Charles Lane, who formerly covered the Supreme Court for the Washington Post, has a book titled The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. The subject is the 1873 murder of scores of black men in Colfax, Louisiana, the prosecution of that case by the U.S. Attorney, and the Supreme Court's reversal in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875). Cruikshank is one of the cases near the end of Reconstruction that effectively gutted the Fourteenth Amendment for a time. Guest-blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy, Chuck has posts on the book and the case here, here, here, here, and here.

The case is a reminder that the worst violations of equal protection of the laws have come not in prosecutions but in failures to prosecute.