Let’s talk about the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan has, finally, been acknowledged by many as a terrorist group. At least a group that used to be terrorists. What the modern Klan is has been painted in murky colors by the so-called liberal media as they flirt with sexier Proud Boys and neo Neo Nazis leaving the KKK grandpops mostly alone. Anyway.
Disclaimer: I am just a stay-at-home mom who actually has no free time on her hands and, instead, gets up before dawn to do this because there is a part of me that is compelled to. In short: I am no expert.
First, what is terrorism? I’m going with the FBI definition:
Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government or its citizens to further certain political or social objectives. Law enforcement generally recognizes two types of terrorism: domestic and international. (Source: FBI)
Terrorist use violence or the threat of violence to produce fear. This is what distinguishes terrorism from both conventional and guerrilla warfare. Sure, fear tactics, usually dubbed psychological warfare, are used in both conventional and guerrilla warfare, but they are usually secondary with the focus on a “military” victory. Fear tactics are a weapon in the arsenal, not the entirety of it. Terrorists are people who employ the deliberate use of violence to create fear. They often feel they have no other way to achieve their goals. Goals that are not just political, but virtuous. Terrorists come from a point of weakness, desperation, and, perhaps most dangerous, righteousness. (Jenkins, J. P. (2021). terrorism | Definition, History, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com)
To infect people with fear terrorists employ acts of violence that are dramatic and very public. In the case of the Klan this includes lynchings, arson, kidnappings, mass murder, and bombings. Targets are chosen to maximize shock value. Which explains why the Klan enjoys a church burning. Terrorists want to destroy a people’s sense of peace.
To be frank, there are times when terrorism is, if not justifiable then understandable. When people who have been enslaved, murdered, pillaged, and downtrodden in every way possible resort to terrorism against their oppressors most of us get it. Even if we don’t agree. The Klan is made up of the oppressors. The goal is to either remove or subjugate people who exist outside of the parameters that they dub fully human. In this, they were too often successful.
The Ku Klux Klan began during Reconstruction. In the Klan version Southerners were just beginning to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives when evil northern republicans, carpetbaggers, and Southern traitors overthrew local governments and colluded with freed Blacks to attack defenseless whites while the South was helpless to do anything about it. (This, by the way, is very similar to how Reconstruction was taught in my south Louisiana public school history classes. I enjoyed history and don’t remember learning anything in school about African Americans of this time.)
Then, in 1866, General Nathan Bedford Forrest founded the Ku Klux Klan adopting the name from the Greek word “kyklos,” meaning circle, and the English word clan. The original Klan was not centralized, instead working as a series of terrorist cells to lift white Southerners back into their “proper” position. This “Invisible Empire” employed violence against Republicanism and Reconstruction primarily by performing monstrous acts of brutality against African Americans in the hopes of maintaining white supremacy in the post-war South.
“From 1866 through 1871, men calling themselves ‘Ku-Klux’ killed hundreds of black Southerners and their white supporters, sexually molested hundreds of black women and men, drove thousands of black families from their homes and thousands of black men and women from their employment, and appropriated land, crops, guns, livestock, and food from black Southerners on a massive scale.”
Elaine Frantz Parsons in Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction.
Gladys-Marie Fry writes in her book, Night Riders in Black Folk History (University of Tennessee Press, 1977) about why the Klan chose to costume themselves the way they do. “It is significant that the early Klan made such great efforts to frighten and terrorize blacks through supernatural means. The whole rationale for psychological control based on a fear of the supernatural was that whites were sure that they knew black people. They were not only firmly convinced that black people were gullible and would literally believe anything, but they were equally sure that blacks were an extremely superstitious people who had a fantastic belief in the supernatural interwoven into their life, folklore, and religion.
“Such thinking had obvious flaws: the underestimation of black intelligence and the overvaluation of existing superstitious beliefs. Blacks were frightened, no doubt, but not of ghosts. They were terrified of living, well-armed men who were extremely capable of making black people ghosts before their time.”
(Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism, www.splcenter.org 2021
Black people were right to fear. Between 1865 and 1900 it is estimated that the KKK performed over 3500 lynchings of Black people in the South. This is in addition to the many white Republicans and sympathizers who were also targets. The scale of the barbarity motivated the Republican led Congress to make a show of passing the Force Acts of 1870. Unfortunately, the Act merely doubled down on Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of equal protection without addressing the persistent violence. Congress then passed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 the first piece of US legislation that made individuals and states punishable under federal law for hate crimes or disenfranchising citizens on the basis of race. President Ulysses S Grant, perhaps still bitter about the massive loss of life due to Southern hubris, used the KKK Act to crack down on the Klan.
Unfortunately for everyone the presidential election of 1876 was heavily contested. The US did what the US always does and threw Black folks under the bus. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was allowed to take office but in exchange federal troops were withdrawn from the South. Republicans abandoned those that they* had formerly enslaved and white supremacists reasserted control over the South instituting the system of Jim Crow segregation, or slavery light.** The Klan, its individuals no longer needing to hide in the shadows, mostly disbanded. (The First KKK (article) | Reconstruction. (2021). Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org)
*I said what I said.
Until 4:29 a.m. on April 12, 1861, a minute before Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor and began the Civil War the federal government supported and enforced the Southern enslavement of human beings. Some would contend this to be true up through the Emancipation Proclamation which, arguably, would have freed no enslaved person if the South had set down its arms and surrendered.
Just look at the “slave cases” decided by the Supreme Court. In The Antelope in 1825 Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the African slave trade was not contrary to the law of nations. In Prigg v Pennsylvania (1842) the court held that the federal Fugitive Slave Act overruled a Pennsylvania state law that prohibited free Black people from being taken out of Pennsylvania into slavery. In 1851 in Strader v. Graham the U.S. Supreme Court simply bowed out of determining whether slaves whose master allowed them to travel from the slave state of Kentucky into the free state of Ohio acquired a right to freedom. There was the notorious Dred Scott Decision of 1857 in which the Supreme Court stripped citizenship from Americans of African descent. And in 1861 there was Kentucky v Dennison in which the Court chose not to force free people from Ohio into slavery in Kentucky, but did formally chastise Ohio Governor William Dennison for refusing to do so.
There were lots of people, North and South, agitating for abolition. However, the United States was not a pro-freedom government. For Yankees to pretend otherwise is, at best, disingenuous.
**The only reparations to be found were those paid by the Federal Government to former enslavers. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/opinion/when-slaveowners-got-reparations.html