Harper’s Weekly, January 27, 1872; Library of Congress
On Thursday, March 30, several disguised men swarmed into the house where McBride stayed and roused him from bed at gunpoint. The leader said, “You God damned Yankee, come out here.”
Instantly, McBride realized these men had not come to whip him. They intended to kill him. McBride assessed the situation quickly: Several Klansmen guarded the three doors to the house. Two others stood astride the window in his room. Realizing he had no chance at the doors, he dove between the two men, through the open window.
Outside, McBride bolted toward a dark cabin, where he knew a black man owned a double-barreled shotgun. McBride dashed inside, but before he had a chance to grab the shotgun, several Klansmen plowed through the doorway and yanked him outside. With their bowie knives and the butt ends of pistols, they struck him, pushing him down the road to an open field.
The Klan leader ordered Cornelius to remove his nightshirt. When Cornelius refused, another man struck him on the head with a pistol, knocking him down. Other men yanked off his nightshirt and began to whip McBride with tied bundles of black gum switches, a kind of stick that stings and raises the flesh. McBride kicked and fought as they whipped him, cutting his back from his neck to his hips. When they stopped, the leader said, “Shooting is too good for this fellow. We will hang him.”
In the moonlight, Cornelius spotted a noose suspended from a tree. Mustering his strength, he sprang at the leader and knocked him down. He sped off in the darkness, leaping over a fence and continuing toward the woods. “They swore terribly and fired at me, and the shots went over my head, scattering the leaves all around me,” said McBride.
He hid in the woods until he felt safe to make his way to a neighbor’s house, where he found refuge. “The blood was running down my back,” said McBride.
The next day, Cornelius McBride slung a gun over his shoulder and went to school. Defying the Klan, Cornelius held the examination, as promised, as if nothing had happened. For the next several weeks, he slept in the woods. He was not attacked again.
A young girl teaches her grandfather on a Georgia plantation.
Alfred Waud, Harper’s Weekly, November 3, 1866; Library of Congress
By the time the Freedmen’s Bureau Act expired in 1872, the organization had more than 9,000 teachers working in over 4,000 schools. More than 250,000 black children were attending school. Admittedly, this number is low, reflecting just 12 percent of the 1.7 million school-aged Southern black children at the time. Comparatively speaking, however, the number is not much lower than the percentage of Southern white children who attended school.
The number reveals that there was far more work to be done in the South—more schools to be built and more teachers to be hired and more opportunities to be made for children to attend school. But the number also reveals that blacks and whites had joined together to lay the groundwork for public education. Despite the Ku Klux Klan’s attempt to halt the spread of public schools and the education of black children, students were learning to read and to write and to do sums from brave teachers, and at night the children were teaching their parents and grandparents.
“It was a whole race trying to go to school,” noted Booker T. Washington, the former slave who became recognized as the United States’ foremost black educator. “Few were too young and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.”
“The strongest chains with which the body of a man can be bound are the chains of ignorance. You keep a man ignorant and you’ve got him. You don’t have to stand guard over him with a shotgun. You don’t have to lock him up at night. Just turn him aloose and he isn’t going any place.”
—William Pickens, born in 1881 to liberated slaves. Pickens graduated from Talladega College, Alabama, and Yale University, Connecticut, and was a foreign language professor and author.
CHAPTER 8
“They Must Have Somebody to Guide Them”
To see him, it wouldn’t seem as though a man such as fifty-two-year-old Elias Hill could pose a threat to white supremacy. Unable to walk or crawl since struck with an illness, possibly polio, at the age of seven, Elias remained about the size of a child, with withered arms and legs.
Family and friends helped to feed and care for Elias. They carried him wherever he went. A friend fitted an armchair on a carryall, a light farm wagon equipped with springs, and in the years following surrender, the dwarf-like Elias Hill could be seen jouncing over the rough country roads, gripping the armchair with his gnarled fingers as his driver drove the horses. They traveled from church to church in upcountry South Carolina, where Elias preached the Gospel and sermons on universal love and scriptural salvation to fellow black Baptists. His bones ached and his jaw was so stiff, it hurt him to move it, and yet he had, it was said, a sonorous voice that rang over the countryside.
Elias Hill was a circuit preacher, meaning that he officiated at several churches, traveling a circuit, or circle, to preach. To Elias and the people he served, freedom meant the freedom to preach and to worship as they pleased. No longer would they have to fear the patrollers as they sneaked out of the slave quarters to worship secretly at night. No longer would they have to sit in segregated pews or in the balconies of their master’s churches. No longer would they have to listen to the sermons of a white minister hired by slave owners or a slave owner himself, telling them to be loyal and obedient.
Believing that Christian slaves would be easier to control, some plantation owners erected small chapels like the one depicted here. In this engraving, a black preacher, a slave himself, ministers to his fellow slaves under the watchful eye of the planter or white minister on a South Carolina plantation.
Illustrated London News, December 5, 1863; Beck Center, Emory College, Atlanta, Georgia
In the years after slavery, many black Americans turned to their churches for comfort and strength. Preachers such as Elias Hill and ordained ministers played a vital role in Reconstruction politics, as they devoted themselves to organizing their communities both spiritually and politically. With the guidance of these men, the churches became the center of the black community and the lives of the freed men, women, and children.
Eager to form their own churches and worship openly among their own people, tens of thousands of freed people withdrew from the bi-racial churches of their former masters. Some held temporary worship services in a “brush arbor,” also called a “hush arbor.” The arbor was made by cutting a clearing in the woods and cross-tying trees together to fashion the leafy tops into a canopy. Some held services in abandoned warehouses or in one another’s cabins. Some shared worship space in white churches.
Some freed people fought for ownership of the white churches they had built as slaves, but most black communities built their own churches, scrimping and saving to do so and to pay the salaries of their own preachers. Most founded Baptist and Methodist churches. Of the Methodist churches, the African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches attracted the most members.
Some preachers, including Elias Hill, had been slaves at one time. Others were free blacks, often ordained ministers, who had come from the North as missionaries. Often the most educated men in the black community, the preachers acted as a liaison between the workers and the Freedmen’s Bureau and white employers, explaining labor contracts to those freed people who could not read. Many also taught school and were active in the Republican Union Leagues. In addition to preaching, Elias Hill taught reading and writing at a poor black school and served as president of the York County Council of the Republican Union League.
To the black community, the church was more than a church: It was a movement to transform the mind and the spirit of the former slaves. Ministers worked tirelessly to instill in them a sense of racial pride, to encourage them to realize their full potential, and to organize them politically. They saw the things their people needed: work, land, schools, housing, and equal treatment before the law. But in order to achieve t
hese things, they knew that black Americans—and they were Americans—needed the vote.
From the pulpit, many ministers spoke out loudly on spiritual and political matters. “It is impossible to separate them here,” said the Reverend Charles H. Pearce, a former slave who had purchased his freedom in Maryland, came to Florida as a missionary, and held several political offices after the war. “A man in this state cannot do his whole duty as a minister except he looks out for the political interests of his people. They are like a ship out at sea, and they must have somebody to guide them.”
Another former slave humorously noted the political sway that black preachers held among black women. “De colored preachers sure got up de excitement ’mongst de colored women folks,” recalled Mack Taylor from South Carolina. “They ’vise them to have nothin’ to do wid their husbands if they didn’t go to de ’lection box and vote . . . I didn’t go, and my wife wouldn’t sleep wid me for six months.”
At this camp meeting, or revival, black Southerners have gathered to listen to sermons, praise God, and sing gospel hymns. In 1871, Lewis Thompson, a Zion Methodist Church minister in Goshen Hill, South Carolina, found a wide coffin-shaped notice posted to his wooden stand (similar to the one shown here). The note read: “You are not to preach here: a colored man is not to preach in this township K.K.K.” Thompson ignored the threat and was later found dead.
Harper’s Weekly, August 10, 1872; Library of Congress
Many ministers performed civic duties, from registering voters to becoming active in the Republican Union League. Although most black ministers didn’t aspire to political office, at least 240 black ministers, including some who came South as missionaries after the war, were elected to Southern legislative seats during Reconstruction.
As white Southerners watched the number of black churches grow rapidly and realized the political influence of their ministers, they continued to worry about being outvoted by the freedmen—or worse. Some were also haunted by an event that took place thirty years before the war, in 1831, when a preacher slave named Nat Turner led a large-scale slave uprising in Virginia. In an attempt to encourage slaves to fight for their freedom, the deeply religious Turner and his followers led a revolt, killing more than sixty white men, women, and children.
The militia captured and executed Turner and sixteen followers, but the rebellion terrorized slaveholders and other whites. Southern lawmakers passed even stricter laws, and slaveholders supervised the religious lives of their slaves very closely.
In 1831 Nat Turner, a slave and religious leader, led his followers to revolt against their slave owners, killing more than sixty whites. In retribution, white men in parts of Virginia and nearby North Carolina killed more than one hundred black people.
Library of Congress
With the Turner rebellion in mind, many white Southerners didn’t want black ministers and preachers sermonizing about politics, racial equality, and other matters of civil rights to the freed people. Many believed that these men should serve as spiritual advisors only. “When they have confined themselves entirely to their duties,” said H. D. D. Twiggs, a Georgia judge and former lieutenant in the Confederate army, “I think there has been no difficulty.”
Many white Southerners also feared the spontaneous and emotional worship style practiced in the black churches, They worried that such venting of emotion—the singing and clapping, the shouts and cries, the dancing and stamping of feet—might lead the freed people to rise up against white people and seek revenge for the years of bondage and other injustices.
The black worship style evolved into its own distinct form of religious expression, as shown here in this caricatured illustration. Modern scholars describe the worship style as the Christian gospel reworked through African religious beliefs.
Illustrated News, April 30, 1853; Library of Congress
Even Northern white clergymen and missionaries found themselves appalled at the lack of decorum. These whites failed to understand that the former slaves had developed a Christianity that reflected their circumstances, experiences, and worldview, as well as honored their African heritage.
In some parts of the South, fearful whites spread rumors about things that supposedly happened in black churches. In Mobile, Alabama, for instance, a newspaper accused a black preacher of inciting his parishioners to commit “murder, arson, and violence” against whites. “The preacher made frequent allusions to some great conflict which is yet to come off between the whites and the negroes in which the former race is to be exterminated by the latter,” claimed the newspaper informant. “He frequently cried out, ‘In this hour of blood, who will stand by me?’ And his question ever met with most enthusiastic replies of ‘I will, bless God!’” The preacher’s office was attacked by whites, but the preacher, who was away, was unharmed.
Some Southern whites felt conflicted over who should be allowed to preach to black people. A nineteen-year-old Klansman from North Carolina explained the mixed feelings of his den: “Some of them said they [black people] ought to be allowed to have a preacher of their own,” said James Grant. “And that the whites ought not to be allowed to preach to them. Some of them thought they [black people] ought not to be allowed to preach at all.”
Throughout the South, the Ku Klux Klan monitored black churches, reporting on the sermons back at the den. In Jacksonville, Florida, Klansmen disguised themselves as women and attended the services. Other times, they stood behind trees across from the church and blatantly shot at black churchgoers.
The Klan also targeted black churches to prevent blacks from holding political meetings at night. On one moonlit night in Tuskegee, Alabama, Klansmen shot and killed three black men and wounded five or six others. The men, church stewards, were holding a late-night meeting to discuss the purchase of a church bell when shots rang out and bullets sprayed their meeting room. The gunmen were never caught.
In many parts of the South, the Ku Klux Klan burned black churches that housed political meetings. “Nearly every colored church and school-house in the county was burned up,” noted a white man living in Lee County, Alabama. To protect the churches they had worked hard to build, some freedmen asked Republican candidates to refrain from holding meetings in their churches.
The Klan also targeted white ministers who didn’t share their views on race. In Alabama, several Klansmen broke into Moses Sullivan’s bedroom and at gunpoint forced the white minister outside, where they held a trial, accusing him of favoring racial equality. Finding him guilty, they beat him severely with hickory sticks. The final blow caught Sullivan above the forehead, breaking the bone. The beating was a warning, they told him. The next time, they promised, they would kill him. Sullivan and his family fled. It took him months to recover from the beating.
In Huntsville, Alabama, Klansmen drove blacks from Saturday-night worship services. The two men pictured here are modeling Klan disguises captured after the melee that Klansmen called a “parade,” that Harper’s Weekly called “a line of battle,” and that modern historians call a riot. The outrage left two victims dead and two others wounded. Four Klansmen were arrested but allowed to escape by local authorities.
Harper’s Weekly, December 19, 1868; Library of Congress
Some of the greatest Klan violence against the black church and its preachers took place in York County, South Carolina, where an estimated three out of four white men, including two constables and a mayor, belonged to the forty or more dens.
On September 1, 1868, Alabama Kukluxers published this death threat to a white Southern Republican and a Northern minister from Ohio in the Tuskaloosa Independent Monitor. Cyclops Ryland Randolph edited the local newspaper.
Tuskaloosa Independent Monitor, September 1, 1868
When the fall 1870 election results showed that Democrats had lost by five hundred votes, the York County Klan exploded with a vengeance, blaming, among other things, black clergy for encouraging their congregants to vote Republican.
The Klan began riding a
weekly circuit. Some nights, they fired their guns randomly into cabins. Other nights, they dragged their victims outside, where they beat them, burned them, mutilated them, and murdered them. Some victims were white, but most were black men, women, and children.
The Kukluxers warned their victims not to report the attacks; if they did, they threatened, they would never reach the courthouse alive. They warned witnesses against testifying, threatening bodily harm or that the Klan would have them arrested for perjury.
The violence that drove South Carolina freed people from their homes occurred throughout the South. Here, Louisiana blacks hide from armed whites in a swamp.
Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873. Library of Congress
Hundreds of terrified black men, women, and children fled their cabins to hide in the woods and the swamps. They slept out in the cold and rain, abandoning their homes and crops, afraid to spend two nights in the same place.
To quell the violence and instill order, South Carolina’s Republican governor, Robert K. Scott, chartered several black militia companies and armed them with muskets and rifles and ammunition. In York County, where Elias Hill lived, three black militia companies patrolled the roads, stopping white men to inquire about their business.
Some black men waged a war of retribution, setting fire to property that belonged to white people, burning their barns and gin houses where cotton was stored. “There was scarcely a night passed without a fire in some direction,” explained Milus Carroll, a twenty-two-year-old Yorkville Klansman at the time.
They Called Themselves the K.K.K. Page 9