I get “This Day in History” alerts from the History Channel, and there’s always one really cool in-depth feature article. From the alert on Christmas Eve (the day the KKK was founded in 1865), came an interesting summary of the history of the KKK.
Reconstruction has always been like the unfairly-named Dark Ages for me: a lot of violence and poverty and suffering, but important political developments. But for some odd reason, the article piqued my interest, and I’ve spent a good portion of my multitasking morning googling the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. What I found fascinating was that the Act authorized military force to control the South; it was used to suspend habeus corpus and place parts of South Carolina under martial law. The Supreme Court struck down most of its provisions in 1882.
But really, I’m still not at all interested in Reconstruction, just the issues of federal/state jurisdiction and the role (and rule) of law it brings up. I think I only found it all fascinating because of the Military Commissions Act.
1 comment:
Reconstruction is one of those bizarre periods in American history that is endlessly fascinating. There were some incredibly progressive things happening, like black people being elected to national offices. Then there was just crazy, backwards stuff. I like the term 'scalawag.' That's from that time period.
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