The Supreme Court undermined and sabotaged the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, enabling Jim Crow

The Supreme Court undermined and sabotaged the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, enabling Jim Crow; and it is now undoing the Civil Rights Act and the Affordable Care Act: "The nation’s founding document is no match for a dedicated majority of justices committed to circumventing its guarantees," writes Adam Serwer.

Why wasn’t the Fourteenth Amendment enough to prevent Jim Crow? Why was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 needed, and the additional measure of protected class? The Supreme Court undid the equal protection clause, preparing the way for Jim Crow, by ruling in 1873 (_United States v. Cruikshank_) that “the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state.”

Adam Serwer:

"Seventy-two men were ultimately indicted for their role in the Colfax massacre [over 100 black people slaughtered], charged under the Enforcement Acts of 1870, which were passed to help the federal government suppress the Ku Klux Klan. But their convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the federal government lacked the authority to charge the perpetrators. Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote that the United States had not clearly stated that the accused, in slaughtering more than 100 black men, had “committed the acts complained of with a design to deprive the injured persons of their rights on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, argued the Grant-appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, because the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state. “The only obligation resting upon the United States is to see that the States do not deny the right,” Waite wrote. “This the amendment guarantees, but no more. The power of the national government is limited to the enforcement of this guaranty.” … 

"This decision, in United States v. Cruikshank, the legal historian Lawrence Goldstone argues, provided a guide for the campaign of racist terrorism that would suppress the black vote and enshrine a white man’s government for generations. “The Colfax defendants would have had to announce their plan to violate their victims’ rights on account of the color of their skin in order to be culpable,” Goldstone wrote. “Justice Bradley had thus communicated to any Redeemer with violent intent that to avoid federal prosecution one need simply to keep one’s mouth shut before committing murder.”

Grant was enraged that “insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers … and the so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice.”" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption-court/566963/