Opinion: The fight against white supremacy could learn something from America’s first war on terror
By Charles Lane Charles Lane Editorial writer and columnist specializing in economic and fiscal policy Email Bio Follow Opinion writer April 8 at 6:21 PM One hundred forty-eight years ago this month, a member of Congress decried what he saw as a double standard regarding the protection of U.S. citizens from political violence. Overseas, Rep. Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts said on the floor of the House, “no nation . . .
Congress duly passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, and President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law on April 20, 1871. The federal government could suspend the writ of habeas corpus in Klan-dominated areas and use federal marshals and troops to arrest Klan terrorists and bring them to trial in federal courts.
Recent events, from the 2015 murder of nine African Americans by a white supremacist in Charleston, S.C., to the massacre of Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue last October, lend credence to that notion. Grant’s determination to defeat the Klan, based both on his morality and on his political interest in protecting Southerners, black and white, who were likely to vote for him, proved decisive in that long-ago struggle.
Another lesson of history is that an effective crackdown on white supremacist violence today, if and when it comes, may require tactics similar to those used in the U.S. government’s recent “war” on other forms of terrorism. The Secret Service’s chief, Hiram C. Whitley, had no qualms about any tactics to defeat lawbreakers, believing, as he put it, that “any strategy resorted to by the officers to bring them to justice is in my judgment perfectly justifiable.”
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