They Called Themselves the K.K.K.

by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

  Photograph by the author

  For thorough and up-to-date scholarship that compellingly refutes long-standing misconceptions of Reconstruction, I relied on Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) and his Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). These two books offer new perspectives and information about the black experience during Reconstruction as well as the role of the Freedmen’s Bureau and its agents, “carpetbaggers,” Republicans, teachers, and preachers. In the latter book, Forever Free, I found illuminating Joshua Brown’s visual essays and commentary about contemporaneous images and their influence on the reading public. James M. McPherson’s Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000) also proved a useful source, especially for its economic and political discussions.

  Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) offered a rich look at the way that blacks and whites shaped Southern history in the areas of emancipation, education, and religion during Reconstruction; W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1975, 1935) offered a vital discussion on the role of African Americans in labor and economics. Jane Turner Censer’s The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 2003) offered a new perspective on elite white Southern women, arguing that “southern belles” forged self-reliant and independent identities that challenged the “helpless” stereotype wrought in popular culture and exploited by the Klan.

  Other essential scholarly texts include David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). One of the foremost scholars in the area of cultural memory, Blight discusses white Southerners’ use of propaganda to shape and spin perceptions of the Civil War and Reconstruction into a mythic “Lost Cause” that lives on today, especially in racist subcultures. He also reminds us that great violence has been committed in the name of memory.

  Gladys-Marie Fry’s classic Night Riders in Black Folk History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975) is also essential reading. This work follows the nightrider through folklore and oral history for an especially compelling study of antebellum patrollers and the postwar Klan’s manipulation of blacks through terror and intimidation.

  Histories on the Ku Klux Klan tend to fall into two broad groups: well-documented texts written by trained historians and those largely undocumented or poorly documented texts written by others. For serious scholarship, I recommend David M. Chalmers’s Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), Allen W. Trelease’s White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), and Wyn Craig Wade’s The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

  Also essential is Herbert Shapiro’s White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). Shapiro argues that a society committed to racism cannot be maintained without violence. He traces the violent reactions of white supremacists as African Americans moved toward genuine equality. Kwando M. Kinshasa’s Black Resistance to the Ku Klux Klan in the Wake of the Civil War (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2006) was also helpful.

  Other insightful sources include J. Michael Martinez’s Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007) and Nancy MacLean’s Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Although she focuses on the second era of the Klan, MacLean’s scholarship was especially helpful in understanding how extremist groups developed in the United States and in Germany during the 1920s, with very different results.

  An older text that for the most part has stood the test of time is William Peirce Randel’s The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy (Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1965). Elaine Franz Parsons’s 2005 article “Midnight Rangers: Costumes and Performances in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan,” found in the Journal of American History (vol. 92, no. 3, pp. 811–35), offers an interesting look at the Klansmen’s macabre theatrics during their brutal raids.

  I also consulted with white supremacist perspectives on the Klan and Reconstruction written by Klan apologists. These include Colonel Winfield Jones’s Story of the Ku Klux Klan (Washington, D.C.: American Newspaper Syndicate, 1921) and Stanley Horn’s Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871 (Cos Cob, Conn.: John E. Edwards, 1969). These biased accounts are noteworthy for their contribution to a legacy of deformed understandings of the Ku Klux Klan and its role during Reconstruction.

  Primary evidence about the Klan’s formation is fragmentary at best, mostly coming from an account titled Ku Klux Klan, Its Origins, Growth, and Disbandment. Published in 1884 by founding member John Lester and coauthor D. L. Wilson, this so-called history lacks detail, and many details, where present, are inaccurate.

  Scholars such as David Blight remind us of the power of memory to turn history into myth and, I add, myth into history. Interpretation often depends upon the lens through which we view history. It should be noted that Lester’s account was written at a time when many white Southerners constructed their own versions of the past in memoirs and histories. In their writings, they vindicated Southern secession, glorified the Confederate soldier, and rationalized the Klan’s violence during Reconstruction. Works such as these helped to forge and propagate the Lost Cause tradition. Other “Lost Cause” writings consulted for this book include Victoria V. Clayton’s White and Black Under the Old Regime (Milwaukee, Wisc.: the Young Churchman, 1899) and Myrta Lockett Avary’s Dixie After the War (New York: Doubleday, 1906), among others.

  For a contrasting firsthand view of the South after the war, readers should refer to Carl Schurz’s Report on the Condition of the South (1865), reprinted by Bibliobazaar; and Albion Winegar Tourgée’s The Invisible Empire (1880), reprinted by the Louisiana State University Press in 1989.

  Today, Nathan Bedford Forrest remains an enigma. For more information I recommend Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill’s The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005) and Brian Steel Will’s A Battle from the Start (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

  No study of the Ku Klux Klan is complete without an in-depth look at race, prejudice, and violence. For this reading, I turned to George M. Frederickson’s Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), Joel Williamson’s A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Elisabeth Young-Breuhl’s The Anatomy of Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); and Marc Aronson’s Race: A History Beyond Black and White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

  An invaluable resource for understanding prejudice and human behavior is Margot Stern Strom’s Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior (Brookline, Mass.: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., 1994). For alternate viewpoints, I consulted work such as Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 1995), in which he argues that a race-obsessed America fails to see the possibility of progress, and Marshall L. DeRosa’s Redeeming American Democracy: Lessons from the Confederate Constitution (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 2007).

  Sociologists and psychologists have long studied the devastating implications of rumor on violence. Excellent resources on this subject include Patricia A. Turner’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African American
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend (edited by Gary Fine and others; New Brunswick, N.J.: Aldine Transaction, 2005), and Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman’s The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947). This last source is considered a standard on the subject and offers great insight into human behavior.

  Today, the Internet is the new grapevine telegraph. For readers who wish to dispel rumors and distinguish facts from fiction, I recommend fact-checking sites such as www.factcheck.org and www.snopes.com. For readers who wish to strengthen their reasoning skills when confronted with rumors, I recommend Nancy M. Cavendar and Howard Kahane’s Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life (Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth Publishing, 2009).

  Several documentary histories provide an excellent and diverse collection of reprinted primary documents. These include Herbert Aptheker’s multivolume Documentary History of the Negro People of the United States (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1973) and Walter Fleming’s Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational and Industrial, 1865 to the Present Time (New York: Peter Smith, 1950). Readers should bear in mind that Fleming was among the early-twentieth-century historians who denounced slavery but argued that the freed people were unprepared for citizenship. These historians further argued that victorious Northerners had trampled the rights of white Southerners, who after much suffering banded together to overthrow Republican governments and restore home rule. This interpretation is known as the Dunning School, named after William Archibald Dunning and dominated history textbooks well into the 1960s. Today, historians discredit the racist Dunning school perspective.

  I also relied on 1860 and 1870 census records and nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals. These included Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, Pulaski (Tenn.) Citizen, Cincinnati Commercial, New York Times, American Missionary, Columbia (S.C.) Daily Phoenix, Yorkville (S.C.) Enquirer, Tuskaloosa (Ala.) Independent Monitor, and Atlantic Monthly, among others.

  Few photographic images of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan exist. For this reason, Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News were especially valuable for their contemporaneous illustrations. For furthering my understanding on how pictorial newspapers shaped and reflected popular views regarding race, I am grateful for Joshua Brown’s Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and his visual essays mentioned earlier.

  For the stories of individuals I pored over 8,027 pages of testimony from the Ku Klux Klan trials of 1871–72, collected in thirteen volumes and called Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, or the Ku Klux Klan Report. The volumes were published by the Government Printing Offices in Washington in 1872. I also used a sixty-seven-page report of outrages committed in Tennessee and compiled in 1868, called Report of Evidence Taken Before the Military Committee in Relation to Outrages Committed by the Ku Klux Klan in Middle and West Tennessee.

  Equally valuable were the more than 2,300 Slave Narratives collected by government workers in 1937. The narratives are easily located in the digitized American Memory collection at the Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov. Although some historians question the reliability of these narratives, I found it exciting to compare the particulars of the Slave Narratives against the testimony of the Ku Klux Klan Report. For an absorbing study of slavery and memory, see the works of David W. Blight, Gladys-Marie Fry, and Patricia Turner, as mentioned earlier.

  Quotes from the above KKK Report and Slave Narratives are attributed in the section of this book titled “Quote Attributions,” as are other primary sources consulted, such as letters, diaries, newspapers, and other accounts.

  In addition to reading about the William Luke murder in the Alabama KKK report (as cited in “Quote Attributions“), interested readers can refer to Gene L. Howard’s Death at Cross Plains: An Alabama Reconstruction Tragedy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984) and Peter Meyler’s “Strange Fruit: The Martyrdom of William Luke” (Beaver, February/ March 2005, vol. 85, no. 1, pp. 22–25).

  John Fabian DeWitt’s Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law offers additional insight into the life of South Carolina freedman Elias Hill, his quest for black citizenship in the United States, and ultimately his decision to leave America for Liberia.

  In the midst of researching this book, I attended a Klan Congress (they no longer call it a rally) held deep in Arkansas’s Ozark Mountains. I wanted to understand how the present-day Klan read against the Reconstruction era order.

  On a dirt road, with my directions unfolded in my lap, I wound my rental car over railroad tracks, over two low-water concrete slabs, through a creek that had overrun its banks, past a trailer with a large Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign sign (now two years post-election), and past a dilapidated house soldiered by a hundred goats or more.

  The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that somewhere across America each week a cross is burned. Some people argue that cross-burning is a symbolic form of speech, protected by the First Amendment. The law, however, allows a court to presume that cross-burning is a threat.

  Photograph by the author

  At a gate marked by a large American flag, I turned in to the Soldiers of the Cross Bible Camp. My car spit dirt and gravel as I continued up the long, steep drive. At the top of the hill, the drive opened onto a clearing lined by red, white, and black flags so similar in color and design to the Nazi swastika that I sucked in my breath.

  I parked next to trucks and minivans that sprouted American and Confederate flags from their antennas and headed up the hillside to the community center, where families were milling about. For those readers who wonder if I traveled alone, I did. But my worried husband flew down that night.

  There began my weekend with the Klan, a weekend lit with fire-and-brimstone speeches that warned of the dangers of racial integration and Jews; that claimed America was intended for white people; that condemned public schools and taxes; that burned with an altar call of Klan members, one by one or in family groups, stretching out a right arm in a straight-armed salute, dedicating themselves to their race, their God, and their country and then shouting “white power!” The weekend ended with a twenty-five-foot cross burning against the night sky, surrounded by men and at least two women in white robes.

  I had researched the Klan’s history and creed, and yet no reading had prepared me for the speakers and the men and older boys who wrapped the tall cross in burlap and the children who donned child-size Klan robes for the closing cross lighting. I also wasn’t prepared for the ordinariness of these people: if I had met them at another time, in another place, if I didn’t know their beliefs and their politics, I could see myself swapping recipes and stories about our children. I also wasn’t prepared for the relatively small number in attendance—fewer than a hundred—even though the registration packet and other information promised hundreds.

  Of all the speeches I heard that weekend, one haunts me more than the others. “We are planting thousands of seeds among high school students,” said a Klans-woman who had traveled from Kentucky. “We don’t need robes . . . a silent majority in America agrees with us.”

  My reaction was visceral. That night, I couldn’t get the shower hot enough to scrub away the words. I thought about silence and the many ways it implies agreement, whether it’s a failure to speak out against a racist or hateful remark or joke or a failure to confront bullying, stereotyping, and scapegoating and other injustices. I also thought about fear, how fear is peddled and how we’re often manipulated to fear the wrong things.

  The use of terror—the use of violence and fear as a physical and psychological weapon—is as old as humanity. So is silence. It is my hope that this book will show that the lives of the Klan’s victims—th
e lives of people like Anne Evans, Hannah Tutson, Henry Lipscomb, Elias Hill, and William Luke and others—are far greater than the humiliation and violence they suffered at the hands of the Klan. It is my hope that this book will stand in memorial to the victims’ great courage and to the pivotal role each one played in American history.

  Acknowledgments

  For readers interested in more information on tolerance and justice, a good place to start is the Internet. You will find resources such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), located in Montgomery, Alabama, and its electronic Teaching Tolerance newsletter. (Educators can subscribe free.) The newsletter offers tips to parents, teachers, teenagers, and younger people for everyday action, topics ranging from responding to bigoted comments to dealing with hate at school. The Facing History and Ourselves organization helps educators connect history to current issues in our world today. Committed to developing literacy, the organization offers educator resources and development programs.

  My thanks must begin with my gratitude to my history-teaching husband, Joe, for his unwavering support and encouragement in the writing of this book and for his expertise in the areas of U.S. history and political science; to my daughter, Brandy, and her husband, Rick, for the good care they give me while I am on deadline; and to my son, Joe, whose interests and conversations inform my work in a myriad of ways. I also thank my friends Jeanne and Dale McCloe, for their support and for many conversations that have helped to inform this book and Bambi Lobdell and Libby Tucker for their generous assistance with hard-to-get library materials.

  To my editor, Ann Rider, and to my publisher, I owe a debt of gratitude for believing in this book. For reading chapters and parts of chapters in early draft form, I thank fellow writers and friends Suzanne Fisher Staples, Gail Carson Levine, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Clara Gillow Clark, Laura Lee Wren, and Elaine Lisandrelli.