Randa Abdelfattah

A note before we get started.

This episode contains descriptions of racist violence.

Yorkville, South Carolina, July 27, 1871.

You're hearing readings of testimony about a murder in York County, South Carolina that happened the year before, in 1870.

The men were testifying in front of Congress.

Roundtree was a cotton farmer who lived in York County.

He had just come back from selling his cotton in Charlotte, North Carolina with $200 in his pocket.

Around one o'clock in the morning, 60 or 70 Klansmen surrounded his house.

Black resistance spawned white reprisal.

The Klan embarked on a reign of terror in the South Carolina upcountry.

The violence got so bad that the governor of South Carolina sent a telegram to President Ulysses S. Grant warning that South Carolina was in a state of war.

He even threatened to declare martial law.

The Civil War had ended only a few years before.

But that would prove easier said than done.

And I'm Ramtin Arablui.

In the years after the war, much of the South was in shambles.

Guy wrote a book called Grant's Enforcer, Taking Down the Klan.

For both white and Black Southerners, the end of the war upended the social and economic order that had existed for generations.

Amos Ackerman was one of the many white southerners who now found themselves unsure of where they belonged in the world.

He had moved to the south from New Hampshire to escape the cold for health reasons.