On June 22, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Act to Establish the Department of Justice into law. On its face, it was a bureaucratic consolidation--an attempt to streamline the legal functions of the federal government. More profoundly, it was a moral commitment: an effort to give federal teeth to the principles enshrined in the Reconstruction amendments. In the wake of civil war, the DOJ emerged to protect equal protection, due process, and the radical belief that the law should serve even those who had just emerged from bondage.

We often forget--or were never taught--that the DOJ's first major mission was fighting domestic terrorism; not today's lone actors but coordinated white supremacist militias: the Ku Klux Klan. In the early 1870s, the DOJ indicted hundreds of Klansmen in states like South Carolina and Mississippi. Federal prosecutors faced open hostility in courtrooms where local juries refused to convict their neighbors. Grant's attorney general Amos T. Akerman knew the odds were against him but pressed forward, even using troops to enforce federal court orders. For a brief time, the Department of Justice was a moral backbone--fragile but resolute.

But the momentum didn't hold. Reconstruction crumbled under political compromise and the North's exhaustion with racial justice. The Klan re-emerged. The DOJ retreated. Over the next century, its role oscillated--at times principled, at others complicit. Under J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, the DOJ surveilled and harassed civil rights leaders, ran COINTELPRO to disrupt political dissent, and treated racial justice movements as threats to national stability.

Even so, the DOJ was also responsible for enforcing desegregation orders, dismantling voter........

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