Other historians argue that the trials swept the dirt under the rug. White Northerners, they say, were more interested in suppressing rebellion than in truly protecting the lives and rights of Southern blacks. It’s been estimated that tens of thousands of white men belonged to the Klan and that these men committed thousands of acts of violence against defenseless people. Yet, despite the mass arrests, only 3,319 Klansmen were brought to trial in the Southern states; and of this number, only 1,143 resulted in conviction. Most of those convicted were simply fined or received light sentences or both. Others pleaded guilty in return for suspended sentences and a warning. The courts dropped the charges against the remaining 2,176 prisoners.
A distraught man kneels by the victims of white violence. In the caption, artist Thomas Nast asks: “Is this a republican form of government? Is this protecting life, liberty, or property? Is this the equal protection of the laws?”
Harper’s Weekly, September 2, 1876; Library of Congress
In May 1872, with the Ku Klux Klan trials over, Congress passed the Amnesty Act, pardoning most of the remaining Confederates, nearly 150,000. Only about 500 Rebels remained barred from voting or holding a political office.
That fall, President Grant ran for a second term and won easily. The next summer, he began to pardon those Klansmen serving sentences, saying the pardons were necessary in order to restore peace to a still chaotic South. The pardons allowed most Klansmen who had fled or gone into hiding to return home. Within four years, nearly all convicted Klansmen had either served out their sentences or had received pardons.
Despite these conciliatory moves, each state and local election brought a new wave of violence. New white supremacist groups flourished under different names such as the Rifle Clubs, the Red Shirts, the White League, the White Liners, and the White Caps. These groups intimidated black voters openly and violently.
Defying the Ku Klux Klan Act, some wore masks, as noted by a Harper’s Weekly sketch artist: “Masked, armed, and supplied with horses and money by the Democratic candidates for office, they ride over the country at midnight, and perpetrate unheard-of enormities,” wrote Thomas Nast. “They rob, they murder, they intimidate; yet no man, white or black, dares to denounce them.”
By 1876, it had become evident that the public had grown tired of the decade-long crusade to reconstruct the South and protect the rights and lives of Southern blacks. Northern whites wanted a return to normalcy. They wanted peace and reunion with Southern whites.
That spring, the Supreme Court justices struck a blow to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments when they pointed out inherent weaknesses in both amendments. Four years after the Ku Klux Klan trials the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government the power to act against white supremacist groups and that the duty of protecting citizens’ equal rights “rests alone with the States.”
In the fall of 1876, the presidential election proved too close to declare a winner. After a bitter legal battle between Democrats and Republicans, a compromise was reached in January 1877, and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was appointed president. As president, Rutherford B. Hayes promised to leave the South alone. Soon after taking office, he withdrew the last of the federal troops. Reconstruction was over.
In the days leading to the 1876 presidential election, many freedmen once again endured flagrant voter intimidation at the hands of Southern white supremacists.
Harper’s Weekly, October 21, 1876; Special Collections, Binghamton University
The famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass expressed the worry of many black Americans. “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?” he asked.
In the years after Reconstruction ended, Democrats continued to regain control throughout the South often through violent means. In state after state, they enacted new laws, called Jim Crow laws, that stripped away the political and civil rights of black Americans. The Jim Crow laws kept the lives of black Americans segregated and unequal in the South.
Former Yankee and Rebel soldiers shake hands in reconciliation at the 1913 Peace Jubilee, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. That year also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. By 1913, most of the nation had embraced white supremacy and had sanctioned Jim Crow laws. That year alone, white mobs lynched fifty-one black Americans.
Library of Congress
As the years passed, many white Americans grew nostalgic and sentimental about the years before the Civil War and the war itself. White Yankee and Rebel veterans began to participate together in Memorial Day observances, both in the North and the South. At these “reunions,” the soldiers talked over old times, glorying in the battles and the soldier’s life. Although roughly 179,000 black men had served as soldiers in the army and another 19,000 in the navy, most were not invited to these gatherings and even told to stay away.
In this illustration called “Death at the Polls, and Free from Federal Interference,” the artist Thomas Nast shows the consequences of the removal of federal troops from the South.
Harper’s Weekly, October 18, 1879; Library of Congress
White authors and artists began to depict Southern life in ways that revised history, often portraying a romanticized view of plantation life and slavery. In novels, memoirs, and nonfiction books and articles, as well as mass-market magazines, Southern writers justified secession and the war, explained their defeat, venerated their leaders, and villianized the North. In popular culture and in their history, Southern writers created a literary and intellectual movement known as the Lost Cause, a belief that the Confederacy’s cause was noble, its leaders chivalrous, and its military unmatched.
This engraving offers an idealized view of Southern life and race relations. By the early 1870s, such illustrations were becoming common, as white Americans struggled to put the war behind them and return to a sense of normalcy.
Harper’s Weekly, December 30, 1871; Library of Congress
Some writers and historians glorified the Ku Klux Klan, creating a powerful mythology about the order and a distortion of history to justify its violence. In their work these writers continued to spread fear and false claims about “Negro domination,” the freed people’s unpreparedness for citizenship, their unwillingness to work and be self-supporting, their propensity toward lawlessness and violence, and their incapacity to learn.
In 1905, white Americans clamored to read a best-selling romantic novel written by a Baptist minister. In The Clansman, Thomas Dixon portrayed the Klan as noble white-robed knights who burned crosses and saved white civilization from “Negro rule” and racial violence in the South. Dixon claimed the Klansmen were reluctant to take the law into their own hands and acted out of necessity.
In 1915, the producer D. W. Griffith transformed Dixon’s racist novel into an epic silent motion picture, The Birth of a Nation. Despite protests by black Americans, the movie became a runaway box-office success.
This illustration, called “The Fiery Cross of Old Scotland’s Hills,” comes from Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, The Clansman. The Reconstruction-era Klansmen never practiced cross burning, but Dixon’s novel would present fact as fiction and create a lasting myth about Reconstruction and the first Ku Klux Klan.
Inspired by the movie, a group of white Southern men burned a cross on the top of Stone Mountain in Georgia. With this iconic first cross burning, the Ku Klux Klan was born again as a pro-Christian, pro-American brotherhood. This time, they added Catholics, Jews, immigrants, liberals, welfare recipients, and labor unions to their list of hates. Their membership swelled in the 1920s, including as many as five million men who dedicated themselves to white supremacy, conservative family values, and old-time religion. And yet, in the years that followed the Klan’s rebirth, hate-driven lynch mobs—many of whom were known Klan members—would take the law into their own hands and murder at least 718 black men, women, and children, and eight w
hite people.
In 1954, when the Supreme Court declared that the system of segregated schools in the United States was unconstitutional, Klan violence again surged in the South as black Americans enrolled in white schools and pushed to end segregation in other public areas as well. The Klan led brutal attacks on black men and women, who registered to vote or attempted to vote. They attacked men, women, and children who bravely crossed the color line to desegregate buses, theaters, diners, schools, and other public facilities.
In 1925 Klansmen and women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. It’s estimated that nearly five million men and women belonged to the organization from all parts of the United States.
Library of Congress
Known Klansmen were responsible for the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who allegedly flirted or exchanged pleasantries with a white woman; the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, a black leader who organized a protest against still segregated schools in Jackson, Mississippi; the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four black girls; the 1964 torture and murder of three young civil rights workers who registered voters in Mississippi; and the 1965 murder of a white civil rights worker named Viola Liuzzo.
During the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement would be viewed as the “Second Civil War,” the “Second Reconstruction,” and a “Second War of Northern Aggression.” But ultimately the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists wouldn’t win. Nearly one hundred years after the formation of the first Ku Klux Klan, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights. In 1968, another Civil rights Act banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
One year later, Congress passed the Federal Hate Crimes law, making it a federal offense for a person to willfully injure, intimidate, or interfere with another person’s right to engage in federal protected activities such as voting, serving as a juror, attending school, patronizing a public place, or applying for employment on the basis of a person’s race, color, religion, or national origin. Since then, the law has been broadened to include ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or disability, and covers crimes that involve threats, harassment, physical harm, or crimes against property motivated by prejudice.
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan light a cross at their closing ceremony in 2006. The cross-lighting, they say, symbolizes the light of Christ, dispelling darkness and ignorance.
Photo taken by the author
Today, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups continue to exist at the fringes of the conservative right or as a separate political party altogether or with no political affiliation at all. In 2009 the Southern Poverty Law Center, located in Montgomery, Alabama, counted 932 active hate groups in the United States. The known activities of these groups range from murder and other acts of violence, intimidation, harassment, and vandalism, as well as speeches, meetings, and the spread of hate propaganda through leaflets, the Internet, and shortwave radio broadcasts.
Despite their numbers, these hate groups wield none of the power or prestige that the Ku Klux Klan held in earlier years. The Southern Poverty Law Center attributes their loss of power to Americans’ intolerance of hate groups and their criminal activities and to law enforcement agencies who uphold our nation’s laws. Modern historians also credit the large numbers of people who fight for real answers to social and economic problems and who fight for educational and economic opportunities for all Americans.
History is filled with stories of terrible things that happen as people stand up for an ideal and strike out against injustice. In 1857, before Emanicipation and the Civil War, Frederick Douglass warned Americans that reform wouldn’t be easy. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” said Douglass. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
Perhaps no one understood the difficulty of reform better than the freed people. Mittie Williams, the fourteen-year-old house slave who went fishing with her father the day the war ended, would never forget her father’s excitement and the tug of his hand as he pulled her back to the Big House. In 1937, seventy-two years after the day the cannons boomed, Mittie Williams Freeman would remember that day and the years that followed as she recounted her life as a slave and a free woman. “It seem like it tuck a long time for freedom to come,” she told her interviewer.
Indeed it did.
Civil Rights Time Line
1863
January. Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves living in the seceded Southern states.
1865
February. General Sherman issues Special Field Order #15, which sets aside 400,000 acres in the Sea Islands region for exclusive settlement of the freed people, promising them forty-acre plots, mules, and possessory titles. President Johnson later vetoes the order and orders the freed people removed and the land returned to original owners.
March. Freedmen’s Bureau established.
April. Civil War ends; Lincoln is assassinated.
May. Andrew Johnson begins rapid and lenient presidential Reconstruction.
June–August. Under Johnson’s plan, the Southern state governments reorganize. Confederate leaders regain power.
September. White Southern governments begin to pass restrictive Black Codes.
December. Congress reconvenes and refuses to seat Southern representatives.
December. Thirteenth Amendment ratified, abolishing slavery everywhere in the United States.
1866
March. President Johnson vetoes bill to extend Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Bill.
April. Congress overrides Johnson’s veto of Civil Rights Bill.
May. Memphis riot. White civilians and police kill forty-six blacks and injure many more, burning ninety houses, twelve schools, and four churches.
May. First Ku Klux Klan forms in Pulaski, Tennessee.
June. Fourteenth Amendment proposed, entitling all persons born or naturalized in the United States to citizenship and equal protection under the laws of the United States.
July. Congress passes new Freedmen’s Bureau bill over Johnson’s earlier veto, expanding the bureau’s responsibilities and powers.
July. Tennessee is readmitted to Union as first reconstructed state.
July. Police in New Orleans storm a Republican meeting of blacks and whites on July 30, killing more than 40 and wounding more than 150.
November. Republican election victories produce greater than two-thirds majorities in House and Senate.
Most Southern states reject proposed Fourteenth Amendment.
1867
March. Congress takes over Reconstruction from President Johnson and passes first Reconstruction Act, which divides South into five military districts, each under the command of a general. The act also guarantees freedmen the right to vote in elections for state constitutional conventions and in subsequent elections. Each Southern state is required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and its new constitution by majority vote, and then submit the constitution to Congress for approval.
March. Second Reconstruction Act passes over Johnson’s veto.
April. Ku Klux Klan holds secret meeting to develop strategy to combat Republican plan for Reconstruction of the South and civil and political rights of black Americans.
July. Third Reconstruction Act passes over Johnson’s veto.
1868
February. House impeaches Johnson.
March. Fourth Reconstruction Act passes over Johnson’s veto. The Second, Third, and Fourth acts provide details for voter registration boards, the adoption of new state constitutions, and the administration of “good faith” oaths on the part of white Southerners.
May. Senate acquits J
ohnson by one vote.
July. Seven more Southern states are readmitted to the Union under Radical plan: South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina.
July. Fourteenth Amendment is ratified.
September. Forrest claims that Klan membership numbers 550,000. Five days later, he recants estimate.
September. The Opelousas Massacre in Louisiana leaves an estimated two hundred to three hundred black Americans dead.
November. Former Union general Ulysses S. Grant (Republican) elected president. Black political leaders elected to state and local offices across the South.
Sharecropping begins in parts of the South.
Forrest orders Ku Klux Klan dens to disband after the presidential election.