The Constitution Doesn’t Guarantee Your Anonymity

I’m a little confused by some of the responses to the arrest of self-styled anti-racism protesters in Newnan, Ga., earlier this week for violating the state’s law against going masked in public. Observers seem somewhere between troubled and outraged that a statute originally enacted to deal with the Ku Klux Klan should be used against people who were marching non-violently against (in this case) self-proclaimed Nazis. But were the law applied selectively, hitting only racist targets, it would be blatantly unconstitutional.

Statutes that prohibit wearing masks in public go back to the decade after the Civil War, when Reconstruction authorities were searching for a way to deal with the terrorism of what historians call the first Ku Klux Klan. By the end of the 19th century, the group had died out, but a second Klan arose in the 1920s, leading to pressure on state governments to enact anti-masking laws. The Georgia version was adopted in 1951. Here’s the current text, found in Title 16 of the state code: