The Man Who Took On The Klan

0:00A note before we get started. This episode contains descriptions of racist violence.

0:12Yorkville, South Carolina, July 27th, 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 raid 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.

0:57Who 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.

1:35Some four or five fellows there. I asked them what they was going to do. They said they was going to kill him.

1:47I 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.

2:08They 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 1 o 'clock in the morning, 60 or 70 Klansmen surrounded his house.

2:34And somebody fired. I don't know which side fired the first gun. When the first gun was fired, about 50 or 75 guns were fired into the cracks and windows of the house.

2:54He went up in the loft. They discovered it. Roundtree run to the edge of the loft and shot down at us in the entry. He then jumped out of the window. I run out and run around and just got around when I saw him fall. Henry Sepaw came up and drew a long bowie knife. Then they shot him and cut his throat. It was moonlight. They had balls of turpentine and lit them.

3:37That got the attention of practically everybody. Tom Roundtree's killing was part of the Ku Klux Klan's campaign to restore white power in South Carolina by keeping black people from the ballot box. And it gets to be really chaotic. Over the next several months, black folks start burning gin houses and crops of white farmers around York County. 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.

4:28He even threatened to declare martial law. The Civil War had ended only a few years before. 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.

5:13I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. And I'm Ramtin Adab-Louis. Today on the show, the man who took on the Klan.

5:32Hi, this is Carolyn from Lappinger's Falls, New York, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

5:45Part 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.

6:14The end of the war, it came just like that. Like you snap your fingers.

6:22How did you know the end of the war had come? How did we know it? Hallelujah broke out. Felix Haywood, enslaved in Texas. I remember someone saying, asking a question. You got to say, Master? And somebody answered and said, Nah. Sarah Jane Patterson, enslaved in Georgia. Something begins to work up here. I begins to think and to know things. And I knew then I could make a living for my own self, and I never had to be a slave no more. Robert Falls, enslaved in North Carolina. Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes, and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We were free. Just like that, we were free.

7:19Legally, there's a new situation, but the notion of freedom is, and it was for them, a vague and amorphous notion. The Civil War began in 1861, and within two years, President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all people who were enslaved in the Confederacy were free. And when the Confederacy was defeated in 1865, the federal government passed the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery across the United States. The slaves where I lived knew after the war that they had abundance of that something called freedom. What they could not eat, wear, and sleep in.

8:12Ezra Adams, enslaved in South Carolina. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud, but it didn't make them rich. Yes, sir. They soon found out that freedom ain't nothing, unless you got it something to live on and a place to call home. And they knew that to really be free, they had to do things. This is Bernard Powers. He's the director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. They had to determine what freedom looked like, And that's what they did in so many ways. They're faced with a constellation of options and decisions.

8:58This is Kadada Williams. The author of I Saw Death Coming, a history of terror and survival in the war against Reconstruction. 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.

9:50Pressing lawmakers to make sure that their rights are protected. And they have to do this because every single move they make is contested. The master says we are all free, but it don't mean we is white and it don't mean we is equal. George King, enslaved in South Carolina.

10:11In the years after the war, much of the South was in shambles. Virtually all of the fighting during the Civil War occurred in the South. And so there was widespread destruction and disrepair. In other words, brutal. Those places were abandoned, and they suffered tremendous damage from the bombs. There had been a surrender, of course, in 1865 at Appomattox, but there had never been peace. I'm Guy Gugliotta, former journalist for the Washington Post. Guy wrote a book called Grant's Enforcer, Taking Down the Klan. The South had lost one-fifth of its male population. Its economy, based on plantation agriculture and slavery, was no more.

11:06For both white and black Southerners, the end of the war upended the social and economic order that had existed for generations. There was nothing to replace it. Amos Ackerman was one of the many white Southerners who now found themselves unsure of where they belonged in the world. Before the war... He was a very successful attorney in northern Georgia. He had moved to the south from New Hampshire to escape the cold for health reasons. He was worried about two things, as far as I could see. Worried about getting out of debt and worried about God. He spent a lot of time in church. He's really a bore.

11:48He's just super serious, very, very, very dull. When the war began, Ackerman saw how the federal government responded to the first invasions of the Confederate Army. He's disgusted because Confederates invaded this big federal armory and the federal government didn't do anything about it. Ackerman much later says, I like a strong government. He said, and this government wasn't strong. If this government wouldn't protect itself, I wasn't going to protect it. It was federal weakness which kind of drove him into the Confederacy. Federal weakness. And also the fact that he himself was a slaveholder who enslaved 11 people.

12:36After the war, the world around Ackerman had turned on its head. He basically saw the writing on the wall, the side he had fought for, lost. And above his devotion to the Confederacy was his devotion to the rule of law. Slavery was illegal. And that was simply the law now. However unlikely it might have seemed, Amos Ackerman did a complete about-face. Some of us who had adhered to the Confederacy felt it to be our duty that we were to participate in the politics of the Union. To let Confederate ideas rule us no longer. Regarding the subjugation of one race by the other as an appurtenance of slavery, we were content that it should go to the grave in which slavery had been buried.

13:28Reconstruction 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.

14:09There 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.

14:50The Klan is engaged in these early days in these kind of pranks and they're performing musical entertainment. Just because the Klan is not organized in Carolina until 1868, it 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 reconstruction. Once Black men have the right to vote, they really start to get involved in the political violence.

15:39In 1867, the Reconstruction Acts were passed. They placed the Confederate states under military rule until they ratified the 14th Amendment and established new state constitutions that guaranteed equal rights and protections to African Americans. Under the Reconstruction Acts, Black men in southern states could vote and hold office for the first time. This opens the floodgates and Black men rush through them. In 1867, only about 1 % of Black men are registered to vote. But by the end of the year, upwards of 80 % of Black men are registered to vote. It's a complete metamorphosis politically. In South Carolina, you'll get the creation of the black body politic.

16:31And the thing to keep in mind is this. South Carolina is a state that has a black majority. When the state elections are held in the spring of 1868, African Americans occupied the majority of seats. This is the only place. It's the only place during Reconstruction in the South where there was a Black majority in either house of a state legislature. Obviously, Black people had never seen this, had never participated in a process like this, nor had whites, and they were outraged. Rather than accept Black political rule, they turned to violence.

17:25Testimony of Henry Lipscomb, Spartanburg, South Carolina, July 11, 1871. Were the colored people there afraid? They were not so afraid at the start. At the election, they were not afraid. They went up and voted, every one of them. and some swam the river in order to and some waited. But after the coup clucking started and they whipped some and killed some and got their guns, they were scared. In many cases, it was horrific, terrible. They came about midnight. They came to take me or kill me, I reckon. How were these men dressed? This man had on white all together, Plum all around and a disguise across the face.

18:15A little white and I could see red eyes and lips. There was relative safety in the cities. Charleston, Georgetown, Beaufort. The cotton counties are just overwhelmingly black. If the Klan tries to mess around down there, it's pretty dangerous for them. But up in the upcountry, in Spartanburg County, York County, Union County, these counties are all pretty much equally divided between blacks and whites. When one went into the interior, particularly, you're moving away from the streetlights. You live out on farms, and your nearest neighbors could be miles away.

19:09receive aid and protection, and even to band together. It's 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.

19:57Did you sleep in the woods? Yes, sir.

20:04There 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 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.

21:04You 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.

21:39I 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. Ackerman appeared before Congress and said, this is what you do. Some action by Congress is desirable, and that action should be founded upon the power which Congress possesses under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. You've just passed the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment says that everybody born in the United States is a citizen. If you're a citizen, you've got rights. And so black folks are citizens. When the Ku Klux Klan just breaks into houses, terrorizes people, lynches people, murders people, steals from people, why don't you make those federal crimes, try them in federal court as civil rights violations?

22:39I have no doubt of the fact that Congress possesses such power. Ackerman caught President Grant's eye, and he offered him a position as the nation's new attorney general, which took the whole country by surprise. At this time, Ackerman was a stranger to the national stage. Nobody knew his name. And he had fought for the Confederacy. So what made Grant think that Ackerman was the best choice to enforce Reconstruction laws that most former Confederate soldiers saw as not only a humiliating reminder of their defeat, but also a huge overreach of federal powers? Grant wanted to reconcile with the South, and so he needed a Southerner in the Cabinet.

23:29And Ackerman was indeed the only Southerner ever to serve in the Reconstruction. cabinet. When Ackerman took office in 1870, he was ready to use the federal power at his disposal to enforce the law. He comes in and he's interested in one thing. He's interested in getting rid of the Ku Klux Klan, and that's all he wants to do. He's not interested in anything else. Coming up, Amos Ackerman sends the Department of Justice into South Carolina.

24:07Hello, 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 Throughline on NPR.

24:36Part 2. Enforcement. The 7th of March. They came to my house about 2 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.

25:34It 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.