On Easter Sunday in 1873, more than one hundred black men were
gunned down in Grant Parish, Louisiana, for daring to assert their
right to vote. Several months earlier, in Lexington, Kentucky,
another black man was denied the right to vote for simply failing
to pay a poll tax. Both events typified the intense opposition to
the federal guarantee of black voting rights. Both events led to
landmark Supreme Court decisions. And, as Robert Goldman shows,
both events have much to tell us about an America that was still
deeply divided over the status of blacks during the Reconstruction
era.
Goldman deftly highlights the cases of United States v. Reese
and United States v. Cruikshank within the context of an ongoing
power struggle between state and federal authorities and the
realities of being black in postwar America. Focusing especially on
the so-called Reconstruction Amendments and Enforcement Acts, he
argues that the decisions in Reese and Cruikshank signaled an
enormous gap between guaranteed and enforced rights. The Court's
decisions denied the very existence of any such guarantee and,
further, conferred upon the states the right to determine who may
vote and under what circumstances.
In both decisions, lower court convictions were overturned
through suprisingly narrrow rulings, despite the larger
constitutional issues involved. In Reese the Court justified its
decision by voicing only two sections of the Enforcement Acts,
while in Cruikshank it merely voided the original indictments as
being "insufficient in law" by failing to allege that the Grant
Parish murders had been explicitly motivated by racial
concerns.
Such legalistic reasoning marked the grim beginning of a nearly
century-long struggle to reclaim what the Fifteenth Amendment had
supposedly guaranteed. As Goldman shows, the Court's decisions
undermined the fledgling efforts of the newly formed justice
department and made it increasingly difficult to control the racial
violence, intimidation, poll taxes, and other less visible means
used by white southern Democrats to "redeem" their political power.
The result was a disenfranchised black society in a hostile and
still segregated South. Only with the emergence of a nationwide
civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did things
begin to change.
Readable and insightful, Goldman's study offers students,
scholars, and concerned citizens a strong reminder of what happens
when courts refuse to enforce constitutional and legislated
law--and what might happen again if we aren't vigilant in
protecting the rights of all Americans.
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