The Ku Klux Klan The First Empire: 1865-1872 - PowerPoint Presentation

The Ku Klux Klan The First Empire: 1865-1872

The Ku Klux Klan was formed in December of 1865 in Tennessee. The name was derived from the Greek word kuklos (κύκλος) which means circle.This original Klan chapter was formed by six former Confederates with the intent of starting a fraternal organization. However, the Klan’s purpose began to take shape and the loosely connected chapters began to spring up throughout the South.The KKK was just one of many white supremacist groups that arose during the Reconstruction era (Southern Cross and the Knights of the White Camelia just to name two).Eventually the Klan became the most prominent and by mid-1866 the movement had rapidly spread as an insurgent movement promoting white supremacy.Specifically targeting black leaders and white Republicans (scalawags and carpetbaggers) and their allies, the Klan used threats and violence, burned black homes and churches and either lynched or left the bodies of their victims in the road for everyone to see.

The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership: “Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime  guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.”1 1. Elaine Frantz Parsons, "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan". Journal of American History 92.3 (2005): 811–36.

Eric Foner writes in his book Reconstruction:“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.”22. Eric Foner , Reconstruction Updated Edition: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Revised ed. (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014).

The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues (almost all black secret organizations that worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau to register black voters), anyone supporting the Republican party and Freedmen’s Bureau workers. One Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported: “ Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites. Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault.“ 33. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, The Free Press, 1998, pp. 677–678.

Klan violence focused on political rights and voting. Thousands of blacks and white Republicans were killed between 1866 and 1872 during campaign seasons. Prior to elections, black Republicans would be chased through the woods, executed and crudely buried in shallow graves. The Klan effectively suppressed Republican votes. In one county in Louisiana over 1,000 voters were registered Republican, no Republican votes were cast in the 1868 Presidential election.

Union General and Congressman from Massachusetts, Benjamin Butler introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (commonly known as The Ku Klux Klan Act). The act was in response to “The KKK Testimony,” which was a Congressional investigation interviewing victims of Klan violence in the South. The testimony is over 7,000 pages. The act gave the president (Grant at the time) the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in any state that was not protecting the civil rights of their own citizens.It also gave the federal government the ability to send in federal troops to maintain control and arrest and put on trial (in federal courts where African Americans would legitimately be allowed on juries) any person who was threatening the civil liberties of citizens.This created an extension of “Bayonet Rule,” but also effectively put an end to the widespread violence and control of Klan activities in the South.

As Foner argues: “By 1872, the federal government's evident willingness to bring its legal and coercive authority to bear had broken the Klan's back and produced a dramatic decline in violence throughout the South. So ended the Reconstruction career of the Ku Klux Klan.”This however, did not end the violence in the South directed towards blacks and their allies, rather the violence was now no longer (at least for another 40 years) attributed to the Ku Klux Klan.Groups such as The White League and the Red Shirts continued to direct violence towards the African American community by burning black churches and schools as well as attacking and murdering black leaders and politicians.