White Supremacist Terrorism in the United States

The tragic irony surrounding the American caricature of the foreign terrorist was that in the Ku Klux Klan the United States produced a wholly domestic terrorist movement during Reconstruction that gleaned more support and shed more blood than any in Europe or Russia.

The American Civil War left over 600,000 men dead and devastated the infrastructure of the American South. Moreover, it fundamentally trans­formed the region's culture, society and economy as well as destroying its moral and ideological centre by ending slavery. Aided by the newly estab­lished Freedmen's Bureau, African Americans set up businesses, bought property, worked their own land, attended schools and learned to read, held public assemblies, and, in short, sought to live as free citizens for the first time on a large scale in the American South. But Southern states essentially tried to re-enslave African Americans through Black Codes, which used vagrancy laws, employment contracts and penal labour to restrict their movement and liberty. After ‘Radical' Republicans surged into Congress in 1866, they passed legislation that stripped former soldiers and administrators of the Confederacy of the right to vote and sent troops to reoccupy the South in order to safeguard African Americans' newly won franchise. Although they remained a majority in most areas of the South, former Confederates - nearly all of them Democrats - quickly found them­selves ruled by Republican coalitions of freed blacks, black and white Northern ‘carpetbaggers' who had come south, and white Southern ‘scala­wags' who cooperated with the new authorities.

Having lost the rebellion and unable to wage another open war of resistance to protect their lost world, militant southern white Democrats responded by launching a campaign of terrorism.

Because of poor record-keeping and broad popular support in the South we do not know the true extent of the casualties. What we do have are the occasional local body counts. For example, twenty-five murders and 115 assaults on ‘innocents' were reported between June and October 1867 in Tennessee. Two hundred racially based murders occurred in Arkansas

The Origins of Modern Terrorism between July and October 1868. And perhaps one hundred people were killed in a single Florida county from 1865 to 1871.^[944] An avalanche of anecdotes from memoirs, official reports and congressional testimonies make clear that violence such as this was epidemic across most of the former Confederacy.

Across the South, masked riders delivered beatings and whippings, raped women, burned down houses and schools, and shot, burned or lynched their victims. Blacks were targeted when they registered or voted, acquired parcels of land, taught or attended school, armed themselves or formed local militias out of self-defence. According to a Mississippi Klansman, ‘when a leading negro would make himself particularly obnoxious... and was considered dangerous, he was selected as an example’.^[945] White Republicans who acted in concert with blacks or supported them as teachers, business partners, tax collectors, election officials, sheriffs or politicians were also attacked.

The US Congress passed laws to mobilise resources against the KKK, and President Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops on several occasions to take on the Klan. But this was expensive, extended the divisiveness of the Civil War, and created increasing resentment in the North. Federal support for Reconstruction dried up, troops were slowly withdrawn, and courts were starved of money to prosecute and punish Klan members and other white supremacists. Violence against Republicans, black and white, grew, and white supremacist cells evolved from nighttime arson, beatings and murder to open organisation in militias. So too did the purpose of white supremacist violence evolve: from instrumental terror meant to influence to functional violence designed to occupy spaces and physically keep African Americans and white Republicans away from polls. In 1876-7, the last Reconstruction era govern­ments elected by blacks and whites were driven from office, and Union troops fully withdrew. Soon thereafter, Klan violence largely evaporated - not because the Klan had been suppressed, but because the Klan had won.

White supremacist violence was, of course, specifically intended to restore the racial hierarchy upset by the Civil War. But it was often couched in the rhetoric of protecting the people and their rights from an intrusive, aggressive government. After all, the first white supremacist blow against Reconstruction was struck when the actor John Wilkes Booth uttered the immortal words ‘Sic

semper tyrannis' (‘Thus always to tyrants') while assassinating Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. As for the southern campaign of violence itself, a South Carolinian Klan manifesto described it thus: ‘Defeated on the battle­field, defrauded at the ballot box, we have but one remedy - the dagger that was made illustrious in the hands of Brutus.'^[946] Anti-federal vitriol only increased in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, as can be seen in the words of I.

It is important to observe that white supremacist terrorism did not cease with the end of Reconstruction. In the 1890s, the states of the former Confederacy adopted new constitutions and new laws that fully implemen­ted racial segregation. This is what we know as Jim Crow, but it was to all intents and purposes American apartheid. It was enshrined in the law and maintained by the authorities to be sure, but what really preserved it was lynching. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, over 4,000 African Americans were lynched from 1877 to 1950.^[948] Lynchings were mob violence ostensibly carried out to achieve justice, but the accusations used to trigger these murders were often fabricated. Victims were sometimes chosen arbi­trarily or under the flimsiest of circumstances. In other words, individuals were primarily lynched to send a message to the rest of the targeted popula­tion to remain subservient. The author Richard Wright said in his autobio­graphy, ‘The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness.'^[949] One would be hard-pressed to come up with a clearer description of how terrorism - or, for that matter, state terror - operates. Jim Crow established the legal basis for segregation. But lynchings - that is, terrorism - were the occasional outbursts of violence that helped preserve segregation.