Trump, Trumpism and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871
“It ends with me.”
Contemplating generations of family dysfunction that damaged him as a child and haunted his adulthood, a friend once vowed he would not pass “it” on to his children.
America has yet to make that commitment and keep it.
Donald Trump was formally charged in Washington, D.C. on Thursday with four federal crimes stemming from his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Those efforts did not culminate with the violent insurrection he inspired at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump and his co-conspirators worked to subvert democracy that evening, even as police cleared the complex of rioters, and as hospitals treated the hundreds injured and processed the dead.
The last of the charges special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment levied against Trump dates from the Reconstruction era. Will Bunch reminds Philadelphia Inquirer readers that President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 in response to a similar post-election riot in South Carolina the year before. The law is the third of the Enforcement Acts passed to address white blowback to post-Civil War enfranchisement of former slaves (the males, anyway).
The Washington Post recounted what prompted the act’s drafting:
“We have just passed through an Election which, for rancour and virulence on the part of the opposition, has never been excelled in any civilized community,” South Carolina’s Republican governor, Robert K. Scott, wrote to Grant in fall 1870. “Colored men and women have been dragged from their homes at the dead hour of night and most cruelly and brutally scourged,” Scott reported, “for the sole reason that they dared to exercise their own opinions upon political subjects.”
The opposition, Scott told Grant, had declared “that they will not submit to any election which does not place them in power.” Klan sympathizers were even plotting to disrupt the vote tally. “I am convinced that an outbreak will occur here on Friday … the day appointed by law for the counting of ballots,” Scott wrote.
The three Enforcement Acts from that period are still on the books. Trump is charged under 18 U.S.C. § 241 for conspiracy to “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same.”
Bunch writes, “Critics on the right may point to the age and relative obscurity of the law Trump was charged under to suggest that prosecutor Smith is overreaching. But in reality, invoking the anti-KKK statute feels like a remarkable and long overdue collision with the arc of justice.”
Over 150 years beyond the Civil War, the Third Enforcement Act remains relevant because this country has yet to — in its soul — make the vow not to pass on the racial animus that inspired it onto the next generation.
Certainly Fred Trump did not, Bunch writes, citing his 1927 arrest at a Klan rally in New York and Donald Trump’s history of racially inflammatory statements and actions. Trump’s scheme to throw out 2020 votes targeted cities with significant Black populations:
“Bad things happen in Philadelphia,” Trump famously told a 2020 debate — priming the pump for his foundational and utterly phony belief that voter fraud was coming from Democratic-run cities with large Black populations. When Trump started to fall behind in the vote tally about 24 hours after the polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, his focus — and that of his henchmen — immediately turned to the swing-state cities where African Americans had voted in large numbers, especially Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee, in addition to Philly.
Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, addressed the country’s racist legacy Thursday evening with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
Trump’s narrative of illegitimate votes being behind his 2020 loss, she insisted, only works because it feeds racist tropes that resonate with a large minority of white Americans. Enough to inspire thousands to answer his call to come to the District on Jan. 6 and to storm the U.S. Capitol at his prompting. It animates the Republican claims that Trump cannot get a fair trial in Washington, D.C., a city that, like Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee, has a heavily Black population.
“Are we equal citizens under law or are there different classes of citizens?” Hayes posited as an unresolved issue in American history. The contention, explicit or implicit, behind the notion that some votes are illegitimate, “is that there are two classes of citizens, some of whose votes are suspect, their actions are suspect, cannot be trusted to fulfill the constitutional obligation to serve on a jury of peers, because they are fundamentally a lower order of citizen.”
As it was in 1870.
Trump reinforced that anti-Black narrative before leaving town Thursday. Denigrating Washington, D.C. where he will face trial, Trump claimed he’d witnessed “filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings” on his short drive to and from the airport. As the indictment document makes clear, Trump lies with abandon.
Hayes played a clip of Fulton County Georgia district attorney Fani Willis recounting how many racist slurs she’s experienced since opening her investigation into efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential results (that went against Trump).
“I’ve probably been called the ‘N’ word more times in the last two and a half years than a hundred people combined,” Willis said.
The pattern is clear. It is generational. To deny it is folly, and a threat to our continued existence as a nation. The whole world saw that on Jan. 6.
“To pretend that that is not a very essential part of Trump’s strategy, his appeal to a segment of the America population, and the willingness of the Republican Party — and in fact they have trafficked in this stuff, perhaps less blatantly, for many, many years — that’s what we’re facing,” Ifill responded, noting that the racial subtext to Trump’s strategy appears nowhere in the 45-page indictment.
“And if we pretend this is just about Trump and just about some charges but we leave that part out, we’re leaving the danger and the cancer still among us unaddressed.”
Bunch concludes:
White supremacy is the virus that has sapped democracy on this continent since 1619. The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870-71 were a bold attempt at finding our better angels and imposing a cure — but it fell way short. Consider the case of the United States of America vs. Donald Trump a booster shot. The trial of our former president may decide once and for all whether we were actually serious when we proclaimed that all people are created equal.
“We” were not. Pretty words. Aspirational. Powerful. Inspiring. But for a large segment of our people, words never fully embraced. More deeply rooted than our democratic norms is the belief that there are, as Hayes suggested, “different classes of citizens,” some a “fundamentally a lower order of citizen.” Some even who do not deserve citizenship by virtue of their skin color. That generational dysfunction persists despite what the documents encased in glass at the National Archives promise.
Was my friend successful in putting behind him his family’s cancerous legacy? I don’t know.