Washington, D.C., President Grant’s first term. On June 22, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the creation of the U.S. Department of Justice and Civil Rights Enforcement.
Today, we know of it as the United States Department of Justice. Since 1957, a civil rights division handles the department’s civil rights matters (Wikipedia).
The 1870 Act to Establish the Department of Justice:
gave the Department control over all federal law enforcement, and all criminal prosecutions and civil suits in which the United States had an interest.
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President Ulysses S. Grant ordered that the new Department of Justice’s initial mandate was to counter and subdue those groups in the South who had been using intimidation and violence to oppose the Amendments.
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Both Attorney General [Amos T.] Akerman and the first U.S. Solicitor General, Benjamin Bristow, used the new powers and resources of the Department of Justice to successfully prosecute Ku Klux Klan members. (1870, DOJ Timeline)
In the period of 1871–1877, the Department of Justice secured 1,143 convictions for civil rights violations in the South, nearly all committed by members of the K.K.K. and related armed, racist organizations (Gillette 43).
IMAGE
(Cropped; see below in full.) Our Three Great Presidents, Duff & Wettach, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 24 1/4 in. x 21 1/2 in., National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_325377.
SOURCES
Gillette, William. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879. United Kingdom: LSU Press, 1982.
United States Department of Justice, The. “150 Years of the Department of Justice.” Webpage. Accessed June 22, 2022. https://www.justice.gov/history/timeline/150-years-department-justice#event-1195101.
Wikipedia, s.v. “United States Department of Justice,” last modified June 2, 2022, 18:13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Justice.
