Politically war-torn Louisiana wasn’t about to do anything about this massacre. The U.S. Department of Justice, therefore, stepped in and charged eight terrorists with violating a federal law, the Enforcement Act, which Congress had passed specifically to stop the Klan and similar violent white supremacist organizations. This should have been easy. As the Klansman Dave Paul noted, what they did in Colfax is what gets you hung from the highest gallows. Yet when their convictions reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices ruled in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) that the Enforcement Act
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