Commentary: How an 1871 civil rights law morphed into a police protection act

In 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War, the state of race relations was awful in the United States. Yes, the Union had defeated the Confederacy and forced the end of slavery. Yet in Northern as well as Southern states, official and unofficial racist policies were everywhere, and segregation in housing and schools was common across the nation.

Nevertheless, the viciousness of many in former Confederate states toward Blacks was so extreme that Congress responded to what was called this “reign of terror” by enacting what was known as both the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and the Civil Rights Act of 1871. It held that anyone acting “under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation (or) custom” who deprived someone of their constitutional rights could be sued by their victims.

This is the law that is at the heart of the present debate over whether police officers have “qualified immunity” for their actions on the job. While present tensions over the continuing presence of systemic racism are high, America has obviously made progress since 1871. But during the 149 years since then, this law has been steadily weakened by unelected judges discovering nuances to its central finding that representatives of the state who deny others their constitutional rights can be held liable.

This is a perverse irony. A law meant to protect Blacks from capricious state action enacted during a nakedly racist era has now evolved through judicial interpretation into a law that makes capricious state action less likely to face sanction in a more enlightened era. A law that makes no mention of immunity is now somehow used as the basis for providing police immunity.

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