A Ulysses Grant-Inspired Law Could Be Used Against Neo-Nazis Threatening to Spread Covid-19

The coronavirus pandemic is apparently the perfect foil for terrorist organizations with nefarious designs on ambushing minorities who are, like the rest of the world, focused on limiting their exposure to the disease. In mid-March several media outlets reported that white supremacists were encouraging their members to spread the coronavirus to law enforcement and “non-white” people.

While the use of a bioweapon by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists to target minorities is relatively new, endangering the well-being is certainly not. On April 20, 1871 Congress passed the Third Enforcement Act into law, making it legal for the President to declare martial law, impose severe penalties against terrorist organizations and use military force to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. President Ulysses Grant pushed for the law to strengthen his authority to protect the formerly enslaved who had become the target of brutally violent white men in the South.

The law became known as the KKK law. A Confederate General, Nathan Bedford Forrest, served as the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard. The organization’s notorious night raids, murders, and intimidation of the Black community and whites who supported them led Forrest to attempt to disband the group, giving a speech calling for racial harmony in the latter years of his life.

Grant requested the Third Enforcement Act so keen was his commitment to protecting the lives of Blacks. In South Carolina, white men were tried for their racist crimes by largely black juries. Grant appointed Amos Akerman as the national’s Attorney General. Akerman, a former slave owner, became a zealous prosecutor of the Klan using the Enforcement Act to effectively break the Klan until its resurgence during the Jim Crow era.