Chapter 1: What historical context led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina?
A note before we get started. This episode contains descriptions of racist violence. Yorkville, South Carolina, July 27, 1871.
Give us your best information with regard to the disturbances in this county at the last election by men in disguise. Well, sir, there is no doubt about the matter. There have been several men killed since the last election. Can you give me the names and circumstances? The first killing I remember was Roundtree. Tell us something about the raids you were on.
The first raid I was on was on the 2nd of December. A week or ten days before the night, Ned Turner came over to the shop where I was at work and told me that they were going to make a raid on Roundtree.
Who was Tom Roundtree? He was a black man. What position in his race?
He occupied no position at all. What was his politics? He did not meddle in politics much, I don't think.
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.
Well, when the night came on, I went down there. Some four or five fellows there, I asked them what they was going to do. They said they was going to kill him. I asked them what they were staying there for. They said they were waiting for some people to come from the other side of the river. He then hollered for them all to form a line in the road and start.
They went to about a quarter of a mile of Roundtree's house and got down and hitched the horses.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did Tom Roundtree's murder exemplify Klan violence?
Enter Amos Ackerman, a former Confederate soldier and slaveholder, and the newly appointed Attorney General of the United States. Ackerman was in charge of the brand new Department of Justice, created to enforce federal law in the South and protect Black people from violence. He believed in the rule of law, and he had the power of the U.S. federal government at his disposal.
He comes in and he's interested in one thing. He's interested in getting rid of the Ku Klux Klan.
But that would prove easier said than done.
I'm Randa Abdelfattah.
And I'm Ramtin Arablui.
Today on the show, the man who took on the Klan.
Hi. Hi. This is Carolyn from Wappingers Falls, New York, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part one, there had never been peace. When the war began and black Carolinians heard the first shots, a lot of those people heard the sound of freedom.
And that was true for Black people across the South.
The end of the war, it came just like that. Like you snap your fingers. How did you know the end of the war had come? How did we know it? Hallelujah broke out. Felix Haywood, enslaved in Texas.
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Chapter 3: What role did Amos Ackerman play in combating Klan activities?
And professor of history at Wayne State University. Where do you live? Where do you work?
And they make all of those decisions in freedom.
First, you go find your loved ones who were sold away from you.
You can see advertisements that they put in local newspapers. For husbands, wives, children that had been sold away.
They rush into securing housing.
Create schools to learn how to read and write.
Doing what they can to acquire land, finding employment.
They decided that if they were free, they could labor in whatever way they decided.
oppressing lawmakers to make sure that their rights are protected. And they have to do this because every single move they make is contested.
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Chapter 4: How did the Reconstruction Acts impact Black political participation?
Reconstruction was an effort to reconcile the outcomes of the Civil War. So it's, you know, a series of policies, but it's also a process as the nation tries to figure out a new way forward. But it also means trying to figure out what it means to include newly freed African Americans into the body politic.
Among white Southerners, a certain kind of rhetoric started to emerge.
White Southerners coming out of the Civil War, they rightfully, you know, one could understand that they might fear that Black people are going to attack them. There is a sense of, what will they do to us after what we have done to them? There are even federal lawmakers that are wringing their hands and saying, well, you know, are Black people seeking revenge?
The reality is that there is no evidence at all of Black people instigating this violence. What they are doing is defending themselves against it in a way that they weren't necessarily doing in slavery.
And that's why you see white supremacists, they kind of up the ante with the organized violence when it becomes clear that they're not going to be able to stop Black people from seizing their freedom.
The Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious of these white terror organizations, was founded in 1866 in Tennessee.
The Klan is engaged in this early days in these kind of pranks and they're performing musical entertainment.
Just because the Klan is not organized in Carolina until 1868, doesn't mean that there was an absence of white terrorist organizations. They exist from the very beginning of the years following the war. The KKK is just the one that was probably the most well-organized and the one that received the greatest publicity. And it's really triggered by the success of political reconstructions.
once Black men have the right to vote, they really start to get involved in the political violence.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did federal authorities face in prosecuting the Klan?
You're moving away from the streetlights. You live out on farms and your nearest neighbors could be miles away. So your ability to receive aid and protection and even to band together. is much more limited in the countryside because the population is much more diffuse.
While Black people were enslaved, their lives had value, right? So enslavers aren't just killing the people they hold in bondage all willy-nilly, but Black people seizing their freedom. It's a completely different story. And so this violence is much more likely to be deadly.
Why were you afraid to sleep in your house? They had killed Mr. Alf Owens, a white man down there, and a black man named Jim Peeler and one named Tom Roundtree. I could hear them say they allowed to go to every radical man's house and that scared me. Did you sleep in the woods? Yes, sir.
There really is no peace for Black people who are trying to live upright and to be free in the South. And that is very clear by virtue of the violence that they are experiencing and witnessing on a daily basis. People think, well, I thought this person was an ally and then they were in the raid the night before. That's the reality of terror.
The issue really then is how does the North and how do Blacks Republican politicians in Washington, in Congress, respond? Well, they respond with hope. They hope that the situation will get better. But unfortunately, they don't respond with enough action.
What starts to happen as the violence goes on and on and on and as it escalates, there is a greater sense of moral injury that the federal government is going to let this violence slide. You have, you know, northern conservatives who are in the Democratic Party at this time saying this is just southern culture. There's nothing to see here. There's nothing going on here.
We don't need to pay attention and we certainly don't need federal troops to do anything about it. We don't need new laws. This is just the way the South is.
Just like before the Civil War, Georgia attorney Amos Ackerman saw the federal government failing to respond to challenges to its authority. He was getting frustrated with their weak stance, and he was not afraid to be open about it.
I think that difficulties arise mainly from the disturbances in the minds of the people on account of the war and its results, and the changes brought in society by these causes.
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Chapter 6: What were the outcomes of the Klan trials in South Carolina?
He's not interested in anything else.
Coming up, Amos Ackerman sends the Department of Justice into South Carolina.
Hello, my name is Imani Rosario. I'm calling from Princeton, New Jersey. I am a smarter, more informed, and probably more interesting person. Having found and started listening to your podcast, you are listening to ThruLine on NPR.
Part two, enforcement. The 7th of March, they came to my house about two o'clock in the night, came in the house and called him. Disguised men. I can't tell who it was. I don't know how many there was. I call them Ku Klux.
In early March 1871, the Ku Klux Klan arrived at Jim Williams' house in York County. He was there with his wife, Rose, and their children.
Jim Williams was an active civil rights leader. He was also the captain of a state militia company based in York County.
In South Carolina, the state militia is organized by the Republican administration. The state militia essentially becomes a black militia. It is comprised of black men because southern white men would not really join it.
Jim Williams' company was actively engaged in resisting Klan activities. They were one of the only lines of defense the Black community had against the Klan. And so it was only a matter of time before Jim became a target.
The Klan
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Chapter 7: How did the political landscape change after the Klan trials?
This made it really hard to enforce the law.
And the Grant Administration will begin to more aggressively implement the Enforcement Acts, working along with the newly organized Justice Department that Amos Ackerman will head. Ackerman's most important job was to prove that the Ku Klux Klan was a conspiracy.
That it was an actual organization with leaders and members, meetings and plans that they carried out to inflict terror on Black people. Looking back from our vantage point, it seems obvious. We know today that the Ku Klux Klan was a real organization. But back then, this was a group shrouded in rumor and mystery.
To the federal government, it wasn't clear exactly what it was or how deep the conspiracy went.
Ackerman needed to discover its leaders, its members, and figure out what kind of planned violence the organization was responsible for.
South Carolina was seen as kind of a test case.
If Ackerman won, it would be a dramatic expansion of the role the federal government could play in enforcing civil rights. It could even mean the end of the Klan. But could he pull it off? That's coming up.
This is Todd from Minneapolis.
I've been a listener since your very first episode.
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Chapter 8: What legacy did the Klan trials leave on civil rights and federal authority?
The jury is sitting over against the wall.
The jurors were mostly Black men. South Carolina had a majority Black population, and potential white jurors also refused to serve, either as a boycott or because they feared or were part of the Klan.
The rest of the room is filled, Black folks sitting on one side and white folks sitting on the other. Well, there are two things that a prosecution wants to do. They want to convict the Klansmen, obviously. But what they want to do is they want to put teeth on the 14th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment enshrined equal protections under the Constitution.
They want to show that these crimes, hate crimes, are violations of the civil rights. of the victims.
Amos Ackerman and his prosecutors argued that the 14th Amendment gave the federal government power over states to uphold these equal protections. And since the state of South Carolina hadn't protected Black people from the Klan, They argued the federal government could. But the 14th Amendment had just been ratified a few years before, and what it meant had still not been totally tested.
Prosecutor David Corbin told The Room, What does the 14th Amendment mean?
Is Congress going to pass an act to explain these words? I have no doubt that Congress cannot explain what those words mean. It must be done by the court.
Ackerman and his prosecutors also wanted to convict the Klan for violating other constitutional rights.
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