Truth Without Reconciliation

0:00This episode contains graphic depictions of sexual and physical violence. Please take care while listening.

0:35equal protection under the law. But there were other promises as well, like the Southern Homestead Act, which allowed formerly enslaved people and poor whites the ability to purchase parcels of land. The burning question by 1871 was how would these promises be kept? Because it was very clear that many Southern whites were not cooperating, that in fact they were responding with horrific violence and terror against just about any Black person who tried to exercise their rights under the law. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Reconstruction, the Unfinished Promise. Can you give me some sense of the scale of the violence here?

1:23So there are thousands of people who are killed during Reconstruction, And one estimate puts the number at 54 ,000. Oh, wow. Yeah, that is an astonishing number. Yes, which is about the size of a small to mid-sized town. So imagine that the population of a town disappearing, being killed over a roughly 30-year period. I'm speaking with historian Kadada Williams, who's written two books about how black Americans asserted their rights during the Reconstruction era. What's remarkable about her scholarship is how it brings to life stories that have been too long overlooked. Stories she's found in newspapers, in letters, and in public testimony.

2:10Her podcast, Seizing Freedom, brings those stories to life as well. When you listen to these voices she's unearthed from the Reconstruction era, you start to doubt that the Civil War really came to an end in 1865, when the history books say it did. And so even though peace had been declared on paper, we see enslavers and their allies using a great deal of violence to try to preserve slavery as much as possible. And so they are, to a degree, waging a war against newly freed Black people. So what choice does Congress make in the wake of this kind of violence? Because Congress is the body that established Reconstruction.

2:55I think Congress makes decisions that it can, recognizing how resistant the larger population was to emancipation. There's this idea that resistance to emancipation is only in the South. But there's extreme resistance to emancipation in the North and the West. And so Congress authorizes these preliminary investigations. The attorney general partnered with the Treasury Department to send agents south to investigate and arrest offenders. So that's one of the first things that they do. And they're finding enough information that merits legislation. And so Congress will pass the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871.

3:40As Kadada explained to me, the Enforcement Acts were a series of laws passed by Congress to protect the civil liberties and voting rights of African Americans. But members of Congress also attempted to document what was happening. Over the course of seven months, in 1871, they traveled around the South and invited hundreds of witnesses, black and white, to describe the violence they had experienced. They even interviewed some of the perpetrators. These inquiries are sometimes called the Klan hearings, although not all of the perpetrators were part of the Klan. And they were the only real, official effort in all of American history to publicly reckon with the violence that followed the war.

4:24Many of those who testified were speaking on the record about their experiences for the first time. And I have to warn you, this testimony involves graphic depictions of violence.

4:48You've got victims, perpetrators, elected officials, and in that group you have about 200 African Americans who testify at the hearings. State your age, where you were born, and where you now live. As near as I can tell, I'm about 42 or 43 years old. I was born in Gadsden, Florida, and I now live in Clay County near Waldo on old number 11 Pond. One of the testimonies that really stuck out to me was that of Hannah Tutson. She testified in Jacksonville, Florida, on November 10th in 1871. Are you the wife of Samuel Tutson? Yes, sir. Were you at home when he was whipped last spring? Yes, I was at home.

5:39Tell us what took place and how it was done. When they came to my house that night, the dog barked twice. An old man got up and went out of doors and then came back and laid down. The dog flew out again. And I got up and went out of doors. But I could see nothing. I went back into the house, and just as I got in the bed, five men bulged right against the door, and the door fell right in the middle of the floor, and they all fell down.

6:18Hannah was a newly freed woman. She was a wife. She was a mother. She had three younger children in the house. She also had several older children that had moved out and were living on their own. I can imagine that Hannah looked like a lot of Black women at the time. She could have been brown-skinned. She could have been light-skinned. She could have been dark-skinned. We just don't know. She could have been really slim coming out of slavery. She could have been thick because she was in her early 40s when she testified. She would have been moving towards menopause. I see a constellation of possibilities from all of the Black people that I know myself, that I've seen in photographs over time.

7:06She's got a whole world mapped out in her mind. She had her own dreams of what her life was going to be like having survived what she called the red times of slavery. She's working alongside her husband to build a new life for their family. She's doing everything she believes she should do. And yet she's being menaced and harassed by these people who want to deny her everything. And they dismantle her life.

7:44Tell us what took place and how it was done. George McRae. He ran right to me and gathered me by the arm. As I saw him coming, I picked up the child, the baby, and held on to him. The old man threw his arms around my neck, held on to me. Another man catch hold of my foot. And then there was so many hold of me, I cannot tell who they were. The committee is asking her about the details of the May 1871 raid on her family's home. And she's describing what happened when a white man named George McRae attacked her and her family.

8:41Hannah and Samuel had just barely made it out of slavery. They spent several years scrimping and saving every penny they could to buy land. They purchased it legally through a government program, and hardly any time passed before gangs of white men began to harass Hannah and her family. The five men dragged Hannah and her husband outside. One of the men stomped on Samuel as Hannah begged her husband to stop fighting back. I said, Sam, give up. It's not worthwhile to try to do anything. They'll try to kill us here. They took and carried me to a pine, just as large as I could get my arms around.

9:22And then they tied my hands there. They pulled off all my linen, tore it up so that I did not have a piece of rag on me as big as my hand. They tied me and I said, man, what are you going to do with me? And they said, God damn you, we will show you. You are living on another man's premises. I said, no, I am living on my own premises. I gave$150 for it.

9:53Samuel and Hannah are part of a rural community. Their testimonies indicate that it's a mixed-race community with Black and white and probably Native American neighbors. What most people seem to be doing when they acquire land is build a home, plant a large garden, bring in their livestock, and start a crop. On top of helping Samuel with a homestead, Hannah has her own business as a laundress. Doing laundry was how many Black women helped their families survive the transition from slavery to freedom. I imagine Hannah's work was probably crucial in their ability to purchase their land. Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act in 1866 to help newly freed African-Americans acquire land.

10:45One of the conditions of the Homestead Act is that you have to stay on the land in order to keep it. You have to pay the fee, you have to stay on the land continuously for a period of time, and you have to improve the land, meaning you have to grow a crop, et cetera, on it. So what you're hearing in Hannah's testimony is that she will not be intimidated or threatened off her family's land. She knows that if her family leaves, they'll lose everything. As I read her testimony, I learned that the same men had been to her home three weeks before. And when those men returned to their land, they did much more than threaten Hannah and her family.

11:27One of the first things the men did was separate Hannah and Samuel. They take them to completely different parts of their property. They tie Hannah to a tree. A few of the men begin whipping her. This continued well into the night. The men, they take breaks from their assault of Hannah while they destroy their crops, while they tear down their home. And when some of the men would go off and leave, one of the men who stayed, George McRae, took that as an opportunity to assault Hannah. Every time they would go off, George McRae would act scandalously and ridiculously toward me and treat me shamefully.

12:17When he, George, saw them coming again, he would make me get up. He would make me squat down by the pine and say, what are you trembling for? I'd say that I was cold and was afraid that I'd freeze. he would get his knees between my legs and say, God damn, you open your legs. He sat down there and said, Old lady, if you don't let me have my way with you, I will kill you. I said, no, do just what you are going to do. They whipped me and went off again to the horses and got liquor of some kind and poured it on my head and I smelt it for three weeks. So it made me sick. They went off and whispered, and then George McRae told them to go to my house and tear it down.

13:09There were four men whipping me at once. With the straps that you would use on a horse, these were one of many tools that attackers used to assault the people they were holding hostage during these raids. They used everything from branches to whips, ropes, and chains. How many lashes did they give you in all? Can I tell you? For they whipped me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. I was just raw. The blood oozed out through my frock all around my waist, clean through. After I got away from them that night, I ran to my house. My house was torn down.

14:03After the men grew tired of abusing Hannah and her husband, they just left. Hannah, bloody, naked, and most likely in excruciating pain, made her way back home. When I first started reading the congressional testimonies, I read them like a lot of historians typically read them, meaning I skipped past a lot of information and I honed in on Hannah's description of her sexual assault. As I developed a better lens for reading the testimonies, I started to slow down and not just take in her sexual assault, but to understand all of the things that led up to it, all of the things that happened around it, and all of the things that happened afterward.

14:56And I felt a sense of even shame that I had missed all of the other details of her testimony. And so I felt that in some ways, maybe that she's calling to me from across time saying almost that you missed it, that you missed it. You still don't get it. I think what Hannah wanted me to see really clearly that her babies were in the house when they were attacked and they were injured in the attack, too. in ways that historians who look at these records often do not consider at all. I said, Lord, my little children are dead. I went to the box of my things and I picked up a dress I had there. But I went five miles before I put it on my back.

15:53When I got near one of my neighbor's house, I hollered murder. And they heard me. and they said they heard horses' feet go by. I did hear horses myself and I hollered for I was afraid. I cannot read and I've got no clock. But as near as I can tell, an hour must have passed and I went 12 miles by sunrise after I got away from them. She goes searching for her family. She doesn't find the children at the house, which has been torn down. She fears that they have been killed. She goes back, continues to look, and she finds Samuel passed out tied to a tree. They still don't know where the children are.

16:41They wait until the sun rises, and shortly after that, their daughter and her two siblings come home.

16:54What we realize is that the daughter grabbed her two siblings when her parents were being dragged out of the house and ran to a woodpile far away to hide from the men. The eldest daughter explained that she fed the baby gooseberries to keep it from crying and attracting the men to where they were hiding.

17:22How old were your children? One was about five years old, another between nine and ten, and the other was not quite a year old, lacking two months. That was the one you had in your arms when the jerk bit away? Yes, sir. Did the baby get hurt? Yes, sir. And one of its hips, when it began to walk, one of its hips was very bad, and every time you would stand it up, it would scream. But I rubbed it and rubbed it, and it looks like it was outgrowing it now.

18:04What reading Hannah's story made me want to do is to try to figure out if I could learn anything about what happens to them after they testify at the hearings. When you're doing that kind of archival research, you lose track of people over time. Nearly 15 years after Hannah testified at the Klan hearings, I found them in the Florida census. She had moved from where they were along with Samuel and two of their children. They were all living in St. Johns County, Florida. But I'm struck by the fact that they are still together. Because to survive a harrowing attack where a husband is bound and whipped and a wife is bound, whipped, and sexually assaulted, a lot of couples don't come back from that.

18:51They can't live with each other and with what happened to them. But Hannah and Samuel, they're still there. I don't know if it was a healthy union or not, but I know that they're together and that is, at least for me, it is, if not comforting, then interesting.

19:15Do you remember your thoughts and reactions when you first encountered the testimonies from the Klan hearings? Well, it's an incredible compilation of descriptive violence of all sorts. To help make sense of the motivation behind the violence, I wanted to speak to another historian, Professor Robin D.G. Kelly. Kelly is one of the most renowned scholars of the interracial political movements that emerged in the South after Reconstruction was overthrown. And he teaches a class about the Klan hearings at UC Berkeley. One of the things I really emphasize in my own thinking about violence is, what is it for?

19:57You know, so much of it is political violence about suppressing a movement, a revolution. There's not a more revolutionary moment in American history than Reconstruction. And so it's violence produced by the state and the state's relationship to mob violence. And that's something that we should talk about. The violence coming from the former Confederates, coming from the Ku Klux Klan, which was driven by elites. That violence, I would argue, is an extension of the shadow state, trying to basically take back power in the South. Slavery, we know, is incredibly violent. But is the violence after slavery is abolished different in your mind?

20:41Postbellum violence is different in many ways. One, now you're talking about Black people who are not property. So the value of an African who is in bondage is one that required the owner to protect that investment. Now you don't have that kind of protection. The other thing which I think is really, really important, I don't want to lose this, is that state violence and mob violence are two sides of the same coin. In other words, they're completely connected. So the Klan itself was a conspiracy on the part of former planters, property owners, with the support of a deputized white population. and so what ends up happening in 1871, 72, 73, that whole period, this constant struggle of massacres, massacres that are in the service of this new formation or new state power.

21:52So I think it's really important not to see organizations like the Klan as just like a bunch of backwards, ignorant people who hate Black people. It's not even about hating Black people. You know, you can hate or not hate. What they want is power.

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24:44When Black people gained the right to vote, they upended the balance of political power in the South. One story that really struck me in the historical record is that of Emmanuel Fortune. Fortune lived in Jackson County, Florida, way up in the panhandle of the state. He'd been enslaved and he was in his 30s when Reconstruction began. He became a shoemaker and a farmer, a leader in the community. In 1868, Fortune was elected as one of four representatives from his county to the State Constitutional Convention. And that's where his career in politics began. By the time Congress held its so-called Klan hearings, Fortune had been elected to the Florida House of Representatives.

25:31He testified on the same day as Hannah Tudson, November 10, 1871 State your age, where you were born, where you now live and what is your occupation I am going on 39 years old I was born in Jackson County in this state and I now live in Jacksonville This testimony reveals yet another dramatic story one that Kadada Williams wrote about in her book I Saw Death Coming — Emmanuel Fortune was a native Floridian, and the only surviving parent to three children. His wife died in 1871, just months before he gave his testimony at the congressional hearing. I think that Fortune would have dressed his best.

26:19He was a lawmaker, so he would have been used to doing that. And as most proud Black men do, you know, when they're going to important places, when they've got important business, they dress accordingly. The hair would have been done. That part would have been super straight. Coles would have been clean, pressed, and ready to go.

26:39When people like Emanuel Fortune go and testify, they would have gone to these often big formal places, often big buildings. Sometimes they may be state buildings. And depending on the weather, it may be inside, but it might be outside. I would imagine that Fortune had a knife or a gun on him for his own self-defense, no one was going to be patting them down before they went into the room. They're not there with long guns or anything, but, you know, you could keep a pistol on your person.

27:15When did you leave Jackson County? In May 1869. And why did you leave there? There got to be such a state of lawlessness and outrage that I expected that my life was in danger at all times. And I left on that account. In fact, I got indirectly information very often that I would be missing someday and no one would know where I was on account of my being a leading man in politics and taking a very active part in it. You can't overstate the political change Black political power represents in the South. Once Black men start voting, that dramatically alters the balance of power in the region. Emmanuel and his community were in the Plantation Belt, which is where many enslavers had produced cotton before the war.