Author Archive | Charles Lane

The just concluded MLK assassination anniversary was a somber event everywhere, and especially in our nation’s capital, my hometown, which burned — figuratively and literally — in the wake of James Earl Ray’s evil deed. I can remember those days from my childhood, and they’re not happy memories. It took the city pretty much until […]

I’ve received an unexpected but gratifying outpouring of interest in my notion of a proper memorial for James Roswell Beckwith, the prosecutor-hero of my new book, The Day Freedom Died. I’ll be trying to organize something appropriate in the months ahead. It got me thinking: Beckwith is hardly the only Reconstruction-era figure whose efforts on […]

You have probably never heard of the hero of my book, The Day Freedom Died. His name is James Roswell Beckwith, and he prosecuted the Colfax Massacre alone (not by himself with a couple of clerks — alone), defying death threats in majority-white-supremacist New Orleans, back-channel obstructionism from Washington and the sheer physical difficulty of […]

As promised, I’d like to go into the 13th and 15th Amendment issues in Cruikshank, by way of suggesting why Justice Bradley’s ruling as circuit justice in the case was so mistaken — legally, not just morally. First, consider the indictment by US Attorney J.R. Beckwith. It’s hard to summarize a sprawling, 32-count document which […]

In response to an astute comment: yes, I made a mistake in the citation for U.S. v. Cruikshank. It is 96 92 U.S. 542. My apologies. Absolutely everything else I have to say is completely correct and perfect, however.

I’ll get back to the role of the 13th and 15th amendments in the Supreme Court’s erroneous Cruikshank decision. But for now, I just wanted to add another piece of interesting evidence regarding the intent of the framers of the 14th, as well as the other two. One of the little nuggets you’ll find in […]

Thanks for the comments on my first post. I’d like to take up Hans Bader’s defense of Cruikshank, because it concisely gets to the heart of the matter: the state action requirement found by the Court in that case. My book goes into this history in some detail, because it is crucial to understand that […]

[Reposted, with comments now working (I hope).-EV] I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the interest blawgers and other reviewers have shown so far in The Day Freedom Died, my new book about a little-known massacre of more than 60 African Americans in 1873 — and the ill-fated federal effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. The […]