April 1873

On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, in Colfax, Grant Parish, Louisiana, a white paramilitary force of 150 men armed with a cannon attacked a group of Black men defending the courthouse against a Democratic attempt to seize local government. After the Black defenders surrendered, the attackers executed 50–100 prisoners in cold blood. Total Black deaths ranged from 60 to over 150. Three white men died. It remains the deadliest racial massacre in post-Civil War American history. Federal prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts led to convictions, but the Supreme Court's ruling in US v. Cruikshank (1876) overturned them, holding that the 14th Amendment did not authorize federal prosecution of private citizens — ending federal protection of Black Americans from mob violence.

In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the first Supreme Court interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the Court ruled 5–4 that the Amendment protected only a narrow category of 'privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States' (such as access to federal offices and ports), not the broad civil rights that were subject to state regulation. The decision effectively bifurcated citizenship and stripped the 14th Amendment of much of its potential to protect freedpeople from state-sponsored discrimination. Justice Miller's majority opinion ensured that most civil rights protection remained with the states — which had no interest in protecting Black citizens.

A white militia murders scores of Black freedmen in Louisiana, a turning point against Reconstruction.

The Supreme Court's first reading of the Fourteenth Amendment guts its "privileges or immunities" clause, weakening federal protection of rights.