Pod Insights Throughline The Man Who Took On The Klan About this episode In 1871, Ku Klux Klan violence in South Carolina got so bad that the governor sent a telegram to President Ulysses S. Grant warning that he was facing a state of war. Grant sent him Amos Akerman: a former Confederate soldier and slaveholder who became the U. S. government’s most zealous warrior against the KKK.
Guests:
Bernard Powers, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston at the College of Charleston in South Carolina
Guy Gugliotta, author of Grant's Enforcer, Taking Down the Klan
Kidada Williams, professor of history at Wayne State University and author of I Saw Death Coming, A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:16 Speaker 01 A note before we get started. This episode contains descriptions of racist violence.
0:28 Speaker 01 Yorkville, South Carolina, July 27, 1871.
0:35 Speaker 02 Give us your best information with regard to the disturbances in this county at the last election by men in disguise.
0:42 Speaker 03 Well, sir, there is no doubt about the matter. There have been several men killed since the last election.
0:49 Speaker 02 Can you give me the names and circumstances?
0:51 Speaker 03 The first killing I remember was Roundtree.
0:57 Speaker 02 Tell us something about the raid you were on.
0:59 Speaker 03 The first raid I was on was on the 2nd of December.
1:04 Speaker 03 A week or 10 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.
1:14 Speaker 02 Who was Tom Roundtree?
1:16 Speaker 03 He was a black man.
1:17 Speaker 02 What position in his race?
1:19 Speaker 03 He occupied no position at all.
1:22 Speaker 02 What was his politics?
1:23 Speaker 03 He did not meddle in politics much, I don't think.
1:27 Speaker 01 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.
1:39 Speaker 03 Well, when the night came on, I went down there.
1:52 Speaker 03 Some four or five fellows there. I asked them what they was going to do. They said they was going to kill him.
2:04 Speaker 03 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.
2:12 Speaker 03 He then hollered for them all to form a line in the road and start.
2:25 Speaker 03 They went to about a quarter of a mile of Roundtree's house and got down and hitched the horses.
2:31 Speaker 01 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.
2:42 Speaker 01 Around 1 o'clock in the morning, 60 or 70 Klansmen surrounded his house.
2:51 Speaker 03 And somebody fired. I don't know which side fired the first gun.
2:57 Speaker 03 When the first gun was fired, about 50 or 75 guns were fired into the cracks and windows of the house.
3:11 Speaker 04 He went up in the loft. They discovered it.
3:14 Speaker 03 Roundtree ran to the edge of the loft and shot down at us in the entry. He then jumped out of the window.
3:22 Speaker 03 I run out and run around and just got around when I saw him fall. Henry Sepah came up and drew a long bowie knife.
3:32 Speaker 04 Then they shot him and cut his throat. It was moonlight. They had balls of turpentine and lit them.
3:54 Speaker 05 That got the attention of practically everybody.
4:01 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
4:11 Speaker 05 And it gets to be really chaotic.
4:16 Speaker 05 Over the next several months, black folks start burning gin houses and crops of white farmers around York County.
4:27 Speaker 01 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. He even threatened to declare martial law.
4:49 Speaker 01 The Civil War had ended only a few years before.
4:53 Rund Abdelfatah? Enter Amos Akerman, a former Confederate soldier and slaveholder, and the newly appointed Attorney General of the United States. Akerman 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 US federal government at his disposal.
5:20 Speaker 05 He comes in and he's interested in one thing. He's interested in getting rid of the Ku Klux Klan.
5:26 Speaker 01 But that would prove easier said than done.
5:30 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Ronda Abdel Fattah.
5:32 Speaker 01 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
5:34 Rund Abdelfatah? Today on the show, the man who took on the Klan.
5:49 Speaker 00 Hi, this is Carolyn from Wapinsers Falls, New York, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon. With their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR. This message comes from iXL, a learning platform for helping kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. One subscription covers math, science, and reading for all children in a household. Receive 20% off at ixl.com/NPR.
6:32 Speaker 01 This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
7:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Part One: There Had Never Been Peace.
7:07 Rund Abdelfatah? When the war began and Black Carolinians heard the first shots, a lot of those people heard the sound of freedom.
7:20 Rund Abdelfatah? And that was true for Black people across the South.
7:31 Speaker 02 The end of the war, it came just like that. Like you snap your fingers.
7:39 Speaker 02 How did you know the end of the war had come? How did we know it? Hallelujah broke out.
7:45 Speaker 04 Felix Haywood enslaved in Texas.
7:49 Speaker 04 I remember someone saying, asking a question. You got to say, "Master?" And somebody answered and said, "Nah." Sarah Jane Patterson enslaved in Georgia.
8:05 Speaker 07 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.
8:19 Speaker 07 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.
8:35 Rund Abdelfatah? Legally, 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.
9:15 Speaker 07 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. Ezra 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.
9:48 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
10:08 Speaker 02 They're faced with a constellation of options and decisions.
10:14 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Kidada Williams.
10:16 Speaker 02 The author of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction.
10:22 Rund Abdelfatah? And professor of history at Wayne State University.
10:26 Speaker 02 Where do you live? Where do you work?
10:28 Rund Abdelfatah? And they make all of those decisions.
10:31 Speaker 07 In freedom.
10:34 Speaker 07 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.
10:55 Speaker 01 Doing what they can to acquire land, finding employment.
10:59 Speaker 07 They decided that if they were free, they could labor in whatever way they decided. Pressing 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.
11:28 Speaker 01 In the years after the war, much of the South was in shambles.
11:32 Speaker 07 Virtually all of the fighting during the Civil War occurred in the South. And so there was widespread destruction and disrepair.
11:43 Speaker 05 And it was brutal.
11:44 Speaker 07 Those places were abandoned and they suffered tremendous damage from the bombs.
11:53 Speaker 05 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.
12:08 Speaker 01 Guy wrote a book called Grant's Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan.
12:12 Speaker 05 The South had lost one-fifth of its male population. Its economy, based on plantation agriculture and slavery, was no more.
12:22 Speaker 01 For both white and black Southerners, the end of the war upended the social and economic order that had existed for generations.
12:30 Speaker 05 There was nothing to replace it.
12:34 Speaker 01 Amos Akerman was one of the many white Southerners who now found themselves unsure of where they belonged in the world. Before the war...
12:43 Speaker 05 He was a very successful attorney in northern Georgia.
12:47 Speaker 01 He had moved to the South from New Hampshire to escape the cold for health reasons.
12:52 Speaker 05 He was worried about two things, as far as I could see. Worried about getting out of debt and worried about God. Spent a lot of time in church. He's really a bore. He's just super serious, very, very, very dull.
13:09 Speaker 01 When the war began, Akerman saw how the federal government responded to the first invasions of the Confederate Army.
13:17 Speaker 05 He's disgusted because Confederates invaded this big federal armory and the federal government didn't do anything about it. Akerman, much later, says, "I like a strong government." 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.
13:44 Speaker 01 Federal weakness. And also the fact that he himself was a slaveholder who enslaved 11 people.
13:52 Rund Abdelfatah? After the war, the world around Akerman 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 Akerman did a complete about-face.
14:18 Speaker 07 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 impertinence of slavery, we were content that it should go to the grave in which slavery had been buried.
14:43 Speaker 07 Reconstruction was an effort to reconcile the outcomes of the Civil War. So it's a series of policies, but it's also a process.
14:53 Speaker 04 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.
15:06 Rund Abdelfatah? Among white Southerners, a certain kind of rhetoric started to emerge.
15:11 Speaker 04 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.
15:56 Rund Abdelfatah? The Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious of these white terror organizations, was founded in 1866 in Tennessee.
16:05 Speaker 04 The Klan is engaged in, in this early days, in these kind of pranks and they're performing musical entertainment.
16:13 Speaker 07 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, 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.
16:47 Speaker 04 Once black men have the right to vote. They really start to get involved in the political violence.
16:55 Rund Abdelfatah? In 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.
17:20 Speaker 04 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.
17:36 Speaker 07 It's a complete metamorphosis politically.
17:41 Speaker 07 In South Carolina, you'll get the creation of the Black body politic. And, and 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
18:26 Speaker 07 this, nor had whites, and they were outraged.
18:32 Speaker 04 Rather than accept Black political rule, they turned to violence.
18:41 Speaker 02 Testimony of Henry Lipscomb, Spartanburg, South Carolina, July 11, 1871.
18:49 Speaker 07 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.
19:13 Speaker 07 In many cases, it... It was horrific, terrible. They came about midnight. They came to take me or kill me, I reckon.
19:23 Speaker 02 How were these men dressed?
19:25 Speaker 07 This man had on white altogether, plum all around, and a disguise across the face. A little white, and I could see red eyes and lips.
19:37 Speaker 07 There was relative safety in the cities. Charleston, Georgetown, Beaufort.
19:46 Speaker 05 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 up country, in Spartanburg County, York County, Union County, these counties are all pretty much equally divided between blacks and whites.
20:08 Speaker 07 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. 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.
20:36 Speaker 00 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.
20:56 Speaker 02 Why were you afraid to sleep in your house?
20:58 Speaker 07 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.
21:13 Speaker 02 Did you sleep in the woods?
21:14 Speaker 07 Yes, sir.
21:21 Speaker 04 Really, it's 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.
21:43 Speaker 07 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.
22:07 Speaker 04 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.
22:38 Speaker 01 Just like before the Civil War, Georgia attorney Amos Akerman 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.
22:55 Speaker 07 I think the 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.
23:06 Speaker 05 Akerman appeared before Congress and said, this is what you do.
23:10 Speaker 07 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.
23:21 Speaker 05 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.
23:36 Speaker 05 And so, black folks were citizens. When the Ku Klux Klan just breaks into houses, terrorizes people, lynch's people, murders people, steals from people, why don't you make those federal crimes, try them in federal court as civil rights violations?
23:55 Speaker 03 I have no doubt of the fact that Congress possesses such power.
24:01 Speaker 01 Akerman 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.
24:11 Rund Abdelfatah? At this time, Akerman was a stranger to the national stage. Nobody knew his name, and he had fought for the Confederacy. So what made Grant think that Akerman 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?
24:38 Speaker 05 Grant wanted to reconcile with the South, and so he needed a Southerner in the cabinet. And Akerman was indeed the only Southerner ever to serve in a Reconstruction cabinet.
24:51 Speaker 01 When Akerman took office in 1870, he was ready to use the federal power at his disposal to enforce the law.
24:59 Speaker 05 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.
25:11 Speaker 01 Coming up, Amos Aikerman sends the Department of Justice into South Carolina.
25:24 Speaker 00 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 Throughline on NPR.
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26:58 Rund Abdelfatah? Part two, enforcement.
27:03 Speaker 04 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 called them Ku Klux.
27:25 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
27:37 Speaker 01 Jim Williams was an active civil rights leader. He was also the captain of a state militia company based in York County.
27:44 Speaker 03 In South Carolina, the state militia is organized by the Republican administration. The state militia essentially becomes a black militia.
27:57 Speaker 05 It is comprised of black men because southern white men would not really join it.
28:03 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
28:25 Rund Abdelfatah? Rose Williams hid in her house all night with her children. It was only once the sun rose that she was able to go outside.
28:35 Rund Abdelfatah? Her husband's body was discovered that next morning.
28:40 Rund Abdelfatah? He had been lynched by the Klan.
28:50 Speaker 05 It went off like an explosion in South Carolina.
28:55 Speaker 01 It was clear that the Klan had targeted Williams because he was such a public figure. South Carolina's attorney general told the press that civil authorities were unable, because of the Klan, to enforce the laws. In other words, it was like another mini civil war was unfolding right in South Carolina, and the government was losing.
29:16 Rund Abdelfatah? The governor of South Carolina, a pro-Reconstruction Republican, even sent a desperate telegram to President Grant.
29:24 Speaker 07 An actual state of war exists in York and Chester Counties, fighting for four days by Ku Klux from North Carolina. I will be compelled to declare martial law.
29:37 Speaker 01 The federal government had a problem.
29:42 Speaker 01 Republicans in Congress recognize that their ability to continue
29:47 Speaker 07 is going to be endangered if black men are being killed and if they can't vote or if they're being assassinated.
29:55 Speaker 01 For the past year, Congress had been passing a series of laws designed to protect the rights of newly emancipated black people and regain order and control over white supremacist violence in the South. They were known as the Enforcement Acts.
30:10 Speaker 07 The final one of these acts was also known as the KKK Act, the Ku Klux Klan Act.
30:16 Speaker 01 Congress passed the KKK Act in April 1871, a little over a month after Jim Williams' murder. And this was the act that would allow Amos Akerman to prosecute the Klan in South Carolina.
30:29 Speaker 07 When you see this at the top level, at the congressional level, you say, oh, my goodness. Well, Congress is doing things. It's acting. Except the problem is that at the implementation level. And so you see these measures occurring that have been passed by Congress, seeming to indicate growing strength and commitment to Reconstruction. Except at the state level.
30:54 Rund Abdelfatah? In South Carolina, the Klan held a lot of power in local communities, from business owners to physicians to legislators. White South Carolinians from all kinds of backgrounds had ties to the Klan.
31:09 Speaker 07 What we know is that the political climate they create is that you don't need to be a formal member of the organization to partake in the activities. So it can be difficult to understand who's in, who's quote, "in the organization." You know, you move in and out of this activity. You know, you go to church on Sunday morning and, you know, Saturday night, you participated in a Klan raid.
31:33 Rund Abdelfatah? This made it really hard to enforce the law.
31:36 Speaker 07 And the Grant administration will Will begin to more aggressively implement the enforcement acts, working along with the newly organized Justice Department that Amos Akerman will head.
31:56 Speaker 05 Akerman's most important job was to prove that the Ku Klux Klan was a conspiracy.
32:03 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
32:34 Speaker 01 Akerman needed to discover its leaders, its members, and figure out what kind of planned violence the organization was responsible for.
32:42 Speaker 07 South Carolina was seen as kind of a test case.
32:47 Rund Abdelfatah? If Akerman 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.
33:07 Speaker 07 This is Todd from Minneapolis. I've been a listener since your very first episode, and I can't help but think that some people see history as a tale of caution and others see it as a plan to be recreated.
33:26 Speaker 07 Here, this is the Throughline from NPR.
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34:50 Speaker 05 Part Three: Wins and Losses.
34:53 Speaker 01 If Amos Akerman was going to arrest the Ku Klux Klan in raids, he was going to need men on the ground. And Lewis Merrill was one of those guys.
35:05 Speaker 01 Merrill was an army officer sent to York County, which was one of nine South Carolina counties where the federal government wanted to investigate the Klan. But before Merrill and his troops could make any arrests, he needed to build strong cases against Klan members. A feat that was tough in the South. Merrill wasn't getting any help from local law enforcement, and his troops were met with insults by the locals. But the investigations persisted, and for months, Lewis Merrill developed white informants, followed leads from Black residents. He reviewed legal records and coroner's reports. And in October of 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant gave Merrill and his troops authority to go after the Klan.
35:50 Speaker 01 The raids began.
35:54 Speaker 05 So Merrill goes after him. He just starts rolling him up. He goes to the house of a very big leader of the Klan. He sends one of his lieutenants there. They arrest the father. And then the lieutenant asks his daughter, "Where's the pledge?"
36:12 Rund Abdelfatah? The pledge, taken by Klan members.
36:14 Speaker 05 The daughter says, "Oh, it's right here," and opens a desk and hands him the pledge.
36:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Some of the Klan members fled the county. Some even fled the country during the raids. But Merrill and his troops did arrest several Klan leaders, including men accused in Tom Roundtree's and Jim Williams' murders.
36:35 Speaker 05 Merrill's people, the cavalry, are just riding through York County, just pulling people in by the dozen.
36:44 Rund Abdelfatah? Most of the arrests happened in broad daylight with no resistance.
36:48 Speaker 05 So they start to come in, they start to confess. And he's collecting this huge body of material. These people are pleading out as rapidly as they possibly can. They're just taking confessions like one after the other and telling them everything about what's happened. It's absolutely chaotic.
37:08 Speaker 01 In the end, almost 200 people were held in a building that had been converted into a jail. And hundreds more were paroled, waiting to be called to trial.
37:21 Speaker 05 The trials took place in the ballroom of the biggest hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, the capital of the state. Picture this T shape. The judges are at the head of the T. And along one side of the T are the prosecution. And on the other side are the defense lawyers. The jury is sitting over against the wall.
37:45 Speaker 01 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.
37:59 Speaker 05 The rest of the room is filled. Black folks sitting on one side and white folks sitting on the other.
38:11 Speaker 05 Well, there are two things that 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.
38:24 Rund Abdelfatah? The 14th Amendment enshrined equal protections under the Constitution.
38:29 Speaker 05 They want to show that these crimes, hate crimes, are violations of the civil rights of the victims.
38:39 Rund Abdelfatah? Amos Akerman 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.
39:08 Speaker 02 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.
39:19 Rund Abdelfatah? Akerman and his prosecutors also wanted to convict the Klan for violating other constitutional rights.
39:27 Speaker 05 If you break into somebody's house, you're violating the Fourth Amendment. If you break into somebody's house and take their guns, you're violating the Second Amendment. These people are citizens. There is no reason why these crimes can't be prosecuted in federal court, just like the civil rights violations.
39:49 Speaker 01 But prosecutors weren't convincing enough. Even the judges were afraid of expanding the constitutional powers of the federal government. So if Akerman and Corbin were going to have a shot at convicting any Klan members, they had to stick with violations of the Enforcement Act and prove that the Klan and its individual members conspired to prevent black people from voting.
40:11 Speaker 05 You're beating people up, and you're lynching people, and you're doing all these crimes. And you're doing it because you don't want these folks to belong to the Republican Party, and you don't want them to vote.
40:24 Speaker 01 And these conspiracy cases had strong witnesses from the black community.
40:30 Speaker 05 Maybe give unbelievable testimony.
40:33 Speaker 02 Are you the wife of Jim Williams?
40:35 Speaker 04 Yes, sir.
40:37 Speaker 05 Jim Williams' wife, Rose, just describes in
40:43 Speaker 05 in detail exactly what happened, how her husband was sort of found hiding underneath the floorboards, taken out.
40:52 Speaker 04 They told me to shut the door and take my children and go to bed. I shut the door but didn't go to bed. I looked out of the crack after them until they got under the shadows of the trees.
41:09 Speaker 05 Walked out into the woods and hung from a pine tree.
41:15 Speaker 05 And this courtroom is just absolutely silent.
41:20 Speaker 01 While the trials were underway, endless Ackerman was fired up, pushing his rhetoric to sell these prosecutions to the public.
41:30 Speaker 05 He became more and more and more militant as time went on. By the time these trials took place, he was regarded as the most radical member of the cabinet. He actually went up and gave a speech in Brooklyn.
41:45 Speaker 01 Where he commented on KKK men on trial in South Carolina.
41:49 Speaker 03 They are to be convicted. Some would be imprisoned, some sent to the penitentiary, and some would be hung.
41:58 Speaker 05 And he met it.
41:59 Rund Abdelfatah? This new radicalized Ackerman hadn't just pushed the buttons of former Confederates. President Grant was looking towards the next election. The political tides were changing. Grant began pulling back on using the federal government to go after the KKK. The governor of Georgia requested federal help to deal with the Klan in his state, but Grant refused. Ackerman had also been getting a little too involved in Grant's business interests.
42:30 Speaker 05 He had gotten involved in a couple of cases against a big railroad. And Grant loved businessmen. He loved big railroad people and rich people. So the feeling was, on Acreman's part, that he had alienated, too many rich people had alienated the railroads, and he had to leave.
42:52 Speaker 01 Then, in the middle of the trials, Amos Acreman was pressured by President Grant to step down.
43:06 Speaker 03 Sir, I hereby resign the Office of Attorney General of the United States. This resignation to take effect in accordance with the wish which you verbally expressed to me today, on the 10th of January next. A.T. Acreman, Department of Justice, December 13, 1871.
43:27 Speaker 01 Despite Acreman's resignation, the federal government won many of its conspiracy cases in the South Carolina Klan trials of 1871 and 1872. In the end, there were about 140 convictions, mostly guilty pleas. But after Acreman resigned, and after these first few trials, the political will to prosecute the more than 1,000 open Klan cases fizzled out. The white lawmakers in Congress soon no longer had an appetite for using the federal government's power to prosecute violence against black people like they had before. The advocates just weren't there.
44:07 Speaker 05 Thaddeus Stevens, the Charles Sumners, Lincoln, he was gone. They were gone.
44:16 Speaker 05 Carrying this flag was an increasingly difficult labor.
44:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Grant would eventually issue a blanket pardon for all those convicted and for those cases not yet tried.
44:34 Rund Abdelfatah? For all of the people who are arrested, hardly anyone does time. And a lot of that is because of the local communities and ongoing Resistance to black people being free, equal, and secure, and a resistance to the federal government presuming that it should be doing anything in order to stop white Southerners from attacking black Southerners. On the surface, Akerman's zealous pursuit of the KKK was a win for the federal government in the middle of Reconstruction. After the trials ended in 1872, the organization more or less disappeared.
45:11 Speaker 05 The Klan, per se, pretty much folded its tents all across the South. The Ku Klux Klan just disappeared, but white terrorism did not.
45:25 Rund Abdelfatah? And in the end, Akerman and the Justice Department never took down the big KKK leaders like they'd wanted. Most of them either fled the counties during the raids, or just didn't face major consequences. A lot of people, they never surrendered themselves to the government. They just leave and go to another community. A lot of people are pardoned, right, for their activities.
45:49 Speaker 01 And so that's why hardly anyone does any time, and they just go back into the communities, doing some of the exact same things they had done before. In 1877, Grant's presidency came to an end, and Reconstruction went with him. The 1876 election was highly contested. In order to settle the disputes, the federal government promised to pull the military presence from the South. Once the military was no longer enforcing Reconstruction, Southern Democrats started passing Jim Crow laws. These laws upheld racial segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters. They made it easier for white violence against black people to continue.
46:32 Speaker 01 So you don't have as many Klan raids after all of the arrests, but you still have lynchings, you still have massacres, you still have a lot of targeted violence around.
46:41 Rund Abdelfatah? Around elections through the end of the 19th century. And that's how they're able to get Jim Crow installed, through violence and by seizing political power. By the 1880s.
46:52 Speaker 07 All the black senators and black congressmen from the South were all gone.
46:58 Rund Abdelfatah? And the North, which still today gets a lot of credit for abolishing slavery, doesn't re-up its push to use the federal government to change things. It doesn't go full Amos Akerman on these laws in the South.
47:14 Rund Abdelfatah? These are not the abolitionists they've styled themselves as. Northerners and Westerners create this abolitionist cause, this mythology that they're all abolitionists. And the reality is that they were not. They only accepted emancipation as a way to end the war quickly.
47:30 Speaker 01 And they can get away with that because white Northerners and white Westerners are willing to turn deaf ear and blind eye to the violence in order to move on with the American experiment.
47:46 Speaker 07 What happens over time is the memories of the war and what it was about, they begin to fade.
47:55 Speaker 01 How would you then characterize the outcome of these trials? Like, I mean, I asked this question, would you consider it a success or failure? If the measure is protecting the black population and ending the terror in what's effectively a local civil war happening, how successful or not were these trials in helping to change that?
48:19 Speaker 07 Based on those criteria of stopping the terrorism and protecting the rights of black Carolinians to vote and hold office, I would have to judge the KKK investigations and trials a failure. What they showed, I think unequivocally, that the federal government was not really willing to marshal the full power, authority, and machinery to eradicate white
48:54 Speaker 07 Terrorism in the South. They were unprepared beforehand. They didn't take the opportunity to correct the situation. And what it also probably does is to further embolden the forces of terror and organizations like the KKK to control the display of violence in a way that could not be easily tracked and prosecuted.
49:30 Rund Abdelfatah? The legacy of the Klan trials is one of political power, but also political will. You know, they do something really important during Reconstruction, but they don't do enough. What happened during Reconstruction, what happened with the Klan violence and the Klan hearings, I think it really kind of underscores that reality. The federal government could have acted. They chose not to. And they chose not to because the larger white American public did not want them to.
50:12 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
50:15 Speaker 01 I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
50:20 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
50:22 Speaker 01 And me and. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.
50:26 Speaker 02 Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadyama. Irene Noguchi.
50:31 Rund Abdelfatah? Kiana Mulholland.
50:32 Speaker 03 Thomas Coltrane.
50:35 Rund Abdelfatah? And we want to give a special shout out to producer Lawrence Wu, who I'm sure you've heard on the credits before. He's been with us since we started Throughline about seven years ago. And actually, really, even before we started it. He was burning the midnight oil with me and Ramtin back when the show was just an idea in our heads. I can't say enough how grateful we are that he took a chance on us.
50:56 Speaker 01 The show would not be what it is today without him. He's an incredible, creative producer. Some of the best sound design on this show is thanks to him. And he's just like the coolest guy you'd ever meet. A kind, generous teammate and friend. Now Lawrence is on to new adventures, and we're, of course, very excited for him, but also really sad to see him go.
51:18 Rund Abdelfatah? Thank you, Lawrence, for building the show with us and helping to make it better. We're really going to miss you.
51:26 Speaker 01 Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
51:30 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks to Augie Nuzer, Ellis Oriola, Mark Roth, Luther Pearson, Christy Miles, and Ryan Muzzi for their voiceover work.
51:39 Speaker 01 Thank you to Tony Kavan, Johannes Dergi, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.
51:48 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...
51:54 Speaker 07 Naveed Marvi.
51:56 Speaker 02 Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.
51:59 Speaker 01 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at [email protected] . And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.
52:14 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks for listening.
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