Unit 13 · The Klan and the People Who Fought It

The Civil War ended in 1865, and about four million enslaved people became free. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified that December, ended slavery in the United States. An amendment is a formal change added to the Constitution. Freedpeople moved quickly to build their own lives. They found lost family members, founded churches, opened schools and looked for land and fair pay.

The years from 1865 to 1877 are called Reconstruction. During this time the nation rebuilt the South and argued over what freedom would mean. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) made formerly enslaved people citizens. It promised every person equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) said no citizen could be denied the vote because of race.

Each freedperson now had rights that had been denied for generations. Black men voted in large numbers. Hundreds served in state legislatures, and some went to Congress. Many white Southerners accepted the new order, even if unhappily. Others were furious that Black citizens now shared power. That fury soon took the form of a secret order.

Pulaski is a small town in southern Tennessee. There, six young men formed a club they called the Ku Klux. Each was a Confederate veteran, someone who had served as a soldier in the war. The traditional founding date is December 24, 1865. The Tennessee Encyclopedia instead places it in May or early June 1866. Historians have not settled which date is right.

The name is usually traced to the Greek word kuklos, meaning circle. The founders borrowed from the lodges of their day. They used grand titles, costumes and an initiation, a ceremony for bringing in a new member. At first they rode around town in disguise, playing at mystery. It looked like one more club among many.

Later, the Klan’s defenders described this beginning as a harmless joke that got out of hand. Be careful with that story. It came from people who wanted to excuse what followed. A primary source is evidence made at the time, like a letter or sworn testimony. The sworn testimony gathered in 1871 shows organized political terror, not a joke.

In April 1867, Klan leaders met in Nashville. They adopted a rulebook called the Prescript. It set out ranks with grand titles, from local groups called dens up to a Grand Wizard at the top. Historians widely believe the first Grand Wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate general. No membership list survives, so the details of his role are still debated.

The Klan spread across the South in 1867 and 1868. Its dens were only loosely connected. Each local group often acted on its own. What joined them was a shared goal. They meant to stop Black citizens from voting, owning land, going to school and holding office. They also meant to drive out white Republicans who worked with them.

Historians call the Klan a paramilitary force. It acted like an army without being an official one. Its members used terrorism: violence and threats against ordinary people to reach a political goal. Attacks often rose before elections, when votes were at stake. The Klan was no longer a club. It had become a weapon in a fight over who would rule the South.

Klansmen rode at night. They wore robes, hoods or painted masks. They came to a family’s cabin in groups. They dragged people outside, whipped them and sometimes killed them. They burned homes, churches and schools. People called these attacks night riding.

A disguise did two jobs. It hid who the attackers were, so victims could not easily name them in court. It also spread fear. Yet disguises often failed. Survivors frequently knew the riders by their voices, their horses or their size. Many later named these men to Congress. The riders were not strangers. They were local men, and that made the danger closer.

Historians use the word intimidation for threats meant to make people too afraid to act. Night riding was intimidation by design. A family whipped for voting was a warning to every family nearby. The goal was not only to hurt one person. It was to make a whole community stay home on election day.

The Klan’s targets had one thing in common. They stood for the new order in the South. Black voters were attacked. So was any Black officeholder, a person elected or appointed to a government job. Black ministers, teachers and families who bought land or asked for fair pay were targeted too. Teachers from the North who taught in freedpeople’s schools were threatened.

White Southerners who joined the Republican Party were targeted as well. The Klan called them traitors. In the South at this time, a Republican usually meant someone who supported Reconstruction and Black voting rights. The parties have changed a great deal since then. So the word meant something different in 1870 than it does today.

Schools drew special anger. Education let freedpeople read contracts, newspapers and ballots. Many Klan attacks burned schoolhouses or drove teachers away. Yet freedpeople kept rebuilding. Families pooled their money to pay teachers and put up new buildings. Their persistence, the act of continuing despite danger, is part of this story too.

Secrecy did more than hide faces. Klan members swore to protect one another. When a case reached a local court, a member might sit on the jury, the group of citizens who decide a verdict. Other members could supply an alibi, a claim that the accused was somewhere else at the time. Some local sheriffs were members or friends of members.

Witnesses faced a terrible choice. Naming an attacker could bring another raid. Many survivors spoke anyway. Others fled their homes, sometimes hiding in the woods for many nights. Local courts so rarely punished the riders that many Black Southerners came to believe only the federal government could protect them.

Here is the key idea of this chapter. A secret order becomes dangerous when secrecy lets its members escape the law. Many lodges of the time kept harmless secrets, like handshakes and passwords. The Klan used the same forms to hide crimes. That is why accountability, making people answer for what they do, became the heart of the fight against it.

In April 1871, Congress created a Joint Select Committee, a special group with members from both the House and the Senate. Its job was to study the condition of affairs in the former Confederate states. In plain words, that meant the violence. Its members heard witnesses in Washington. Some of them also traveled to towns across the South.

Witnesses gave testimony, statements made under oath. Clerks wrote down their words. Hundreds of people testified: Black and white, farmers and preachers, officials and Klan suspects. Survivors described raids, whippings and killings. Many named the men they recognized, even though speaking up was dangerous.

The committee sent in its report on February 19, 1872. It filled 13 printed volumes, from the Government Printing Office. The first volume holds the report itself. Most of the rest is testimony. Today libraries share these volumes free online. They are one of the richest records of ordinary Americans describing political violence in their own words.

Elias Hill lived in York County, South Carolina. A childhood illness left him unable to walk or use his arms. He grew up to become a Baptist preacher and a schoolteacher. People in his community trusted him to teach their children to read. They trusted him to lead them in worship.

On the night of May 6, 1871, disguised Klansmen came to his cabin. They dragged him outside and beat him. The attack was aimed at a respected Black leader. When members of the congressional committee came to York County that year, Hill chose to testify, or give evidence under oath. He described the attack in careful detail.

Hill was a witness and a leader, not someone to pity. After the attack, he decided his community could not be safe at home. In the autumn of 1871 he led a group of neighbors who chose to emigrate, or move to another country to live. They sailed to Arthington, Liberia, in West Africa. Hill died there in March 1872. His testimony still speaks for him.

The committee did not agree. The Republican members formed the majority. Their majority report concluded that the Klan was a real, organized conspiracy, a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful. It found that the order used violence to overturn elections and deny citizens their rights. The majority supported strong federal action to stop it.

The Democratic members wrote a minority report. They argued that the danger had been overstated. They blamed the Reconstruction state governments for much of the disorder. Both reports were printed together in the first volume. The same testimony stood behind both conclusions.

This gives you a real historian’s task. When two groups read the same evidence and reach opposite conclusions, go back to the evidence. Ask who had reasons to see it one way. Each side was partisan, strongly loyal to its own party. Historians today, reading the hundreds of sworn accounts, widely agree with the majority on the main point: the Klan was organized terror.

Congress passed three Enforcement Acts between May 1870 and April 1871. They were meant to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They made it a federal crime to use force or threats to keep citizens from voting. A federal crime is one against the laws of the whole nation. Federal courts, not only local ones, could now hear these cases.

The third law, signed on April 20, 1871, is called the Ku Klux Klan Act. It made it a federal crime to conspire, or secretly plan together, to deny people their rights. It also let the president suspend habeas corpus where the violence was out of control. Habeas corpus is a person’s right to be brought before a judge and not held in jail without cause.

One part of that law still works today. Section 1 lets people sue officials who violate their constitutional rights. It is now known as 42 U.S.C. section 1983. In 1961 the Supreme Court relied on it in Monroe v. Pape, a case about Chicago police who searched a family’s home without a warrant. A law written against night riders now protects people across the country.

Upstate South Carolina saw some of the worst Klan violence. On October 17, 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine counties there, including York, Spartanburg and Chester. Federal troops and marshals, officers who make arrests for the federal courts, moved in. Suspects could now be held for trial without the usual delays.

Hundreds of men were arrested, and many others fled the state. Grant’s attorney general, Amos T. Akerman, pushed hard for prosecution, the work of bringing criminal charges in court. Federal trials of accused Klansmen were held in South Carolina in 1871 and 1872. Historian Lou Falkner Williams tells their story in a 1996 book.

The trials had real limits. Courts were slow, and only a small share of the accused were ever punished. Still, the arrests broke the Klan’s power in much of the South. Survivors had asked for protection, and for a time the federal government answered. It showed that the law could drag a secret order into the open.

By about 1872, the Klan as an organized order had largely broken up. Arrests, trials and federal troops did much of that work. But the Klan’s goals did not disappear. White supremacy, the belief that white people should rule over others, stayed strong in Southern politics.

New groups took the Klan’s place. The White League, founded in Louisiana in 1874, did not hide. It operated openly, as an armed force backing the Democratic Party there. In South Carolina, armed men called Red Shirts rode openly during the 1876 campaign. Violence and fraud helped these groups take back state governments.

In 1877 the federal government stopped protecting the last Reconstruction governments, and Reconstruction ended. Over the next decades, Southern states found ways to disfranchise most Black men. Remember the witnesses, though. Their testimony became part of the national record. Nearly a century later, the civil rights movement drew on the same amendments and laws they had fought for.

On February 8, 1915, a long silent film opened in Los Angeles. It was first called The Clansman and was soon renamed The Birth of a Nation. Director D. W. Griffith based it on a novel by Thomas Dixon. The film was propaganda. It showed Black citizens of the Reconstruction South as dangers and showed the Klan as heroes who saved the South.

The NAACP, a civil rights group founded in 1909, organized protests. Its members picketed theaters and asked cities to ban the film or cut its worst scenes. The film drew huge crowds anyway. It taught millions of viewers a false version of the history you studied in the last chapter.

On Thanksgiving night, November 25, 1915, William J. Simmons led a small group up Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia. They burned a cross and declared a new Ku Klux Klan. Simmons won a state charter in early December. The film opened in Atlanta on December 6, and he used its fame to recruit. This revival is called the second Klan.

At first the new Klan grew slowly. In 1920, Simmons hired two publicists, Edward Young Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler. A publicist is someone paid to spread the word about a person or product. Their firm was called the Southern Publicity Association. They treated the Klan like a product to sell. Recruiters called Kleagles fanned out across the country.

Each new member paid a $10 joining fee. The recruiter kept part of it as a commission, a share of a sale paid to the seller. The rest moved up to leaders above him. Members also bought robes and other goods from the organization. Money flowed upward from every new recruit, which gave recruiters a strong reason to sign up as many people as they could.

The Klan copied the look of fraternal lodges, which are brotherhood clubs with rituals. It had a ritual book, passwords and grand titles. Millions of Americans already belonged to lodges and found that style familiar. But the second Klan used the lodge form to spread hatred. Its recruiters told each town it would defend the town against whatever that town feared.

The second Klan targeted more groups than the first. It attacked Black Americans, as before. It also attacked Catholics, Jews and immigrants, especially from southern and eastern Europe. This was nativism, the belief that people born in a country deserve more rights than newcomers. The Klan also claimed to defend Prohibition, the national ban on alcohol, and to police people’s private lives.

Many people picture the 1920s Klan as a rural Southern group. The record says otherwise. It was strong in the North and West, in states like Indiana, Oregon, Colorado and Michigan. It was strong in cities like Indianapolis, Detroit, Denver and Chicago. The Encyclopedia of Chicago counts about 50,000 members in the Chicago area, the largest city membership in the nation.

How big was the Klan in all? No reliable national lists survive, so historians must estimate. Their estimates run from about 2 million to more than 5 million members at the peak in the mid-1920s. On August 8, 1925, tens of thousands of members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Many marched with their faces uncovered.

On September 6, 1921, the New York World began a series about the Klan. It ran for 21 days in a row. Editor Herbert Bayard Swope oversaw the project. Reporter Rowland Thomas did much of the digging. Other newspapers across the country also printed the series, so readers far beyond New York saw it.

An exposé is a report that reveals hidden wrongdoing. The World printed the Klan’s own membership forms. It showed how money from fees moved up to the leaders. It listed violent attacks linked to Klan members, including floggings and tar-and-featherings. The paper won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Then came a surprise. After the series, Klan membership grew. Klan leaders themselves said the exposé had helped them. For some readers, the stories worked like free advertising. This is a real puzzle for anyone fighting hate. Attention can expose a group, and it can also spread its message. Growth was an unintended consequence of the World’s work.

The exposé pushed Congress to act. On October 11, 1921, the House Committee on Rules opened hearings on the Klan. A hearing is a meeting where lawmakers question witnesses to gather facts. Reporters from the World and critics of the Klan gave evidence about what they had found.

William J. Simmons testified too. He presented the Klan as a patriotic, law-abiding fraternal order, a brotherhood like many other lodges. He denied that the Klan as an organization had ordered the violence in the newspapers. His performance was calm and confident. Many listeners found him convincing.

Congress passed no law against the Klan after the hearings. The printed record, 184 pages from the Government Printing Office, survives today. It lets you set Simmons’s claims beside the evidence the World gathered. Comparing a group’s own story with outside evidence is one of the most important skills a historian has.

In 1922, people in Chicago formed the American Unity League. Most of its members were Roman Catholic. It set out to fight the Klan by breaking its secrecy. Its weekly paper, Tolerance, ran from 1922 into 1923. It printed the names, addresses and jobs of thousands of people it said were Klan members in the Chicago area.

The idea was simple. The Klan depended on secrecy. Its members wanted to keep their friends, customers and jobs while working against their neighbors. Once named in public, they had to face their community. This tactic is called exposure: making hidden facts public so people must answer for them.

Exposure is powerful, but it carries risks. A list can contain mistakes. Being named can bring threats or a lost job, whether the name is right or wrong. Today, publishing someone’s private information so others can target them is called doxxing. People still debate where exposing a hate group ends and unfair harm begins. Your answer shows what you value about privacy.

Williamson County lies in the coal country of southern Illinois. In the 1920s, Prohibition made alcohol illegal, but a bootlegger, someone who makes or sells alcohol against the law, could still find buyers. Beginning in the winter of 1923 to 1924, the Klan backed a series of raids on bootleggers and saloons. A raider named S. Glenn Young led them.

The raids set off a local war. On one side were the Klan and its raiders. Critics called them a vigilante force, people taking the law into their own hands. On the other were the sheriff’s allies and the Shelton gang of bootleggers. Gunfights broke out in the towns of Herrin and Marion. On January 24, 1925, a shootout in a Herrin cigar store killed four men: Young, Deputy Ora Thomas, and two of Young’s companions.

Was it about liquor or about people? The Klan said it was enforcing the law. Critics point out that many of those raided were Italian immigrants and Catholics, groups the Klan attacked everywhere. Historians see more than one motive at work. Within a few years the local Klan had lost its power. Keep this separate from the Herrin Massacre of 1922, a deadly mine-strike clash that was not a Klan event.

D. C. Stephenson led the Klan in Indiana in the early 1920s. His title was Grand Dragon. Indiana had one of the largest Klans in the nation. Stephenson had great political power, and many officials owed their elections to Klan votes. He presented himself as a champion of law, order and clean living.

In March 1925, Stephenson kidnapped a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer, who worked for the state of Indiana. He violently attacked her. She was badly hurt and died on April 14, 1925. Before she died, she gave a sworn statement about what he had done. A statement like this, made by a person who knows she is dying, is called a dying declaration.

The court allowed her statement as evidence. On November 14, 1925, a jury in Noblesville, Indiana, reached its verdict. It convicted Stephenson of second-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He filed an appeal, but in 1932 the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the verdict. Her words broke the most powerful Klan leader in the North.

The Stephenson case shocked many Klan members. The Klan had sold itself as a defender of morals and law. Now its most powerful Northern leader was a convicted murderer. The scandal, a public event that causes shock and anger, drove members away. In Indiana they left in large numbers. Elsewhere, fights among leaders over money and power drove others out.

Opposition had been growing too. On May 17, 1924, students from the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic school, went into South Bend, Indiana, to confront a Klan rally. Catholic, Jewish and Black groups, newspapers and lawyers kept up the pressure. Across the country, neighbors organized to oppose Klan rallies and candidates.

Hiram Evans had replaced Simmons as the Klan’s national leader in 1922. He could not stop the fall. By 1930 the Klan was a small shadow of what it had been only five years before. Exposure, courts and organized civic groups had broken the hold of a secret order that once counted its members in the millions.

Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. She became a teacher and then a journalist, a person who reports the news, in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1892 a white mob in Memphis killed three Black businessmen. One of them was her friend. Their grocery store had competed with a white-owned store nearby.

Wells began to investigate lynching, the killing of a person by a mob without any trial. Many white newspapers claimed lynchings punished terrible crimes. Wells tested that claim. She collected the white newspapers’ own reports and checked what the victims had actually been accused of. The claim often fell apart. After she wrote about it, threats kept her from returning to Memphis.

She settled in Chicago, married and raised a family there. In 1895 she published A Red Record in Chicago. It gathered lynching cases and counted them year by year. Her method was to use data, facts and numbers collected to answer a question, against a lie. She took part in founding the NAACP in 1909 and worked from Chicago for the rest of her life.

The NAACP was founded in 1909. It fought lynching and segregation, the forced separation of people by race, through courts, research and public pressure. In 1915 it led protests against The Birth of a Nation. Over the next decades, its lawyers won major civil rights cases before the Supreme Court.

In the 1950s, the state of Alabama tried to force the NAACP to hand over its membership lists. Members knew what could happen if their names became public. They could lose jobs, face threats or be attacked. The NAACP refused to give up the names. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court as NAACP v. Alabama.

On June 30, 1958, the Court ruled unanimously, with every justice agreeing, for the NAACP. Justice Harlan wrote the opinion. Alabama could not force the group to reveal its members, because that would expose them to harm and weaken their freedom of association, the right to join with others for a shared cause. Notice the twist. A secret list can protect people, not only hide wrongdoing.

Stetson Kennedy was a writer from Florida who fought the Klan in the 1940s. He said he went undercover inside the Georgia Klan in 1946 and 1947. He also said he passed its secret words to the makers of the Adventures of Superman radio show. In June 1946 the show aired a 16-episode story called Clan of the Fiery Cross. Young listeners heard Superman defeat a hate group.

The story became famous. In 2005 the best-selling book Freakonomics retold it. Then a researcher named Ben Green found problems. On January 8, 2006, the Freakonomics authors, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, wrote an article called Hoodwinked? in the New York Times Magazine. They reported that much of Kennedy’s inside information had come from an informant known as John Brown.

Kennedy’s defenders answer that he did real, brave work against the Klan. The Superman series is not in doubt. Neither is Georgia’s 1947 move to revoke the Klan’s state charter. What is still debated is how much Kennedy chose to embellish, or add to, his own role. A memoir can be both useful and unreliable. Checking it against other records is the historian’s job.