Ku Klux Klan Act
The Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act, Third Ku Klux Klan Act, Civil Rights Act of 1871, or Force Act of 1871, is an Act of the United States Congress that was intended to combat the paramilitary vigilantism of the Ku Klux Klan. The act made certain acts committed by private persons federal offenses including conspiring to deprive citizens of their rights to hold office, serve on juries, or enjoy the equal protection of law. The Act authorized the President to deploy federal troops to counter the Klan and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to make arrests without charge.
The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871. The act was the last of three Enforcement Acts passed by Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction era to combat attacks upon the suffrage rights of African Americans. The statute has been subject to only minor changes since then, but has been the subject of voluminous interpretation by courts.
This legislation was asked for by President Grant and passed within one month of when he sent the request to Congress. Grant's request was a result of the reports he was receiving of widespread racial threats in the Deep South, particularly in South Carolina. He felt that he needed to have Congress delegate broader authority to the President before he could effectively intervene. After the act's enactment, the president had the power for the first time to both suppress state disorders on his own initiative and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Grant did not hesitate to use this authority on numerous occasions during his presidency, and as a result the KKK was completely dismantled and did not resurface in any meaningful way until the beginning of the 20th century.
Several of the act's provisions still exist today as codified statutes. Congress delegated to the federal judiciary the authority to enforce violations of civil rights, with the most important of these enabling statutes being section 1979 of the Revised Statutes entitled Civil action for deprivation of rights. It is the most widely used civil rights enforcement statute, allowing people to sue in civil court over civil rights violations.
Legislative breakdown
H.R. 320 was brought to the floor of the US House for a vote on April 7, 1871. Four parties were present for the vote. Republicans voted 115 in favor, 0 against. Democrats voted 0 in favor, 91 against. Liberal Republicans voted 2 in favor 0 against. Independent Republicans voted 1 in favor, 0 against. 18 members did not vote.It then moved to the US Senate, where it was brought to a floor vote on April 14, 1871. Three parties were present for the vote. 44 Republicans voted in favor, 3 voted against. 0 Democrats voted in favor, 14 voted against. 1 Liberal Republican voted in favor, 2 voted against. 6 members did not vote.
History
In response to political violence by the Ku Klux Klan and others during the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War, Congress passed three Enforcement Acts giving the federal government broader powers to guarantee citizens' constitutional rights. The third of these acts, enacted in April 1871, gave the president the power to imprison people without a trial and to use the federal military on domestic soil to enforce constitutional rights, among other measures.In January 1871, Republican Senator John Scott of Pennsylvania convened a congressional committee to hear testimony from witnesses of Klan atrocities. In February, Republican Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts introduced his anti-Klan bill, intended to enforce both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Butler's bill was narrowly defeated in the House, whereupon Republican Rep. Samuel Shellabarger, of Ohio, introduced a substitute bill, only slightly less sweeping than Butler's original. This bill brought a few holdout Republicans into line, and the bill narrowly passed the House, sailed through the Senate, and was signed into law on April 20 by President Grant.
Use during Reconstruction
After the Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant conducted an aggressive—and ultimately successful—campaign against the Ku Klux Klan and its offshoots from the 1860s to the 1870s. Grant deployed federal soldiers to arrest Klan members, enlisted U.S. attorneys to try their cases, supported Congressional legislation like the Ku Klux Klan Act, and organized federal judges to oversee Klan trials. Under the Klan Act during Reconstruction, federal troops, rather than state militias, were used to enforce the law, and Klansmen were prosecuted in federal court, where juries were sometimes predominantly black. Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned, and habeas corpus was suspended in nine counties in South Carolina. These efforts were so successful that the Klan was destroyed in South Carolina and decimated throughout the rest of the former Confederacy, where it had already been in decline for several years. The Klan was not to exist again until its renewal in 1915. During its brief existence, however, the "first era" Klan did achieve many of its goals in the South, such as denying voting rights to Southern blacks.In its early history, under the Grant Administration, this act was used, along with the Force Act, to bring to justice those who were violating the Civil Rights of newly freed African Americans. After the end of the Grant Administration, and the dismantling of Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hayes, enforcement of the Act fell into disuse and few cases were brought under the statute for almost a hundred years.
Use during and after presidency of Donald Trump
In December 2020, the NAACP along with the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and a group of Detroit voters sued U.S. President Donald Trump along with his presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee under the act as well as the Voting Rights Act. According to the lawsuit, President Trump and the Republican Party "coordinated conspiracy to disenfranchise Black voters" through legal actions intended to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania via "intimidation and coercion of election officials and volunteers".In February 2021, the NAACP and law firm Cohen Milstein filed another lawsuit invoking the act on behalf of U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson. Other congresspersons were to join the litigation as plaintiffs. The February suit was filed against former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers. It alleges violations of the act pertaining to attempts to reject certification of the election results during the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, as well as alleging conspiracy to incite violence leading to the 2021 United States Capitol attack. Following lawsuits filed by Thompson and Swalwell, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed its complaint on behalf of seven officers working with United States Capitol Police accusing Trump, Roger Stone, Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, Oath Keepers and other persons who conspired to attack the Capitol under the same act and the D.C. Bias-Related Crimes Act. On February 2, 2022, Vindman sued several Trump allies, alleging that they intimidated and retaliated against him while he testified in Congress, and thereby violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The defendants in the lawsuit are Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, former White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, and former White House deputy communications director Julia Hahn.
In 2021, plaintiffs involved in the Texas Trump Train incident during the 2020 Biden-Harris Presidential Campaign sued the City of San Marcos, Texas, and several individual defendants under the Ku Klux Klan Act in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. In 2023, San Marcos and two individual defendants settled with the plaintiffs. On September 23, 2024, a jury found one of the remaining six defendants liable for $30,000 in punitive damages to be split among the three plaintiffs and awarded $10,000 in compensatory damages to the bus driver. The Austin American Statesman noted that "he verdict marks the first time in the modern era that a jury has found a defendant liable under the support-or-advocacy clauses of the 1871 Klan Act...."
Section 1 (42 USC § 1983)
Section 1 of the Act, which has since been amended and codified as section 1979 of the Revised Statutes and is also known simply as "Section 1983", authorized monetary and injunctive relief against anyone who, acting under the authority of state law, deprived a person of rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution or federal law.Section 1983 is the most prominent and commonly-litigated civil rights statute.
Section 1979 of the Revised Statutes now reads:
Section 1983 made relief—in the form of monetary damages—available to those whose constitutional rights and laws had been violated by a person acting under State authority. Normally, constitutional rights and laws violations are remedied by specific performance including injunctions by the courts. Thus, if a person's right to due process was violated by a prison guard who was said to be acting under the authority of the state, under § 1983, that person could bring suit for monetary damages against the prison guard. Without § 1983, that person would have to seek an injunction by the courts for the due process violation. The problem with such an action by the court is that injunctions, which instruct a party on penalty of contempt to perform or refrain from performing some action, cannot apply to past harm, only future harm. So, essentially the person would have an actionable cause—the constitutional violation—with no adequate remedy. Most § 1983 claims are brought against prison officials by prisoners, but prisoner claims are usually dismissed as being without merit. Claims can be brought by anyone stating a proper cause of action.
Circumstances changed in 1961 when the Supreme Court of the United States articulated three purposes that underlie the statute: "1) 'to override certain kinds of state laws'; 2) to provide 'a remedy where state law was inadequate'; and 3) to provide 'a federal remedy where the state remedy, though adequate in theory, was not available in practice.' " A §1983 claim requires according to the United States Supreme Court in Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co. two elements for recovery: the plaintiff must prove that the defendant has deprived him of a right secured by the, "constitution and laws," of the US, and the plaintiff must show that the defendant deprived him of this constitutional right 'under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory'.
Now the statute stands as one of the most powerful authorities with which state and federal courts may protect those whose rights are deprived. Section 1979 of the Revised Statutes provides a way individuals can sue to redress when their federally protected rights are violated, like the First Amendment rights and the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Section 1979 can be used to redress violated rights based on the federal Constitution and federal statutes, such as the prohibition of public sector employment discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, and religion.