They Called Themselves the K.K.K.

by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

  But a Harper’s Weekly reporter blamed rumors that fed upon prejudice for escalating the violence. “During the evening the wildest and most exaggerated reports soon spread throughout the city,” wrote the reporter. “Every communicator of the intelligence of the fight told a different story. Each rumor placed a worse aspect upon the affair than the preceding one, and only served to develop the pent-up prejudice against the negro.”

  During times of crisis or uncertainty, people often resort to rumors, or stories circulated without facts to confirm the truth, to help them cope with anxieties and fears. Of all the rumors, racial and hate rumors are considered the most dangerous because they are divisive and create hostility that can lead to violence.

  In view of the Memphis riot and other reports of racial violence, the six men in Pulaski may have spent their evenings discussing the need for patrols. Many white Southerners obsessed about the safety of their families and the security of their property. Many believed that white women weren’t safe as long as black men roamed free. These people chose not to remember that many of these same women had taken care of themselves, managing farms and plantations and family businesses, as the men marched off to war.

  The six men may have spent their evenings reminiscing about the days before the war or rehashing their war exploits, as soldiers often do. But all that is known is that one May evening in 1866, as the men lounged about the law office, John Lester said suddenly to his friends, “Boys, let us get up a club or society.”

  The other men quickly agreed and got to work, dividing into two committees. Calvin Jones and Richard Reed were to select a name while the others prepared a formal set of rules.

  A week later, the six men met again. Calvin Jones and Richard Reed suggested that the group call themselves Kuklos, a Greek word that means “circle” or “band.” Most likely, the men were influenced by Kuklos Adelphon, a popular Southern college fraternity that had disbanded during the war.

  The other men liked the suggestion, but they didn’t find “Kuklos” mysterious enough. For fraternities that have Greek names, the name often has a secret meaning known only to its initiated members. Perhaps this knowledge inspired James Crowe, who offered a deviation, saying, “Call it ku klux.”

  Someone else suggested adding the word “klan,” a word also meaning “band” or “circle,” and so they did. In this way, the name Ku Klux Klan was cobbled together, a redundant, alliterative name that meant, simply and ridiculously, “circle circle.”

  Years later, John Lester would boast about the occult-like power of the mysterious name. “There was a weird potency in the very name Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “The sound of it is suggestive of bones rattling together.” Had they chosen another name, Lester claimed, the group would never have grown beyond Pulaski.

  Several nights after the second meeting, the newly formed Ku Klux Klan met at a large home where one of the men was house-sitting for a family friend. Here they developed rules, closely patterned after the Kuklos Adelphon fraternity. They wrote a vow of secrecy and fashioned secret rites and rituals such as passwords, handshakes, a secret code, and the hazing of new members.

  They also created mysterious-sounding titles that assigned a job to each of the six men: Frank McCord was the Grand Cyclops, or president; John Kennedy was Grand Magi, or vice president; James Crowe was Grand Turk, a master of ceremonies; Calvin Jones and John Lester were Night Hawks, or messengers; and Richard Reed was a Lictor, or sentinel, who guarded the den.

  Their organizational work done, the Klansmen raided a linen closet. They pulled white sheets over their heads, cutting two holes for eyes, and another for their mouth. Then they raced outside and leaped astride their horses and swooped through the town streets, whooping and moaning and shrieking like ghosts.

  The Ku Klux Klan was born.

  At this mansion in Pulaski, Tennessee, the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan developed the rules and rites of the secret order.

  James Welch Patton, Unionism and Reconstruction in Tennessee, 1860–1869; reprinted with permission from the University of North Carolina Press

  “There may be in their conduct some things to regret, and some to condemn; but he who gets a full understanding of their surroundings, social, civil and political, if he is not incapable of noble sentiment, will also find many things to awaken his sympathy and call forth his admiration.”

  —John Lester, explaining why the circumstances following surrender justified the formation of the Ku Klux Klan

  CHAPTER 3

  “I Was Killed at Chickamauga”

  Not long after that first midnight gallop, the six men found a large, abandoned house on a hill not far from the main road leading into Pulaski. The house had been wrecked several months earlier by a cyclone. High winds had left storm-torn trees where a magnificent grove once stood.

  “A dreary, desolate uncanny sight it was,” wrote John Lester nearly twenty years later. “But it was, in every way most suitable for a den.”

  Over the coming weeks, the Klan met at their secret den, where they dressed in robes and hoods and then saddled up. They tore through the countryside, crashing summer parties and barbecues—much to the delight of partygoers, who delighted in the silliness of grown men pretending to be ghosts.

  Under a full moon, an elaborately costumed Klansman patrols, his gun drawn.

  From A Fool’s Errand: By One of the Fools, by Albion Winegar Tourgée; Tennessee State Library Archives

  One night the ghostly figures crashed a moonlight picnic in a beech grove outside Pulaski. One of the picnickers, a former Confederate captain, was amused at the long flowing white gowns and tall conical hats decorated with spangles and stars. The hats covered their faces, but from behind the white pasteboard, eyes peered out of punched-out holes. “It was a pretty and showy costume,” observed Daniel Coleman, who lived across the border in Athens, Alabama.

  The shrouded men joined in the dancing, twirling their white robes about them, as if at any moment they might fly. Some romped among the guests, teasing them in low voices that sounded as if they had risen from the grave. Others didn’t speak at all but moved about soundlessly, signaling one another with gestures.

  The biggest secret about the Klan was its secrecy. “Its mysteriousness was the sensation of the hour,” wrote John Lester at a later date. “Every issue of the local paper contained some notice of the strange order.”

  Notices such as this one appeared in the biweekly Pulaski Citizen:

  Take Notice.—The Ku Klux Klan will assemble at their usual place of rendezvous, “The Den,” on Tuesday night next, exactly at the hour of midnight, in costume and bearing the arms of the Klan.

  By or of the Grand Cyclops, G. T.

  The publisher, Luther McCord, claimed to be baffled by the notices he found slipped beneath his office door. “Will any one venture to tell me what it means, if anything at all?” he implored on the front page of the newspaper. “What is a ‘Kuklux Klan,’ and who is this ‘Grand Cyclops’ that issues his mysterious and imperative orders? Can any one give us a little light on this subject?”

  Chances are Luther McCord already knew the answer, considering that his younger brother was the Klansman Frank McCord.

  The newspaper publicity and the antics of the group piqued the curiosity of readers. Soon other Pulaski townsmen asked to join. Some found their way to the den on their own; the disguised horsemen surprised others at night, blindfolding them and spiriting them away to the den, where the secret initiation took place. Most new members were former Confederate soldiers; at least three were local doctors. Like the six original Pulaski members, these men were active in their churches and shared a Scottish-Irish heritage, one long known for the belief in ghosts and spirits.

  The secret initiation consisted of pranks intended to embarrass the initiates. The Grand Cyclops asked the blindfolded initiate absurd questions. Once satisfied with the answers, the Grand Cyclops ordered: “Place him before the royal altar and adorn his head with the regal
crown.”

  A Klansman then led the man to a large mirror, where he placed a huge hat with two enormous donkey ears on the initiate’s head. The novice was then told to recite a couplet from the poem “To a Louse” by the Scottish poet Robert Burns:

  O wad some power the giftie gie us

  To see oursels as ithers see us.

  [O would some power the gift to give us

  To see ourselves as others see us.]

  Once the novice repeated the words, the Klansman untied the blindfold. As the newest member looked in the mirror, he saw himself looking ridiculous in a donkey hat.

  “The den rang with shouts and peals of laughter,” said Lester. “And worse than all, as he looked about him, he saw that he was surrounded by men dressed in hideous garb and masks, so that he could not recognize one of them.”

  That summer, as news of the popular club spread into the surrounding countryside and other parts of Tennessee, more dens quickly sprang up. According to John Lester, the Klansmen were at the time content to play practical jokes on themselves and others. That soon changed, however, when they realized that people who passed along the dark and lonely road near their den were frightened by the robed and hooded Lictors, or sentinels, standing guard outside. When these passersby asked who they were, the grim-looking Lictors replied in eerie voices, “A spirit from the other world. I was killed at Chickamauga.”

  The two-day battle near Georgia’s Chickamauga Creek left 18,454 Confederate soldiers and 16,170 Union soldiers dead. The Confederates won the September 1863 battle.

  Library of Congress

  The Klansmen were pleased to find that this answer especially terrified the freed people. One of the most vicious battles of the war had taken place at Chickamauga, Georgia, just a dozen miles below the southeastern Tennessee border.

  As the stories about the “ghosts” of the Confederate dead spread, many freed people avoided the places that the Klan dens frequented. “In this way, the Klan gradually realized the most powerful devices ever constructed for controlling the ignorant and superstitious were in their hands,” said Lester.

  It was this realization, said Lester, that transformed the social club into a group of bogeymen who controlled the behavior of the former slaves. Just as the slave patrollers had done before Emancipation, the Klan patrolled the country roads, chasing and whipping black people who dared to leave their cabins at night. Some shot their guns at random.

  This photograph of an unidentified slave family was taken before Emancipation, when mounted patrols regulated the movement of black people, free and enslaved, after dark. After the war, the Ku Klux Klan continued to use physical and psychological intimidation, just as the antebellum patrollers had.

  Library of Congress

  For some black families, it became too dangerous to sleep near windows and doors. One woman described how she and her husband and children slept on the cabin floor to shield themselves during the Klan’s raid. “Dem Ku Klux just come all around our house at night time and shoot in de doors and de windows,” said Ann Ulrich Evans, who lived across the western Tennessee border in Missouri. “Dey never bothered anybody in de daytime. Den some time dey come on in de house, tear up everything on de place, claim dey was looking for somebody. And tell us dey hungry ’cause dey ain’t had nothin’ to eat since de battle of Shiloh.”

  Speaking in eerie voices, the Klansmen claimed to be the ghosts of Confederate soldiers who had died in battle and needed water. They paraded about the cabin, showing off “supernatural” powers. They hid collapsible bags beneath their robes that collected the water they pretended to drink by the bucketful. They feigned an ability to dismember, “taking off” an arm or hand that was actually a skeleton bone hidden beneath their sleeves. They stood on stilts or wore tall hats to appear giant-like. Some pretended to be headless, carrying fake heads in their arms.

  It’s possible that some black people believed in supernatural beings that they called haints, or haunts. Many were the children and grandchildren of Africans, mostly from countries along the West African coast. Their parents and grandparents brought the cultural and religious belief called voodoo to America. Those who practiced voodoo honored the spirit of dead ancestors and believed that they could communicate with the dead through shouts, dance, and song. Some freed people who continued to practice voodoo may have feared that dead Confederate soldiers had returned from the grave to seek revenge.

  Slaveholders had long drawn on these African beliefs in order to cultivate a climate of fear among superstitious slaves. Some masters, overseers, and patrollers had dressed up as ghosts to frighten slaves at night and to make them afraid of the dark. For some superstitious slaves, the tricks might have worked.

  Klansmen attack a family. The disguised men would soon become known as “Kukluxers” and their violent acts as “kukluxing” and “kukluxism.”

  Harper’s Weekly, February 24, 1872; Library of Congress

  Most freed people, however, weren’t fooled. They knew that the disguised Kukluxers weren’t dead masters or Confederate soldiers arisen from the grave. What frightened them were the well-armed, disguised white men who burst into their cabins, outnumbering their victims. As one freedman said, “The reason I was scared was, that they came in with their pistols, and I was afraid they would shoot me.”

  Most freed people had learned that it was safer to go along with the white men and pretend to believe their tricks so that the Kukluxers would leave them alone and keep the violence from escalating into beatings, shootings, and lynchings.

  Some modern historians accept John Lester’s account that the six friends formed the Ku Klux Klan purely as a social club and that the club then broadened into a racist organization that regulated the lives of black people. They claim little evidence indicates that the original Pulaski Klan bullied or seriously terrified anyone during the first summer of its existence.

  Other modern historians disagree, saying that kukluxing, as the attacks became called, was nothing new except in name. These historians call it inconceivable that the six men had no racist agenda from the Klan’s inception. The six men had grown up at a time when the whipping and bullying of black people was culturally and socially acceptable—and perfectly legal. It seems more probable that in starting their club, these men were finding a way to continue racist behavior widely accepted during the days of slavery.

  Still, John Lester claimed that the Klan had no political agenda, even though its growing number of dens were filling with former Confederate soldiers and other white Southern men who had supported the Confederacy. The Klansmen were, according to Lester, “a band of regulators . . . trying to protect property and preserve law and order.”

  In 1866, as the first Klan dens formed that summer, politics were growing more heated in Washington, especially after Republicans voted to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau, over President Johnson’s veto.

  Congress had established the Freedmen’s Bureau in the last days of the war as a temporary government agency to help former slaves and other people in the war-torn South. For one year, the government agency was supposed to provide food, medical care, and education for war refugees of both races and to help negotiate wages, working conditions, and contracts between the freed people and their employers. The new bill extended the agency for three additional years and expanded its responsibilities and powers, providing more financial support for schools, hospitals, and other relief. The bill also gave the bureau more power to defend the rights of the freed people.

  The Freedmen’s Bureau angered many Democrats who wanted the federal government to stay out of state and local affairs. They agreed with President Johnson, who claimed that the agency aided black people at the expense of white people, especially Southern landowners, who would be forced to pay higher taxes for the social programs. They also worried that the Freedmen’s Bureau would fill the heads of the former slaves with the notion that they didn’t have to work, that the government would give them handouts.

  “It
will increase the government patronage to an enormous extent,” cried Southern newspapers such as the Pulaski Citizen about the Freedmen’s Bureau. “It will curse the South with a population of idle and pauper freedmen. It gathers blacks in communities where they are to be supported at public expense.”

  An influential Radical Republican, Charles Sumner, is characterized here giving coins to a black child and ignoring the needs of the white girl. Sumner fought for the establishment of equal rights for black Americans.

  Library of Congress

  That fall and winter, President Johnson and Congress continued to clash over ways to rebuild the South. By March 1867, the Republicans wrested control from the president and passed two Reconstruction Acts, which further infuriated the Democrats. (A third Reconstruction Act would follow later that summer, and a fourth act in 1868.)

  Many poor whites also benefited from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Within the first ten months of its creation, nearly eight million rations of flour, corn meal, and sugar were distributed to both black and white families.

  From J. T. Trowbridge’s The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities; Library of Congress

  The first two Reconstruction Acts divided the South into five military districts each under the command of a general. Union troops were stationed throughout the five districts to supervise elections and protect lives and property while new local and state governments were formed. White Southerners protested, arguing that the federal government was utilizing war-time powers in a time of peace.