence by a federal official. The state is acting. No doctrinal barrier applies. Section 241, as the fragment of Grant’s law that survived, activates instantly to target the very people it was meant to protect.
The law was carefully stripped of power by jurists who saw Reconstruction as the crime. It couldn’t protect Black Americans from private violence.
Yet it retained full power to punish Black Americans if they dared to confront state violence.
The local courts apparently still try to provide some protection, while Trump intentionally floods the system to overwhelm it with garbage. Minnesota magistrates have rejected warrant after warrant for American Blacks because of no probable cause, no evidence of crime…. One judge threw out a complaint about throwing an egg at a car. Another rejected the charges, and then saw Bondi loudly announce them anyway.
Trump doesn’t care about laws. They don’t matter to him. The terror of an arrest, the harm of publishing charges, is the punishment. The waste of time and money in a painful process is the point.
“It’s our fucking city,” his CBP commander Gregory “SS Mantel” Bovino told masked men geared up to storm a neighborhood. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to.”
Imagine what Fred Trump said after being arrested at a 1927 Klan march, apparently for violence against police, and then look at that rhetoric.
See the long game? They call it QQQ.
This is the Lost Cause over three generations waiting for their Klan to rise yet again, repeatedly defeated yet never fully prosecuted.
This is using the legal system to be as racist as the legal system will allow. The Klan’s descendants didn’t repeal Reconstruction. They protested it and sabotaged it until they could capture it.
Prosecuting Black civil rights organizers under anti-Klan statutes was always the game plan. Whatever is architected for safety will be weaponized into a tool of terror.
It fits with decades of saying registration of guns would be the end of freedom, and then forcing registration. Or more recently, after decades of open carry being a sacred right, wearing a holstered gun in public is now a crime so severe it’s punishable by immediate state firing squad execution.