The U.S. Justice Department Was Formed Under President Grant To Suppress The KKK

After the end of the Civil War, members of the former Confederacy created the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate and suppress freed African Americans in states under military government rule. Most of the time sheriffs in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Flordia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama sympathetic to the KKK cause, would not arrest their members and jurors, from local towns, would not convict the ones who were arrested.

To address the grave issues of hundreds of Klan members evading punishment for their crimes, Grant proposed creating a federal justice department to enforce federal civil rights laws.

Attorney General Amos T. Akerman indicted thousands of Ku Klux Klan members, and was instrumental in helping end the first resurgent of the Klan.