Ramtin Arablui

He believed in the rule of law, and he had the power of the U.S.

federal government at his disposal.

I'm Randa Abdelfattah.

Today on the show, the man who took on the Klan.

And that was true for Black people across the South.

The Civil War began in 1861, and within two years, President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all people who were enslaved in the Confederacy were free.

And when the Confederacy was defeated in 1865, the federal government passed the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery across the United States.

This is Bernard Powers.

He's the director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

After the war, the world around Ackerman had turned on its head.

He basically saw the writing on the wall, the side he had fought for, lost.

And above his devotion to the Confederacy was his devotion to the rule of law.

Slavery was illegal, and that was simply the law now.

However unlikely it might have seemed, Amos Ackerman did a complete about-face.

Among white Southerners, a certain kind of rhetoric started to emerge.

The Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious of these white terror organizations, was founded in 1866 in Tennessee.

In 1867, the Reconstruction Acts were passed.

They placed the Confederate states under military rule until they ratified the 14th Amendment and established new state constitutions that guaranteed equal rights and protections to African Americans.

Under the Reconstruction Acts, Black men in Southern states could vote and hold office for the first time.

At this time, Ackerman was a stranger to the national stage.