Dominic Sandbrook

I'm miming it.

You're pouring this water into your hood, and then you've got a kind of concealed... Oh, I see.

You've got a concealed bottle.

So it looks like you're drinking an unearthly quantity of water.

And if you forget to do it...

then no wonder your robes are yellow.

Right, very good.

Now, in the early 20th century, historians who were sympathetic to the lost cause of the Confederacy claimed that these tricks were brilliant and that they terrified African-Americans and they stopped them voting and they helped redeem the South from the horrors of Reconstruction.

But historians now generally say the idea that the freedmen were taken in by these sort of tricks is itself a racist myth.

As Alan Trelease says, this is actually a story not about black superstition about ghosts.

It's a story about white superstitions about black people.

Because it basically, the white, the Klansmen are playing these tricks and laughing and saying to each other, gosh, the African-Americans are so gullible, they're taken in by my detachable hand.

In reality, of course, the African-Americans aren't taken in by it at all, but they're just terrified that if they don't play up the game, and if they don't pretend to be frightened... They'll be lynched.

Yeah, then they'll be beaten up or killed or whatever.

Exactly right.

And actually, the emphasis on these cruel jokes is a bit misleading because by the summer of 1868, what the Klan is really about is violence.

So this is why the Klan matters.

Not the dressing up, not the jokes, but because of the beating and shooting and hanging and rape and murder of thousands of people, the vast majority of them black.

Like the Klan itself, the violence really begins in earnest in Tennessee in 1868 in the build-up to the county elections.

And one of the best documented examples is a place called Moree County, which was south of Nashville.