They Called Themselves the K.K.K.
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1869
February. Congress approves Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees the vote to all male citizens regardless of color or previous condition of servitude.
July. Freedmen’s Bill expires. The Freedmen’s Bureau continues its educational programs until 1872.
1870
March. Congress passes Enforcement Act to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. The act contains criminal penalties for those individuals who interfere with a citizen’s right to vote.
March. Congress ratifies the Fifteenth Amendment.
U.S. Census reveals a white population of 39,818,449 and a black population of 4,880,009 (12 percent). Many white Southerners call the census “rigged,” saying that it isn’t possible for the freed people to thrive on their own.
1871
April. Congress passes second Enforcement Act and Ku Klux Klan Act to further enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, making it a federal offense to abrogate an individual’s civil and political rights. The act also provides for election supervisors and permits martial law and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to combat murders, beatings, and threats by the Klan.
May–December. Ku Klux Klan trials take place in Southern states.
1872
May. Grant issues Amnesty Act, pardoning most of remaining Rebels. Only five hundred former Confederates remain barred from holding political office.
Summer. Freedmen’s Bureau discontinues educational programs.
November. Grant is reelected. He begins to pardon convicted Klansmen.
In elections, Democrats regain control of four state governments by 1872.
1873
April. After a disputed election in Colfax, Louisiana, well-armed whites attack blacks, killing fifty blacks and three whites.
1874
Democrats win majority in the House of Representatives.
1875
Several Grant appointees indicted for corruption.
March. Congress passes Civil Rights Act of 1875, granting equal rights in public accommodations such as inns and theaters, in transportation, and while serving jury duty.
September. Armed whites kill thirty black church leaders and teachers, and white Republican officials in Clinton, Mississippi.
1876
Supreme Court weakens Reconstruction-era amendments by emasculating the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and revealing deficiencies in the Fifteenth Amendment.
Summer. Race riots and terrorism directed at blacks occur in South Carolina. President Grant sends federal troops to restore order.
November. The outcome in the Electoral College proves too close to call in the presidential election of Samuel Tilden (Democrat) versus Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican).
Democratic Party regains control of four more (total of eight) state governments by 1876.
1877
January. After much negotiation, Southern Democratic leaders agree to appoint Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican) president. Hayes orders withdrawal of federal troops from the South.
“Home rule” returns to South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, the only three Southern states not yet controlled by Democrats. Home rule allows these states to determine their own government structure.
1883
Supreme Court invalidates 1875 Civil Rights Act, ruling that the federal government cannot bar discrimination by corporations or individuals.
1896
Supreme Court approves “separate but equal” segregation doctrine.
1915
Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia.
1923
Oklahoma placed under martial law because of Ku Klux Klan activities.
1925
Ku Klux Klan marches on Washington. The New York Times estimates 50,000 to 60,000 Klansmen and women. Others estimate as many as 200,000.
1954
U.S. Supreme Court declares school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling.
1955
Rosa Parks refuses to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus as required by a city ordinance; boycott follows and bus segregation ordinance is declared unconstitutional.
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi. Two white men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, are acquitted. The two men later admit that they killed Till.
1957
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus deploys National Guard to block nine black students from attending a Little Rock High School; following a court order, President Eisenhower sends in federal troops to ensure compliance.
1960
Four black college students begin sit-ins at lunch counter of a Greensboro, North Carolina, restaurant where black patrons are not served.
Ruby Bridges, age six, is the first African American child to attend an all-white school in the South.
1961
Freedom Rides begin from Washington, D.C., into the segregated Southern states in an effort to test the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals that serve buses crossing state lines.
1962
President Kennedy sends federal troops to the University of Mississippi to quell riots so that James Meredith, the school’s first black student, can attend.
The Supreme Court rules that segregation is unconstitutional in all transportation facilities.
1963
Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is killed by a sniper’s bullet. In 1994, Klansman Byron De La Beckwith is convicted of the murder.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers “I Have a Dream” speech to hundreds of thousands during the March on Washington.
Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, leaves four young black girls dead and injures twenty. In 1977, known Klansman Robert Chambliss is found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. In 2001 and 2002, two more Klansmen, Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, are also found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
1964
Congress passes Civil Rights Act declaring discrimination based on race illegal, after seventy-five-day long filibuster.
Three civil rights workers disappear in Mississippi after being stopped for speeding; found buried six weeks later. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to sixty years in prison. Killen, a segregationist, organized the Klansmen who killed the workers.
1965
March. Six hundred activists march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to demand protection for voting rights.
New voting rights act signed.
1966
Edward Brooke (R-Massachusetts) elected first black U.S. senator in eighty-five years.
1967
Riots in Detroit, Newark, New Jersey.
Thurgood Marshall becomes first African American to be named to the Supreme Court.
Carl Stokes (Cleveland) and Richard G. Hatcher (Gary, Indiana) are elected first black mayors of major U.S. cities.
1968
Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee; James Earl Ray is later convicted and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison.
1969
Congress passes a Federal Hate Crimes Law, making it a federal offense for a person to willingly injure, intimidate, or interfere with another person’s attempt to engage in federally protected activities on the basis of the victim’s color, race, religion, or national origin. In 1994, an enforcement act broadens the law to include ethnicity and gender. In 2008, the law is broadened to include sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability, and dropped the prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity.
1973
Maynard Jackson (Atlanta) is elected first black mayor of a major Southern U.S. city.
1975
Voting Rights Act extended.
1979
Shoot-out in Greensboro, North Carolina, leaves five anti-Klan protesters dead; twelve Klansmen are charged with murder.
1983
Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday is established.
1988
Congress passes Civil Rights Restoration Act over President Reagan’s veto.
1989
Army General Colin Powell becomes first African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
L. Douglas Wilder (Virginia) becomes first African American elected governor.
1990
President George H.W. Bush vetoes a civil rights bill he says would impose quotas for employers; weaker bill passes in 1991.
1996
Supreme Court rules consideration of race in creating congressional districts is unconstitutional.
2008
Barack Obama elected first African American president of the United States.
President Barack Obama
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
Quote Attributions
“The method of force . . .” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, [1935] 1975), 677–78.
1. “Bottom Rail Top”
“She skeered to stay by herself.” Mittie (Williams) Freeman, Slave Narratives, Arkansas, vol. 2, part 2, 347.
“slavery stands in the way . . .” Joseph T. Glathaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaign (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 41.
“I never in my life . . .” Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 499.
“We heard that lots of slaves . . .” Freeman, 348.
“Pappy jumps up . . .” Freeman, 348.
“Such equality does not in fact exist . . .” Edward McPherson, LL.D., The Political History of the United States During the Period of Reconstruction, 2nd edition (Washington, D.C.: Solomons and Chapman, 1876), 474–75.
“If they don’t belong . . .” Myrta Avary, Dixie After the War (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1906), 152.
“’Course she is our nigger . . .” Delicia Patterson, Slave Narratives, Missouri, vol. 10, 273.
“We had all our earnings . . .” Victoria Clayton, Black and White Under the Old Regime (Milwaukee, Wis.: Young Churchman Co., 1899), 167–68.
“We came out of the war . . .” Samuel Gholson, KKK Report, Mississippi, vol. 2, 852.
“Hello, massa . . .” New York Times, August 17, 1865, 1.
“My father kept pointing out . . .” Martin Jackson, Slave Narratives, Texas, vol. 14, part 2, 189.
“With malice toward none . . .” Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865 (Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, series 3, General Correspondence, 1837–1897, www.loc.gov).
“I ’lect Uncle Charlie Burns . . .” Sarah Ford, Slave Narratives, Texas, vol. 16, part 2, 45–46.
2. “Boys, Let Us Get Up a Club”
“We could not engage . . .” John Lester and D. L. Wilson, Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth, and Disbandment (New York: Da Capo Press, [1905] 1973), 52, 59.
“operated in favor . . .” Andrew Johnson, as quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished. Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 250.
“When people abroad condemn . . .” Pulaski Citizen, May 11, 1866, 2.
During the evening the wildest . . .” Harper’s Weekly, May 26, 1866, 1.
“Boys, let us get . . .” Lester and Wilson, 53.
“Call it ku klux . . .” Lester and Wilson, 54.
“There was a weird potency . . .” Lester and Wilson, 54.
“There may be in their conduct . . .” Lester and Wilson, 127.
3. “I Was Killed at Chickamauga”
“A dreary desolate . . .” Lester and Wilson, 61.
“It was a pretty . . .” Daniel Coleman, KKK Report, Alabama, vol. 2, 660.
“Its mysteriousness was . . .” Lester and Wilson, 68.
“Take notice . . .” Pulaski Citizen, March 29, 1867, 3.
“Will any one venture . . .” Pulaski Citizen, March 29, 1867, 3.
“Place him before the royal altar . . .” Lester and Wilson, 63.
“O wad some power . . .” Robert L. Stevenson, as quoted in Lester and Wilson, 63.
“The den rang with shouts . . .” Lester and Wilson, 64.
“A spirit from the other world . . .” Lester and Wilson, 73.
“In this way, the Klan . . .” Lester and Wilson, 74.
“Dem Ku Klux just come . . .” Ann Ulrich Evans, Slave Narratives, Missouri, vol. 10, 116.
“The reason I was scared . . .” Reuben Sheets, KKK Report, Georgia, vol. 2, 651.
“a band of regulators” Lester and Wilson, 75.
“It will increase the government . . .” Pulaski Citizen, February 9, 1866, 3.
“I do not think . . .” Nathan Bedford Forrest, KKK Report, Florida and Miscellaneous, vol. 13, 34.
“They considered that good faith . . .” Robert Aldrich, KKK Report, South Carolina, vol. 1, 171.
“It is hoped . . .” Nathan Bedford Forrest, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series 1, vol. 32, part 1 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office), 610.
“The incorrigibles still indulge . . .” Carl S. Schurz, Report on the Conditions of the South, December 19, 1865, 39th Congress, 1st session. (Bibliobazaar, 2006), 14–15.
“Those whose intellects are . . .” Schurz, 14–15.
“Our visitor appeared . . .” Pulaski Citizen, April 19, 1867, 3.
“Time will fully develop . . .” Pulaski Citizen, April 19, 1867, 3.
“On last Wednesday night . . .” Pulaski Citizen, April 19, 1867, 3.
“First time dey come . . .” Lorenza Ezell, Slave Narratives, Texas, vol. 16, part 2, 30.
4. “Worms Would Have Been Eating Me Now”
“We the ** [Ku Klux]. . .” Lester and Wilson, 154.
“The Klan Leaders desired on one hand . . .” Lester and Wilson, 90.
“We chose General Forrest.” James R. Crowe, as quoted in Brian Steel Wills, A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 336.
“incapable alike . . .” New York Times, October 30, 1877, 1.
“There was a great deal . . .” Forrest, 6–7.
“They admitted no man . . .” Forrest, 22.
“Pretty nigh everybody . . .” W. P. Burnett, KKK Report, South Carolina, vol. 3, 1985–86.
“It was thought . . .” Coleman, 661.
“in caves in the bowels . . .” James M. Beard, K.K.K. Sketches (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, Haffellfinger, 1877), 72–73.
“Wherever a petty tyrant . . .” As reprinted in the Zion’s Herald, April 23, 1868, 45, 17.
“The Sergeant and Scorpion . . .” Avary, 269.
“The Death Watch . . .” Avary, 269.
“Burst your cerements . . .” Avary, 269.
“The very night of the day . . .” Ryland Randolph, as quoted in Lester and Wilson, 41–42.
“[They] told me that . . .” Jacob Davis, The Ku Klux Klan in Middle and West Tennessee, September 2, 1868, 32.
“Have you a pin?” John Harrill, KKK Report, North Carolina, 208.
“The Ku Klux did not consider . . .” Ryland Randolph, as quoted in Stanley F. Horn, Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871 (Cos Cob, Conn.: John E. Edwards, 1969), 45–46.
“What is called a raid . . .” James Justice, KKK Report, North Carolina, 136.
“Is he fat?” Samuel Horton, KKK Report, Alabama, vol. 2, 729–32.
“We were to swear . . .” John Harrill, KKK Report, North Carolina, 205.
“We were to obey . . .” James Grant, KKK Report, North Carolina, 231.
“I did not believe . . .” Grant, 232.
“My neighbors told me . . .” William Jolly, KKK Report, South Carolina, vol. 3, 1972.
“They told me I had better . . .” Christenberry
Tait, KKK Report, South Carolina, vol. 3, 1974.