By: Guy Gugliotta SC Daily Gazette
The first words of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution tell us that “all persons born or naturalized” in the United States are U.S. citizens.
This is the law of “birthright citizenship.”
The amendment was ratified in 1868, and its initial purpose was clear. The Civil War had nominally ended 300 years of slavery, but the newly freed African Americans had neither citizenship nor civil or constitutional rights.
The 14th Amendment was supposed to fix that. You’re born here; you’re a citizen. End of story.
Except the story has never ended.
In today’s atmosphere of virulent political animosity and cultural conflict, it is useful to understand that “birthright citizenship” is not so much about birth anymore as it is about citizenship and the rights that accompany it.
This is what made the 14th Amendment a lightning rod in the civil rights movement.
My new book set for release Tuesday, “Grant’s Enforcer,” follows the career of Reconstruction-era Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, the first federal lawman to understand the potential reach of the amendment in protecting the underserved.
His immediate concerns were the predations of the Ku Klux Klan in the interior counties of South Carolina — especially York County, on the northern border.
But he also believed the amendment could be used to blunt Americans’ ugly and recurring tendency to demonize the “other” in our society.
In 1868, the “other” were the freed slaves, but many groups have subsequently played this unenviable role: Chinese contract laborers; interned Japanese Americans; pregnant mothers crossing the border to give birth; Jews and Black Americans on countless occasions.
Over the last decade this spotlight has focused on refugees and immigrants, Muslims generally and, most recently, anyone whose sexual orientation differs from the “norm.”
Akerman, a Republican from Georgia, knew that “citizenship” was a hollow privilege without guaranteed rights. He made his case before a congressional committee late in 1868 when many states in the former Confederacy were being savaged by Ku Klux Klan terrorism.
Local law enforcement mostly ignored these offenses, seldom tried them and never convicted anyone. Congress wanted to know what to do about it.
Akerman had a simple answer: Prosecute the cases as federal crimes and try them in federal court.
Under the 14th Amendment, no one could deny a citizen’s voting rights, break into someone’s house or take someone’s guns. And if you murdered the father, beat the mother or raped the daughter during your home invasion, these crimes could be added to the case against you.
Under the 14th Amendment, these offenses were now violations of the civil and constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.
When President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him attorney general in mid-1870, Akerman set out to test his theory. In October elections, Republicans in South Carolina won both the governorship and both houses of the Legislature, benefitting from a solid voting majority of newly enfranchised Black voters.
Democrats were enraged, and by the end of 1870 the Ku Klux Klan had ravaged parts of South Carolina to such a degree that its exploits had become national news.
Akerman chose York County as his testing ground because the U.S. Army garrison in Yorkville (today’s York) had collected massive amounts of intelligence and knew everyone in the county who was affiliated with the Klan — leaders, soldiers and sympathizers.
By year’s end, federal authorities had 200 York County Klansmen in custody, and 500 others had surrendered. Thousands more South Carolina Klansmen fled the state altogether, and Klansmen across the South ducked their heads.
The final act played out in federal court in Columbia at the end of 1871. Akerman sought convictions for violations of civil and constitutional rights: voter intimidation, confiscation of firearms and home invasion.
He failed, but he was not surprised. Akerman was proposing new law, while the defense relied on the canon of states’ rights. In the end, the court declined to hear a 14th Amendment case.
As a fallback, Akerman’s prosecutors charged the defendants narrowly with conspiracy to deny the voting rights of their victims, invariably threatened with beatings — or worse — unless they abandoned the Republican Party.
Akerman’s team won these cases effortlessly: 55 York County Klansmen were either convicted or pleaded guilty.
It was, however, a hollow victory.
The Klan, as such, disappeared for 50 years, but white terrorism never abated. In 1876, former Confederate cavalry Gen. Wade Hampton, supported by paramilitary “Red Shirts,” won a bloody gubernatorial race to restore white supremacy to South Carolina. In 1895, a new state constitution effectively disenfranchised Black voters.
Full vindication for Amos T. Akerman only came a century later.
Beginning with the “Mississippi Burning” case in 1966, where seven Ku Klux Klan defendants were convicted in the murders of three civil rights workers, prosecutors have repeatedly called on the same laws that Akerman used in Columbia.
The 14th Amendment today underpins rights cases ranging from hate crimes to human trafficking, disenfranchisement, and election fraud — exactly how Akerman would have wanted.
