Exactly 150 years ago this month, three days of riots in Memphis, Tennessee, left nearly 50 dead, scores more injured, over 90 buildings wrecked, and black residents scattered and terrified. The unrest started with a rumor of black-on-white crime: Black soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering on the city’s south bluffs had allegedly killed white policemen attempting to arrest an African American soldier. Less than a month earlier, the United States Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, ostensibly guaranteeing citizens equal protection under the law and outlawing race-based discrimination.
The Memphis Massacre, as the event came to be known, shows how lack of federal oversight and enforcement can make a mockery of even the most robust civil-rights laws. Former Confederates could murder, rob, and rape African Americans with impunity. Although much has changed since the end of the Civil War, the fact remains that political violence undermines the democratic process even where civil-rights protections are supposedly in place.
[For more of this story, written by Calvin Schermerhorn, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...ession-today/481737/]
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