FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

**Ted Hayes Puts SCOTUS on Notice:

Has the Supreme Court Drifted Away from the Civil Rights Act of 1866?**

Los Angeles, California — Ted Hayes, longtime civil rights activist, homelessness advocate, and public figure known as Mr. Citizen Patriot, has sent a formal constitutional package to the Supreme Court of the United States, warning that the original purpose of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 may have been blurred by generations of judicial drift.

Hayes’s package—sent to Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and copied to the full Court—includes a formal letter, a sworn affidavit, and a Notice and Demand for Constitutional Consideration. At the center of his message is a direct challenge: whether the Court has remained faithful to the original remedial purpose of the 1866 law passed in the aftermath of slavery, or whether that purpose has been gradually expanded, abstracted, and distanced from the very people for whom it was first intended.

“This is not just about technical law,” Hayes said. “This is about whether the blood, bondage, and suffering that gave rise to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 are being remembered truthfully. You cannot talk about federal citizenship, Reconstruction, or equal protection while ignoring the original wound the law was written to address.”

Hayes argues that the constitutional problem begins with a failure of execution. In his view, the chain runs from President Andrew Johnson’s resistance to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, to later Supreme Court decisions that may have loosened the law from its original anchor. He says the issue is not whether citizenship matters, but whether America has been honest about why the 1866 Act was created in the first place.

“We keep talking about the Constitution in general terms,” Hayes said. “But Reconstruction was not general. It was specific. It was a remedy. It was written in response to a historic crime. And when the original beneficiaries of that remedy disappear inside broad legal abstraction, something has gone wrong.”

Hayes, who has spent decades living and working among the homeless in Los Angeles, says his action is both constitutional and moral. He describes it as a call not only to the Court, but to the country—especially Black America, legal scholars, clergy, journalists, and citizens who believe the unfinished business of Reconstruction still matters.

“This is not an attack on the Court,” Hayes said. “It is a warning to the nation. If the Court has drifted from the original foundation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, then the people have a duty to speak. Respectfully. Publicly. Fearlessly.”

Hayes says the release of the package is part of a broader effort to force renewed national attention to the real meaning of federal citizenship, the true structure of Reconstruction, and the unfinished covenant between America and the descendants of chattel slavery.

Media Contact

Ted Hayes
aka Mr. Citizen Patriot
Guardian of the Republic
Los Angeles, California