What is ku klux klan act

Another part of the act is included in Section of the code. The first two acts, passed in May and February , aimed to allow the federal government to enforce the 15th Amendment and African American voting rights in the south. These violent acts went unpunished, legislators asserted, because Klan members and sympathizers were powerful enough that law enforcement would not arrest them, juries refused to convict, and judges would not hold fair trials.

Prior to Reconstruction, the one area in which Congress and the federal government could guarantee, by private lawsuits, constitutional rights was related to fugitive slaves. Wiley Wells secured around indictments in Mississippi.

Most prominently, in the and South Carolina trials, the military provisions of the act were used to make hundreds of arrests and force up to 2, Klansmen to flee the state. In , Monroe v. Pape opened up civil rights lawsuits under Section to apply to anyone whose constitutional rights were violated by state and local government officials and local governments.

Limitations remain on the ability to sue cities for the actions of local officials, but Section continues to be the foundational means for citizens to sue state officers for civil rights violations. A farm bill, for instance, might contain provisions that affect the tax status of farmers, their management of land or treatment of the environment, a system of price limits or supports, and so on. Each of these individual provisions would, logically, belong in a different place in the Code.

Of course, this isn't always the case; some legislation deals with a fairly narrow range of related concerns. The process of incorporating a newly-passed piece of legislation into the Code is known as "classification" -- essentially a process of deciding where in the logical organization of the Code the various parts of the particular law belong. Sometimes classification is easy; the law could be written with the Code in mind, and might specifically amend, extend, or repeal particular chunks of the existing Code, making it no great challenge to figure out how to classify its various parts.

And as we said before, a particular law might be narrow in focus, making it both simple and sensible to move it wholesale into a particular slot in the Code. But this is not normally the case, and often different provisions of the law will logically belong in different, scattered locations in the Code.

As a result, often the law will not be found in one place neatly identified by its popular name. Nor will a full-text search of the Code necessarily reveal where all the pieces have been scattered. Instead, those who classify laws into the Code typically leave a note explaining how a particular law has been classified into the Code. It is usually found in the Note section attached to a relevant section of the Code, usually under a paragraph identified as the "Short Title".

Our Table of Popular Names is organized alphabetically by popular name. You'll find three types of link associated with each popular name though each law may not have all three types.