316
Stevens, J., dissenting
of Congress.13 We need not exceed those bounds to apply the statute to these facts.
The facts and decision in Griffin are especially instructive here. In overruling an important part of Collins, the Court found that the conduct the plaintiffs alleged—a Mississippi highway attack on a white man suspected of being a civil rights worker and the two black men who were passengers in his car—was emblematic of the antiabolitionist violence that § 1985(3) was intended to prevent. A review of the legislative history demonstrated, on the one hand, that Congress intended the coverage of § 1985(3) to reach purely private conspiracies, but on the other hand, that it wanted to avoid the "constitutional shoals" that would lie in the path of a general federal tort law punishing an ordinary assault and battery committed by two or more persons. The racial motivation for the battery committed by the defendants in the case before the Court placed their conduct "close to the core of the coverage intended by Congress." 403 U. S., at 103. It therefore satisfied the limiting construction that the Court placed on the reference to a deprivation of "equal" privileges and immunities in the first clause of the Act. The Court explained that construction:
"The constitutional shoals that would lie in the path of interpreting § 1985(3) as a general federal tort law can be avoided by giving full effect to the congressional purpose—by requiring, as an element of the cause of action, the kind of invidiously discriminatory motivation stressed by the sponsors of the limiting amendment. See the remarks of Representatives Willard and Shellabarger, [Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 1st Sess., App. 100 (1871)]. The language requiring intent to deprive of equal protection, or equal privileges and immunities, means that there must be some racial, or perhaps other-13 The Court's caution in this regard echoes the recorded debates of the enacting Congress itself. See id., at 99-102.
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