This month marks 140 years
since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Often called the anti-Klan
act, the Act provided protection under the law for the newly freed Black
population by seeking to end the legalization of fascist terror directed at
them. Under the law, which stands to this day, equitable relief was made
available to those whose constitutional rights had been violated by someone
acting under State authority, by enabling the victim to sue.
During Reconstruction, federal
troops were used to enforce this law, and Klan members were prosecuted in
federal court, in front of predominantly Black juries. As a result, hundreds of
Klan members were fined or imprisoned, resulting in the destruction of the KKK
in South Carolina, and its significant weakening in the rest of the region.
The anti-Klan act emerged
during the period known as Reconstruction, which followed the U.S. Civil War. The
1867 Reconstruction Act put the whole former Confederacy under military rule
and forced the creation of new state governments in accordance with voting
rights for Blacks.
From Black Codes to Radical Reconstruction
After the Civil War, control
over the labor of former slaves was maintained throughout the South with the
establishment in 1865 of restrictive “Black Codes.” In some states, African
Americans were legally confined to the same jobs—agricultural and domestic
labor—that they had worked as slaves. State after state created vagrancy laws
that punished African Americans for idling, or traveling without a pass from a
white employer. When they could not pay the fines, their fees could be
purchased by a local white employer in exchange for labor. In short, virtual
enslavement had returned to the South.
The Fourteenth Amendment did
away with the Black Codes, and ushered in a new period of Radical
Reconstruction. The Reconstruction era was long maligned by racist historians,
when in fact it was a period of intense struggle to carry through the fight for
freedom, from the formal end of chattel slavery to full social and economic
equality for the formerly enslaved.
Over 1,500 Black representatives
held political office over the next decade in local and state governments,
which embarked on a program of expanded social, educational, economic and
political rights.
The federal government created
the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, which helped Blacks eke out a living through the
establishment of schools and public education, employment and health care,
providing assistance in managing all the new responsibilities of being “free.”
By October of that year, the
Bureau centralized control over education in the District of Columbia,
Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia and parts of Virginia. Shortly thereafter,
day and night schools for reading, math, geography and industrial education
were established. Within five years, the Bureau was able to establish 1,000
schools throughout the South. Throughout, the presence of the federal army
protected these institutions and diminished the threat of violent repression.
Klan terror and the North’s response
Southern planters had long
defined white liberty through their right to control, without challenge, the
bodies and labor of African Americans who they deemed racially inferior.
Through paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan they launched a racist
reign of terror and physical intimidation in reaction to the progressive gains
won by the freedmen and their allies among the Radical Republicans. These
Radical Republicans were determined to smash the slaveocracy and solidify the
domination of the capitalist North over the entire United States.
The gains of the Reconstruction
era had been made possible with the threat of military force from the occupying
Union Army, which protected the democratic revolution. The Reconstruction Act
of 1867 divided major states in the South into military districts: Virginia,
North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida, and Texas and
Louisiana. These districts functioned as military dictatorships preventing the
Southern planters who led the Confederacy from returning to power. Military
rule was coupled with the suppression of racist paramilitary violence directed
at African Americans.
The Klan’s attacks during the
Radical Reconstruction era posed the question again: Would the federal
government use military force to protect African Americans’ rights? The racist
terror taking place in the South was acknowledged by northern Republicans, but
many only challenged it with posturing and speechmaking.
One of the Radical Republicans’
last significant acts was the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which codified into law
the protection of the Black community against racist terror. Directed at the
Klan and other similar paramilitary organizations, the law legally held the
federal government responsible for protecting the civil rights of African
Americans and prosecuting those who violated them.
Under the direction of Attorney
General Amos Ackerman, the vigorous prosecution of the Klan led to a
considerable decline in violence throughout the South.
Already however, the coalition
that had led to the North’s victory was starting to break apart. As historian
Eric Foner noted, Republicans during Reconstruction “achieved far greater
agreement on general principles than their actual implementation; on public
education but not on racially integrated schools; civil and political rights
for blacks but not ‘social equality.’”
As the industrialists in the
Republican Party aimed to resurrect the cotton economy, and restore
“stability,” they sought alliances with the southern-based Democratic Party,
withdrew support for the Freedman’s Bureau and dismissed the Radicals’ idea of
“Black equality.” The same year that the Anti-Klan Act was passed, the
Democrats regained control of Georgia. Foreshadowing what was to come, Attorney
General Ackerman was fired because of an unfavorable ruling against the
railroad companies.
Counterrevolution
In 1876, the Northern
capitalists who had consolidated their control of the U.S. struck a political
compromise with Southern Democrats that allowed for the violent return of the
wealthy white planter class to power. It amounted to the political
resuscitation of the slaveocracy, which immediately went to work to destroy the
democratic rights, social ideals and expanding economic liberties for African
Americans. They did this through a regime of paramilitary terror and apartheid.
In 1883, the Supreme Court
ruled that the most important section of the Anti-Klan Act—which made
paramilitary violence and intimidation crimes to be prosecuted on the federal
level—was unconstitutional. The national government had rapidly retreated from
Reconstruction.
The former slave owners erected
a racist police state, legalized terror, in all areas of the former
Confederacy. They did so not through the reinstitution of formal slavery, but
on the basis of capitalist and sharecropping property relations. It took the
Civil Rights political revolution a century later to carry forward the ideals
of Reconstruction.
The Civil War and
Reconstruction represented an unfinished bourgeois democratic revolution in
U.S. history for the Black nation. The enlistment of Black soldiers, many of
them runaway slaves, played a key role in the military defeat of the
slaveocracy. That revolution not only destroyed slavery, but also created new
democratic ideals of what society could look like.
As Marx outlined in the
Communist Manifesto, however, “When people speak of ideas that revolutionize
society, they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements
of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps
even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.” The old
slaveholders were able to return the South to conditions of neo-slavery, thus
squashing the ideas that would have revolutionized society.
The federal government’s
betrayal of Reconstruction, just five years after the progressive Civil Rights
Act of 1871, reminds us that every democratic right has been won through
struggle and is never completely safe in the hands of the state. Depending on
their political calculus in a given moment, the powers that be may allow the
attacks on birthright citizenship to gain ground, or foment violence against
the most vulnerable sectors of our class. It will be up to us to build a
movement that can defend our communities and prevent a rollback of democratic
rights.
Looking back on the 1871
Anti-Klan Act, Frederick Douglass said that, “The law on the side of freedom is
of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected.”
