Con Law, Slavery
...United States. Congress used the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection to set up military dictatorships to push whites into compliance with the doctrines of fundamental fairness and due process protections for freed black slaves. These Reconstruction efforts took place in the South under Northern army occupation, but their efforts were limited and doomed for two reasons. First, radical Republicans inserted an army one-third the size necessary to secure the areas they were given—they could offer only limited protection to blacks. Second, when the income tax was phased out after the Civil War, there was no longer any funding to support the Reconstruction efforts. As a result, Reconstruction officially ended in 1877 when President Hayes told the troops to stand down. Blacks were left to fend for themselves and the government began to look the other way.
Formal and informal laws were put in place in the South that worked together like scissors to cut out the intent of the Civil War Amendments. The development of equal protection policy from the ratification of the 14th Amendment (1868) until Millikin (1974) underscores at each stage in this history, the influence upon the Court of ideology, social science, and enforcement problems. In this paper I will discuss how a typology of oppression was put into the void left by Reconstruction. I will show how these formal and informal laws were used to create a structure of white internal colonialism by systematically using physical intimidation, economic dependence, political disfranchisement, and social humiliation to keep blacks in poverty and in positions of servitude.
The nascent withdrawal of federal protection against physical intimidation of blacks can be seen in two cases. In U.S. v. Cruikshank (1871), Southern Sheriff Cruikshank gunned down and killed two black men who had defied his order to stay away...
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