Read the Introduction
The phrase that gives this book its name is not a slogan and not a figure of speech. It is the statute's own term, printed in the enrolled text of an Act passed in April 1866 and carried forward, in nearly the same words, into two provisions of the United States Code that stand today. The phrase is under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom. Congress wrote it into a criminal section in 1866, wrote it again into a civil section in 1871, and the officers who enforce the law and the courts that try it have used it ever since to describe the officer who breaks his word while wearing the office.
This book asks one question and follows it wherever the record leads. Where does the right an American holds against an officer actually come from, and what does the statute that created it say in its own words? The answer is a chain of enacted text, and the chain can be walked without leaving the Government's own pages: the enrollment of an Act, the codification that renumbered it, the section of the Code that carries it now, and the decisions that have construed each link. Every link in this book carries its own page. Where a link has not been proved, the book says so in the sentence that uses it, and it does not borrow the authority of the links around it.
The root is the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Act of April 9, 1866, ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27, and the enrolled page prints its own head: an Act to protect all persons in the United States in their civil rights, and to furnish the means of their vindication. That page also prints, in its own words, that the bill was returned by the President with his objections and passed again by two-thirds of each chamber. A root that carries two-thirds majorities behind it is a different thing from a signature, and the book reads it as what it is. Its first section declares who the citizens are, gives them the same right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, to be parties and to give evidence, gives them the right to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and closes by forbidding any law or custom to the contrary. The same Act's second section makes it a misdemeanor to deprive any inhabitant of a right secured by the Act under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation or custom.
Three enacted acts carry this book, and behind each of them is its own enrolled page. First stands the Act of April 9, 1866, ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27, the root, whose own head and whose override record were read at the ink for this book. Next comes the Act of May 31, 1870, ch. 114, 16 Stat. 144, which reenacted the 1866 Act by name in its section 18, restated the equal-rights clause in its section 16, supplied the conspiracy provision no earlier act had carried in its section 6, and added the word alien to the criminal clause in its section 17. Third is the Act of April 20, 1871, ch. 22, 17 Stat. 13, whose first section reaches any person who, under color of any law of any State, causes another to be deprived of a right secured by the Constitution, and whose popular name is a nickname rather than anything its enrolled page prints.
Between those acts and the Code stands one more enacted instrument, and it is the reason this book can cite a code section at all. The Act of June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 683, enacted title 18 into positive law from end to end, and 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242 stand in it at 62 Stat. 696 with 18 USC 912 at 62 Stat. 742. An earlier codification of the criminal law, the Act of March 4, 1909, ch. 321, 35 Stat. 1088, had gathered the penal statutes into a code of its own, and its sections 19 and 20 at 35 Stat. 1092 are the immediate enrolled antecedents of the two sections this book treats in Part Three. Out of that title the chain of enacted text runs from 1866 through 1870 and 1871, through the codification of 1909, into the title Congress enacted in 1948, and out into the code sections in force today.
A word on how a citation is written here, because the form carries a fact. Each act is cited by its enrollment first: its date, its chapter, its volume and page of the Statutes at Large, and the designation its own page prints where it prints one. The code section follows as the current location of the same words. For the 1866, 1870 and 1871 Acts the pages print no public-law bracket and no bill number, so this book names the chapter and the page and says plainly that the designation commonly written for those Acts is a later convenience. On the 1909 Code the page prints its own bracket, and the book carries it. A reader can then check any sentence in this book against the same page it was drawn from, and can see for himself where a modern register has added a form the ink does not carry.
Part One reads that Act as the record carries it, and Part Two follows the chain into the Code. The property clause is the firmest link in the chain, because the codification note printed behind 42 USC 1982 names the Act of April 9, 1866, its chapter, its section and its Statutes at Large page. Through the reenactment of May 31, 1870 and the Revised Statutes the equal-rights clause reaches 42 USC 1981, and there the evidence is stronger than a note, because the live section's own words carry the vocabulary of the 1870 page. Part Three walks what the courts have done with each link, Part Four takes the facts that answer to each clause, and Part Five carries the one construction in this book that is the author's own, printed under his name and labeled as his and not as law.
Honesty about the limits belongs here rather than at the end. Two derivations that a great deal of writing on this subject asserts are not proved, and this book does not assert them. The Code's own revision note for 18 USC 242 traces that section to the Criminal Code of 1909 and stops there, and the enrolled page of 1909 names nothing earlier than itself. Its counterpart under 18 USC 241 stops in the same place. The link that would carry both chains across the gap is the Revised Statutes, the codification that stood between the Reconstruction Acts and the 1909 Code, and no volume of the Revised Statutes was read for this book. So the book says what the pages prove, marks the two derivations open, and names the book that would close them. A chain that marks its open links is worth more than one that hides them, and the difference matters most to the person who intends to stand on the chain in a courtroom.
Three cautions belong with the limits. The first is about dates: figures and citations in this book belong to the sources they came from, and a statute cited here is cited as it read on the day its page was read. A second caution concerns reading, and it is the discipline the whole book runs on: a citation reaches a page here only after it has been read at its source, and a quotation intended for a filing should be read against a printed copy of the source first. The third is about scope, and it is the one most often lost in writing on this subject. A criminal provision against impersonating a federal officer reaches impersonation of officers and employees of the United States and does not reach a state or county official acting in an actual state office. Where the facts involve a state officer, the vehicles that fit are 18 USC 242, 42 USC 1983, and the state's own law of tort, and the last chapter of this book says so in terms.
Nothing in this book turns on a claim of status, on a redemption, on a charter, or on a filing that is said to change what a person is. Those families of argument have their own authorities and their own rules, and they are not used on any page here. What this book does is smaller and considerably more durable. It reads a statute, it follows that statute into the code, it reads the cases that have construed each link, and it reports where the proof stops. What gives the doctrine teeth is the statute itself, and the page is where that statute is read.
Built to be used that way, each chapter opens on the text it is about and quotes it whole, so that a reader can carry the page to any other reader and have the same words in hand. Every chapter names the section or the page it draws from, so that a claim resting on it can be checked by anybody with access to the volumes. Each closes by stating the boundary of what it establishes, because a right claimed beyond its words is a right handed away. That is the whole method, and it applies equally to the Act of 1866, to the code sections that carry it today, and to the decisions that have construed them. What Congress enacted is still the measure. This book walks the chain from there.