up of mainly blacks. Amos T. Akerman was largely involved with the prosecutions of the Klansmen. He worked to make America aware of Klan violence and how much of a problem it was becoming. His work led to trials and to jail sentences of a few hundred Klan members. Many others who were put on trial either fled or were only given a warning. By 1872, the Klan as an organization had been officially broken. Enforcement Acts were a series of acts, but it was not until the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the third Enforcement Act, that their regulations to protect blacks, and to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution were really enforced and followed. It was only after the creation of the third Enforcement Act that trials were conducted, and perpetrators were convicted for any crimes they had committed in violation of the Enforcement Acts. Judicial interpretations After the Colfax massacre in Louisiana, the federal government brought a civil rights case against nine men (out of 97 indicted) who were accused of paramilitary activity intended to stop black people from voting. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Court ruled that the federal government did not have the authority to prosecute the men because the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments provide only for redress against state actors. However, in Ex Parte Yarbrough (1884) the Court allowed individuals who were not state actors to be prosecuted because Article I Section 4 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate federal elections. In Hodges v. United States (1906) the Court addressed a possible Thirteenth Amendment rationale for the Enforcement Acts, and found that the federal government did not have the authority to punish a group of men for interfering with black workers through whitecapping. Hodges v. United States would be overruled in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. some 50 years later, stating for the first time since Reconstruction that the federal government could criminalize racist acts by private actors. Later uses In 1964, the United States Department of Justice charged eighteen individuals under the Enforcement Act of 1870, with conspiring to deprive Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman of their civil rights by murder because Mississippi officials refused to prosecute their killers for murder, a state crime. While the Supreme Court limited the Act, they did not fully repeal it. The resulting