The reconstruction-era Ku-Klux Klan emerged as a solution to the problem of southern white defeat and black empowerment. Through Klan terror, white southern men tried both to reestablish their local control of freedpeople and to position themselves as playing a role in the national future. Klan attacks targeted the confident and ambitious. They undermined black southerners’ claims to manhood, womanhood, and social and political competence. Ku-Klux intended for these attacks not only to kill or injure, but also to humiliate victims. Yet, since victims had some control over their response to att ... More

The reconstruction-era Ku-Klux Klan emerged as a solution to the problem of southern white defeat and black empowerment. Through Klan terror, white southern men tried both to reestablish their local control of freedpeople and to position themselves as playing a role in the national future. Klan attacks targeted the confident and ambitious. They undermined black southerners’ claims to manhood, womanhood, and social and political competence. Ku-Klux intended for these attacks not only to kill or injure, but also to humiliate victims. Yet, since victims had some control over their response to attacks, and were usually the only ones able to publically describe the attack, they had an opportunity to undermine the messages their attackers hoped to convey. Reconstruction-era Ku-Klux worked to reestablish antebellum relationships of oppression, but they understood themselves as modern: Klan costumes drew on contemporary, northern ideas and tropes from the minstrel stage and urban bureaucratic life. Many northerners recognized this borrowing, found the Klan fascinating, and wrote about them in newspapers and other popular texts. As a terrorist movement, the Klan depended on the circulation of such texts both to spread fear among Republican southerners and to recruit new members. Many Klan attacks built upon preexisting local conflicts. Labelling an act of violence as “Klan” violence, however, abstracted it from its local context, defining it as translocal and political. It also invited state and federal governments to become involved in suppressing it. Klan violence, ironically, served to integrate rural southern communities into a broader national culture.