From Michael Newton’s book:
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January 27, 1949— within the Many Klans of Bill Hendrix section: nocturnal motorcade in Tallahassee—200 members led by Hendrix
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May 1949—
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June 11, 1949— page 127 --- Hendrix:
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July 31, 1949— Despite Gov. Warren’s administration’s stated opposition to the KKK, Governor Warren’s secretary of state issued a Florida charter to the Original Southern Klans, Bill Hendrix presiding at grand dragon.
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August 17, 1949— First Lucky Club 13 minutes extant from the auction lot.
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August 28, 1949—page 126-127— On August 28, 1949 Hendrix broke with his Georgia associates, emerging from a secret klonvocation in Jacksonville to announce his election as “national adjutant” of the new Northern and Southern Knights of the KKK, serving an anonymous “Permanent Emperor Samuel II” - whom Stetson Kennedy promptly identified as Jacksonville Democratic party leader Edgar Waybright.
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January 29, 1950—Another Klan merger for Hendrix , this one reported on January 29, 1950. Hendrix announced the alliance of his knights with the Association of Carolina Klans, lead by Tarheel grocer Tom Hamilton, and the Federated Klans of America, under William Morris.
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Their program, Hendrix told reporters, was to an all-out war on “hate groups,” including the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America.
Progressive education was also a target, panned by Hendrix as “nothing more than a communist movement” designed to subvert American values.
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Along the way, Hendrix urged collaboration between the KKK and the Catholic Church, in opposition to communism and “Judeized [sic] Christianity,” but Catholic response was lukewarm at best.
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The only apparent coordinated action between new allies was an abortive plan to revive the KKK in Virginia, quickly scotched by opposition from Governor John Battle.
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Closer to home, Hendrix toured his realm incessantly, predicting divine judgment for the vice dens of Palm Beach, inviting new legislators to join him for a rally at the Live Oak courthouse (no takers), and raiding the membership of Miami’s venerable John B. Gordon Klan. In the latter instance, at least, he enjoyed some success: the klavern split up, with a majority defecting to the Southern Knights ( Hendrix ), while the remainder—rechristened as Den No. 2—allied themselves with Sam Roper’s Association of Georgia Klans.
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While Bill Hendrix and others occupied themselves with melodrama and ritual trappings, Klansmen at the grassroots level sought more visceral expressions for their anger and anxiety.
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The year 1951 began with a new rash of Ku Klux violence....including murder. It was mid-April 1951 before the Judiciary Committee of the state house finally sent an anti-mask bill to the floor, despite the protests from Bill Hendrix that “[w]e took off our masks three years ago and our program is now wide-open.”
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Paul D. Harvill’s investigation based upon the Affiliated Auctions’ Tallahassee KKK Lucky Thirteen Club documents, the local organization was anything but “wide-open”.
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June 21, 1951—Hendrix announces to seek the Governorship of Florida.
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February 12, 1952—Hendrix arrested for mailing postcards “too libelous to appear in the public record.” One postcard addressed Fuller Warren as “the scalawag perverted governor,” while another depicted anti-Klan columnist Drew Pearson plummeting into a toilet labeled American Pot for Communists and Stooges. Calling his arrest “a case of outright persecution,” Hendrix was nonetheless convicted and fined seven hundred dollars, with a one-year jail term suspended. Leaving the courtroom, he remarked to newsmen, “It looks like I’m out of the mailing business.”
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July 15, 1952—Seeking from diversity what he lacked in managerial finesse, Bill Hendrix announced the formation of an American Confederate Army, pledged to battle, ”f the Supreme Court ever outlaws racial segregation.” His troops were compiling a list of NAACP and Anti-Defamation League members, Hendrix warned, and “if law and order ever breaks down we will hold them responsible.”
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Sadly for the movement’s secrecy, it was infiltrated from the start, with Stetson Kennedy commissioned as an active colonel on July 18, 1952.
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A few days later, after more than a year on the campaign trail as an unofficial contender for the governor’s office, Hendrix finally paid his $600 fee and filed as a candidate. Come November 1952, he polled barely eleven thousand votes statewide and was left in the dust by 1948’s loser, Dan McCarty.
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November 1952 --- Hendrix polled barely eleven thousand votes statewide and was left in the dust by 1948’s loser, Dan McCarty.
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Life in the Invisible Empire was less dramatic for Bill Hendrix after his failed campaign for governor. He was briefly reunited with his Carolina ally, Tom Hamilton, when both appeared as featured speakers at an anti-United Nations rally hosted by Parson Jack Johnston at his Columbus Baptist Tabernacle, but is signaled no expansion or revival for the Southern Knights of Florida.
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In June 1953 Hendrix was succeeded as grand dragon by C. L. Parker, a furniture salesman from River Junction, though Hendrix remained active as a Klan spokesman. July witnessed a major defection from the Southern Knights,as Tampa private investigator William Griffin , lately the grand titan for Central Florida, bailed out of his own ambitious-sounding Association of Florida Ku Klux Klans.
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By October Parker and Hendrix claimed affiliation with an illusory “United Klan” said to have at least 100,000 members, but their paucity of followers was indicated by a public plea for blacks to join the KKK - albeit “on a segregated basis.”
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All that was required of new recruits, said Parker, was a nominal one-dollar entry fee, coupled with a pledge of belief in God and the U.S. Constitution.
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“Our main purpose,” he announced, “is to keep the Ne.gro from intermarriage with the whites - the law of God.” To that end, Parker reassured black prospects that they belonged to a pure race, while whites were the mongrels. Hendrix , for his part, denied any link to the various Klans accused of terrorism in Florida. “I believe in using legal procedures,” he said, “even if it takes longer.”
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The fruitless effort to recruit black Klansmen was the last gasp for Hendrix. Declining membership and legal difficulties, couple with electoral defeat, restrictive state legislation, and the threat (however minimal) of federal prosecution combined to push him out of the Invisible Empire - at least, for the time being. By year’s end (1952), he was formally retired from the Klan and resettled in Pinellas Park, content to watch the race wars from a distance.
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However Paul D. Harvill’s investigation reveals that he either resided or partially resided in Tallahassee around this time as he is still listed both before and afterward as a clerk with the U.S. Post Office in Tallahassee, with his residential address earlier as RD 2; then later as 1417 Chowkeebin Nene.
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While Bill Hendrix and others occupied themselves with melodrama and ritual trappings, Klansmen at the grassroots level sought more visceral expressions for their anger and anxiety. The year 1951 began with a new rash of Ku Klux violence....including murder.
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above pages 126 - 139
below—page 141-142:
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On May 17, 1954, the USSC, by a unanimous vote in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, overturned the venerable Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in so far as public education was concerned. Resistance was certain.
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Dan McCarty was elected Governor in 1952. By September 1953, he was dead. Senate President Charley Johns became the temporary governor. He was an outspoken segregationist, having represented Bradford and Union Counties in the State Senate. His residence was Starke.
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The Florida Supreme Court ordered that Johns was an acting governor, until a special election in 1954. Johns announced his candidacy in October 1953, followed two months later by State Senator LeRoy Collins.
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The write-in campaign of retired Klansman Bill Hendrix , announced on May 29, 1954 with a platform of strict segregation and legalized gambling, attracted no great interest from voters. Note that his announcement was twelve days after the USSC decision in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education.........
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In the wake of Black Monday (May 17, 1954, the USSC, by a unanimous vote in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, overturned the venerable Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in so far as public education was concerned.),
January 27, 1949— “The Many Klans of Bill Hendrix” section: nocturnal motorcade in Tallahassee—200 members led by Hendrix.
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July 31, 1949— Despite Gov. Warren’s administration’s stated opposition to the KKK, Governor Warren’s secretary of state issued a Florida charter to the Original Southern Klans, Bill Hendrix presiding at grand dragon.
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On May 17, 1954, the USSC, by a unanimous vote in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, overturned the venerable Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in so far as public education was concerned. Resistance was certain.
The write-in campaign of retired Klansman Bill Hendrix , announced on May 29, 1954 with a platform of strict segregation and legalized gambling, attracted no great interest from voters. Note that his announcement was twelve days after the USSC decision in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education.
August 1955: At least Hendrix had one less rival to worry about in August 1955, as William Griffin disbanded his Tampa-based Association of Florida Ku Klux Klans.
October 1955: The Invisible Empire’s big news for 1955 was the issuance of a Georgia corporate charter on October 24th, to Imperial Wizard Eldon Edwards and his U.S. Klans, Knights of the KKK. Quietly organized in September 1953, the U.S. Klans had already expanded from Georgia to plant klaverns in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Texas.
Early 1956: its kleagles were active in Florida, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Louisiana, building what would be the decade’s single largest Klan, with ten to fifteen thousand members....
Bill Hendrix revived his Southern Knights to meet the latest challenge, and a cross was burned in Tallahassee on May 28, 1956 at the home of a black coed jailed for refusing to ride in the back of a city bus. Membership applications bearing Hendrix’s name and Pinellas Park address were distributed at a rally in the state capital a short time later, but he faced competition from multiple rivals. At a Gainesville rally staged by members of fledgling Florida Ku Klux Klan, fliers were distributed with the admonition: “Beware of swindlers. There are certain parties using the outlawed organization known in the past as the Knights of the KKK for personal gain only. They are using a Pinellas Park address. Beware.”
During more violence, parades and rallies in various parts of Florida, like Lakeland, Starke, Wildwood, hooded orators denounced Governor Collins as “one of the worst enemies of states’ rights in America.”
Bill Hendrix for his part, told reporters that the public demonstrations “will do the segregation question more harm than good....”
April 1957: As for the Church of Rome, Bill Hendrix removed that point of disagreement with the Association of the Citizens’ Councils of Florida on April 22, 1957, two days after an imperial council meeting in South Carolina, with the announcement that his Southern Knights would henceforth welcome Catholic members. The Klan’s fight “today is against integration, communism, and federal controls,” he declared....
1957: A new tough-talking group, organized by Bill Hendrix, was the Knights of the White Camellia of the National Christian Church, launched after Hendrix returned from a gathering of Klans in Montgomery, Alabama.
By early 1958 a resurgence of racist bombing was seen in the state and in the South at large. Miami’s Temple Beth-El suffered $30,000 damage from a dynamite blast in March; a month later, Jacksonville bombers struck twice on the same day, blasting a Jewish Center and all-black James Weldon Johnson Junior High School.
On May 3, 1958, with forty-six racist bombings recorded in Dixie over the past fifteen months, police from twenty-two southern cities gathered in Jacksonville at the invitation of Mayor Haydon Burns, to create the Southern Conference on Bombing (SCB). There was a certain irony in Burns’s chairing of the meeting - elevated to high camp by the attendance of Alabama’s Eugene “Bull” Connor, who collaborated openly with terrorists and never solved a hate crime in his twenty years as “Bombingham’s” police commissioner - but at least the conference attendees sounded sincere, posting $55,700 in rewards for information leading to arrests and convictions.
Jacksonville assistant police chief H.V. Branch was placed in overall charge of the campaign, while the FBI remained aloof, refusing to participate.
The short-lived SCB would never win a case in court, but its technique of infiltrating racist groups provided fascinating glimpses from inside the hard-core white resistance to desegregation.
One early target was Bill Hendrix’s Knights of the White Camellia, described by SCB investigators as engaged in a war with Eldon Edwards for control of the Invisible Empire. Hendrix dismissed Edwards as the “so-called leader of the U.S. Klans who came in for money and has gotten a good many people in trouble.”
Clinging precariously to a facade of moderation, Hendrix told one audience, “I don’t advocate violence, but some people just plain need hangin,’” thereafter reciting a list of names that included Governor Collins, Mayor Burns, and various civil rights activists.
The National States Rights Party, organized in early 1958 as an avowed white racist political party, openly cooperated with the KKK. Founded by a collection of anti-Semites that included Jesse Stoner, American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, and veterans of the defunct Columbians, the NSRP borrowed its uniforms, the SS lightning-flash insignia, and the Thunderbolt title of its newspaper from Atlanta’s erstwhile “juvenile delinquents of the Klan.”
Bill Hendrix was among the featured speakers at the party’s August 1958 convention in Louisville, Kentucky, and he was a member of the four-man delegation that greeted [Fredrick] John Kasper upon his release from the federal lockup in Tallahassee.
Fredrick John Kasper was the founder and chief agitator fo the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council. A New Jersey native obsessed with anti-Semitism and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Kasper hit the road in 1956, touring southern trouble spots in an effort to stiffen white resistance; he scored his greatest triumph in the September riots that stunned tiny Clinton, Tennessee. While awaiting trial in federal counts from that campaign, he found his way to Florida, where he was welcomed as a speaker at KKK rallies (though he apparently never joined the hooded order). The end came for Kasper in March 1957, shortly after he addressed a Klan crowd in Chiefland, urging the knights to help him spread his “segregation gospel” against the “radical-minded and Jewish-and-Communist-controlled Supreme Court.” Subpoenaed by the Florida state legislature, he grudgingly admitted dating black women while he lived in New York City. There were photographs to prove it, and despite Kasper’s plea that he “felt all along that the Jewish race should be segregated,” a majority of southern Klansmen turned against him overnight, unmoved by his subsequent conviction and imprisonment for contempt of court in Tennessee.
At another meeting Hendrix proclaimed, “Now, I don’t want you good people to go around blowin’ up buildings or temples, but the next time somebody does blow up a temple, I sure hope it is filled with Jews.”
Another group of more than passing interest to the SCB wsa the National States Rights party, organized in early 1958 as an avowed white racist political party, openly cooperating with the KKK.
Founded by a collection of anti-Semites that included Jesse Stoner, American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, and veterans of the defunct Columbians, the NSRP borrowed its uniforms, the SS lightning-flash insignia, and the Thunderbolt title of its newspaper from Atlanta’s erstwhile “juvenile delinquents of the Klan.”....
June 1958: With so much racial violence in the news, Florida’s Legislative Investigationing Committee briefly interrupted its pursuit of integrationists and homosexuals to take a quick look at the Klan in June 1958.
Governor Collins had suggested such a probe two years earlier, but the committee - led by disgruntled former governor Charley Johns - had been slow to respond. When it did act, the hearings got off to a peculiar start, committee member Marion Knight inquiring as to whether his own Klan membership in the 1930s disqualified him from participating in the investigation. ("No," Chairman Johns graciously replied, “I don’t think that woud make any difference.")
Before the three-day inquisition ran its course, Eldon Edwards would drop in to visit and Suwannee County’s sheriff would be cited for contempted, but the most intriguing testimony came from a onetime FBI informant who described Orlando Klansman Edgar Brooklyn’s boasts of having murdered Harry Moore in 1951.
Brooklyn (the brother of deceased bombing suspect Earl Brooklyn) promptly denied the accusation and proclaimed that he had long since left the KKK.
Content to look no farther, the John Committee reported that “[t]here is a no question but what some of the men and officers of this organization are dedicated to the use of violence and the threat thereof to carry out their aims, principally in the field of segregation.” Taking a bold stance to “strenuously condemn” such tactics, the committee was quick to note that Florida already had “adequate statutes making such conduct criminal offenses, and it is merely a matter of local officials enforcing the law as it presently stands.”
No suggestion was offered as to how that end might be achieved in jurisdictions where Klan members wore the badges.
Klansmen and their allies on the noe-Nazi fringe were more concerned with action than with talk in 1959. Black homes and businesses were bombed in various parts of Florida. One, George Deatherage, a retired engineer and former Klansman....was indicted on sedition charges due to his promotion of fascism.
February 1960: With the advent of the sit-in movement, beginning essentially on February 1, 1960 by black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, this movement spread rapidly throughout much of the southern states. Florida’s first sit-in was on February 29, 1960 at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Tampa, with demonstrations spreading to St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Daytona Beach and Orlando over the next six days.
March 1960: Governor Collins denounced the protests as “illegal and dangerous,” marshaling state troopers to tear-ga black marchers in Tallahassee on March 12. Whites brandished clubs and jeered from the sidelines, but the first violent clash was recorded in St. Augustine, where members of Dr. Robert Hayling’s NAACP Youth Council were trapped inside the local Woolworth’s store and beaten bloody by Klansmen.
Once the first blow was struck, Ku Klux responses to the sit-ins were predictable. On the night of March 26-27, an estimated one thousand crosses blazed across Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Florida saw the least action, with two crosses burned along causeways outside Clearwater, each beside a sign reading: King for President, LeRoy Collins for Veep. (The King in question was apparently Reverend Clennon King of St. Petersburg, a black minister who had declared his hopeless candidacy for the White House.)
In April, in Chattahoochee...night riders torched the home of a black rape suspect.....
Meanwhile in Jacksonville, the city’s newest school was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK.
August 1960: In late August in Jacksonville, three thousand white men gathered in downtown in the business section, many with baseball bats and ax handles....
By noon, while Police Chief Luther Reynolds and his patrolmen made themselves scare, the Klansmen attacked blacks outside of Woolworth’s and Rich’s Department Stores, injuring fifty and driving many others back to “Nig.gertown.”
By sundown, two dozen knights and sixty-off blacks were in jail; white rioters were released on payment of fines as low as ten dollars, while the siffiest punishment - ninety days, after a jailhouse beating by white inmates - was reserved for a black college student who led the sit-ins.
Mayor Burns blamed the trouble on out-of-town whites, but Police Chief Reynolds insisted that “all the fellows we arrested were local boys....”
December 1960: The afternoon of December 3, 1960, Bill Hendrix and another Klansman were ejectted from St. Petersburg by lawmen, when they tried to picket sit-ins at a downtown lunch counter.
Discouraged, Hendrix announced his latest resignation from the KKK on December 29th, telling the press, “I see no way to stop racial integration and it looks to me like the best thing to do is accept it. I cannot agree to go outside the law to maintain segregation.” In a letter to Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, Hendrix added: “I know the Klan is going to get lawless....If the loud-mouth politicians of the South want to help, let them tell the people the truth - that the decisions of the United States Supreme Court have become law....Integration is now the law of the land and a person can stop it only by violating the law.”
In response to rumors that the Georgia Klan had developed a secret weapon to fight integration, Hendrix wrote,” Any secret weapon they may have would be just another gimmet [sic] to get ten or more dollars out of decent Georgia people.”
Governor Collins did not stand for reelection in 1960, leaving the Democratic gubernatorial primary to a field of nine contenders. Bill Hendrix was back for a third try, this time without the albatross of legalized gambling, but he garnered no appreciable support against the likes of state legislator Farris Bryant and Jacksonville’s Mayor Haydon Burns.
All candidates except self-styled moderate Doyle Carlton condemned the recent sit-ins, Bryant and Carlton running first and second, respectively, with vote tallies of 193,507 versus 186,228. In the runoff, despite (or perhaps because of) an eleventh-hour endorsement from Governor Collins, Carlton trailed Bryant by close to 100,000 votes. Klansmen play no appreciable role in Bryant’s selection, but they could at least draw consolation from his friendly treatment of the hooded order in the past.
Autumn 1960: The Florida Klan was propelled into national headlines by a quirk of political fate. Born-again wizard Bill Hendrix announced his support for Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, drafted as the unwilling presidential candidate of the National States Rights party, and reporters wasted no time seeking Tampa Klansman William Griffin’s view of the endorsement. Rather than echo his bitter rival, Griffin delcared his support for Republican hopeful Richard Nixon.
1965: The Klan was fragmenting again, with the United Klans of America (UKA)....
Independent Klans continued to proliferate in Florida’s chaotic realm, and while Bill Hendrix barely clung to life in Oldsmar, his ten-man Knights of the KKK dwarfed by two competing UKA klaverns in Pinellas County, Jacksonville saw a new flurry of activity in April 1965, when defectors from the United Florida KKK organized a new Militant Knights.
The small but belligerent faction’s debut was announced by local barber Warren Folks, who also billed himself as the executive vice president of something called Save American Inc. For a Klan with only one klavern, the Militant Knights seemed top-heavy with leaders, including Imperial Wizard Donald Ballentine and Grand Dragon Gene Foreman.
Folks did much of the group’s initial talking, though telling Life magazine: “I believe in the Klan. I don’t believe the thing to do at this moment is to go out and shoot a nig.ger in the street, but when the time comes - when it comes - we’ll take them down by the busload, by the trainload, that’s what we’ll do. By the busload. By the carload! We don’t hate Ne.groes. We love ‘em, in their place - like shinin’ shoes, bell-hoppin’, pickin’ cotton, diggin’ ditches, eatin- possum, servin’ time, totin/ buckshot, river-floatin’, etc....”
Mid-October 1965 - late February 1966: By early 1965, highly public acts of violence perpetrated by the KKK in half a dozen states prompted more respectable segreationists - including those in Congress who dominated the archconservative House Committe on Un-American Activities (HUAC) - to wash their hands of the Invisible Empire. Accordingly, the HUAC had voted in March to undertake a formal investigation of the various Klans, with thirty-six days of public hearings conducted between mid-October 1965 to the end of February 1966. A total of 187 witnesses were grilled, including twenty from Florida, questioned about the KKK and National States Rights party activities.
Long before the hearings were convened, though, the racist fringe had delivered its opinion of the probe. J. B. Stoner’s Thunderbolt denounced HUAC as “a bunch of pimps for the Jew-controlled, race-mixing FBI,” conducting a “giant smear campaign” against the Klan; it also branded chairman Edwin Willis of Louisana as a “degenerate scoundrel,” deemed by the party’s scientific minds to be “part ape....”
The HUAC hearings relevant to Florida provided few dramatic revelations, though they shed light upon the inner workings and pecuniary foibles of the KKK. Bill Hendrix was the only Klansman from the Sunshine State who did not hide behind the Fifth Amendment, and his testimony, taken in a July 1965 executive session, remains sealed to this day except for brief excerpts contained in the committee’s final report.
The other Florida witnesses, questioned on February 21 and 22, 1966, included twelve members of the United Florida KKK, two officers of the United Knights, and one representative each from the United Klans, the Militant Knights, and the National States Rights party. All were represented by J. B. Stoner, who took his own advice and kept his mouth shut when his turn came to testify on February 24th.
With these last entries, Bill Hendrix is no longer cited after pages 177 and 1978. The book’s text is 216 pages, with 21 pages of note and footnotes, along with a six page bibligraphy and a 15 page index.
Paul, you are not from the South are you?
If you were you would be familiar with the history of the South with reference to that “Civil War”.
Maybe your education was sanitized by that time?
There is a lot lies being told about the original KKK.
This site explains the conditions in the South after that war and the reasons for the formation of the KKK.
Above: These are photos of 63 members of the reconstructed South Carolina legislature, 50 of whom were Negroes or mulattos and 13 White. Twenty two read and write (8 grammatically) the remainder (41) make their mark with the aid of an amanuensis. Nineteen are tax payers to an aggregate of $146.10, the rest (44) pay no taxes, and the body levies on the White people of the state $4,000,000.00 in taxes. After the Civil War, Carpetbag and Negro rule reduced South Carolina from third place per capita wealth in 1860 to thirtieth place in 1870.
Photo above: 1868, Blacks dominated the Louisiana Legislature during Reconstruction. The militarily conquered Whites of the South were denied all Constitutional Rights; they could not vote, run for public office, or hold Civil positions. They were denied redress of grievances, yet, were forced to pay excessive taxes to pay for the war.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was created by the Radical Republicans in Congress to give the newly freed Blacks political power over the conquered southern Whites.
A Brief History of the Original Ku Klux Klan: 1865 - 1869.
“Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the Negroes. The White men were aroused by a mere instinct of self preservation until at last there sprang into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable Empire of the South, to protect the Southern Country.” - Woodrow Wilson (of New Jersey) President of the United States, in his “History of the American People.”
In April 1865, the war of Southern secession came to its bitter end. For the last time the Confederate armies assembled themselves before the Union forces, not to do battle, but to stack arms, surrender, and go home. But what did they go home to? After four years of bitter conflict the South was devastated. Its economy was shattered. Its countryside was ravaged. Its cities lay in ruins and most bridges and ferries were destroyed or damaged.
With the collapse of the Confederate government, Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, did not want to grant even a shadow of legality to Southern civil authority. He declared that all police power in the South had reverted to the United States Army. Individuals who held local civil positions had to report themselves to the military authorities. Anyone who violated these instructions was liable to trial before a military tribunal. Civil authority thus fell into a void. Lawlessness abounded. Millions of emancipated Negroes roamed about. They had no education, no work, no homes, and no money. To avoid starvation they raided and stole whatever they could. Poor whites who owned small family farms were defenseless against large roaming gangs of desperate hungry Negroes. Rape and murder became commonplace.
The collapse of the Confederate armies alone guaranteed an upsurge in crime as half starved veterans began their long march back to their homes. In desperation they scrambled for handouts and resorted to petty thievery. General Johnson noted he could do nothing as Lee’s veterans passed through the lines of his still intact army in late April, stealing mules and horses as well as clothes hung out to dry. A week earlier Thomasville, Georgia had been the scene of three days of disorder as disbanding soldiers passed through the town. On the night of May 6, more then fifty armed men stole eighty nine mules and seven horses from the loosely guarded Confederate depot. On May 8, four hundred former soldiers attacked the Confederate storehouses. At the commissary they broke into two warehouses and carried away 125,000 pounds of corn. They also destroyed all books, papers, and office furniture they could find. Such riots were widespread in the deep South following the war’s end.
When a group of paroled soldiers arrived in Houston, to find that the Confederate storehouse had already been looted, they threatened to burn the Texas town. Frightened citizens hastily provided food and accommodations for the ex-soldiers. The sanctity of private property had already been severely undermined by the wartime foraging practices of Union and Confederate forces. By war’s end bands of outlaws had deserters roamed from county to county plundering the scanty stores of the distressed and impoverished people.
More than a year after the end of the war one newspaper editor noted that it was impossible for Southerners to pick up a local newspaper without being horror stricken with the details of some terrible atrocity, robbery, rape, or murder. Before the war these were rare occurrences. Observers often differed as to which area of the South was most crime ridden. On top of all this, Southern Unionists shared a blood thirsty desire for revenge. Later, the Radical Republicans transformed vengeance into a state religion and exemplified the bitterness of Southern Unionists who had been persecuted during the war.
In the summer of 1865, Gov. Brownlow of Tennessee, declared that persecutors of Union men had forfeited all rights to protection and life. That same year one delegate to the Tennessee Constitutional Convention stated that the only right the Rebels had was to be hung. There is ample documentation of cases in which Unionists, seeking revenge for wartime harassment, used their new positions to jail their old enemies on trumped up charges. On the vaguest rumors and hearsay, cavalry units calmly put the torch to the homes of citizens. Vengeful Unionists formed the Loyal League, ostensibly to suppress crime, keep order, and maintain discipline among the Negro population. In fact the Loyal League acted to intimidate political opponents and ex-Confederates.
Worsening the post war situation were the infamous Carpetbaggers and Scalawags, who sought personal profit and political power by exploiting the plight of both the freed Negroes and conquered Whites. The Radical Republicans declared the Southern States would have to be re-constructed before they could be re-admitted into the Union. Until then, the ex-Confederates had no rights of citizenship. Southern whites were completely disenfranchised with no legal standing. They could not vote, hold public office, or petition for the redress of grievances. In an effort to stop the lawlessness, the South was divided into five military districts and martial law declared. Through out the South, freed Negroes formed the Union League and Black Militias and in most areas were given the task of enforcing marshal law. Led by corrupt officers and self serving politicians, the Union League became the most violent and murderous arm of the reconstruction to Blacks and Whites alike.
It was amid this atmosphere that John Lester, James Crowe, John Kennedy, Calvin Jones, Richard Reed, and Frank McCord met in a law office in Pulaski, TN., on Christmas Eve, 1865 and, innocently enough, decided to form a social club for the purpose of mutual entertainment. The club adopted the style of the college fraternities in vogue at the time. They would dress up in weird costumes and play practical jokes on unsuspecting people. To create an aura of mystery they invented an unusual name and called their social club: the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1866, the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan grew through out Tennessee and beyond. At the same time depredations committed by renegade Blacks and Whites, coupled with the absents of constitutional law and vengeance seeking Radical Republicans, made life in the South become all but unbearable. Quite by accident the nocturnal pranksters of the Ku Klux Klan discovered that their costumes and highjinks had a startling effect on the superstitious Negroes. The Negroes thought they were seeing ghosts whenever a group of Klansmen were seen going about at night. The Klan was quick to realize that their newly discovered ghostly image could be used to control bands of unruly Negroes. At first the night riders went out unarmed. Not intending to hurt anyone, they believed that anyone they met would be too frightened to try to harm them. Things were soon to change.
When the Carpetbagger and Scalawag politicians noticed that renegade Negroes were beginning to behave themselves and crime went drastically down in areas where a Den of the Klan had been established, they reacted swiftly. Carpetbaggers and Scalawags were manipulators. They thrived in the violent post Civil War period where they could take advantage of people’s fears to increase their own fortunes and political powers. The Loyal League and Union League made willing allies. The Klan was, for the most part, made up of ex-Confederates who were hated by the Loyal League and if crime and violence went down, no one could justify the expense of maintaining the Negro Militias. The Loyal League and Union League began night patrols in the name of protecting the terrified Negro population. These patrols did not hesitate to open fire on the Klansmen, who, up to that point, were guilty of nothing worse then Halloween tricks. The Klan responded in kind. Soon skirmishes broke out when night patrols of each side would chance encounter each other.
By early 1867, the Klan was spreading through out large sections of the South. It was still largely unstructured and unorganized. By the same token, the Reconstruction Acts of Congress were very organized and well structured . In short, the White South had no constitutional or legal rights at all. The freed Negroes, however, were given full rights. The end result was Negro rule through out most of the South, enforced by Union bayonets. To avoid chaos and to confront the oppression of reconstruction the Klan sought to organize itself. Spokesmen for the Klan first asked former general, Robert E. Lee, if he would head the organization. Lee declined citing his age and poor health. Lee suggested they ask the younger former general, Nathan Bedford Forrest. When the Klan spokesmen asked if they could count on Lee’s support, Lee said, yes, but only if his support for their growing empire remained absolutely invisible. This inspired the Klan to adopt the nickname, “Invisible Empire”. (Lee was never actually sworn into the KKK because he was not a “paroled” exConfederate and he thought that this could cause legal trouble for the fledgling organization.
continued…
However, he was an active advisor to the Klan’s leadership.) N.B. Forrest accepted the Klan’s offer to lead the organization and in April 1867, at a convention in Nashville, TN., Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Order of the Ku Klux Klan. The rules and regulations of the order, called the Prescripts, were written by former general, John B. Gordon, who became the Grand Dragon or state leader of the KKK in Georgia. Former general, Albert Pike, became the chief judicial officer for the Klan. Pike was also a major figure in Scottish Rite Masonry in America. A notable Klansman and Free Mason, Pike is buried in the Masonic Lodge in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the White House.
Once organized under Grand Wizard Forrest, the Klan became a force to be reckoned with. Disbanded Confederate units reunited to form Dens of the Klan. Ex-Confederate officers became the Grand Dragons, Giants, and Titans. Ex-Confederate common soldiers made up the rank and file of the Klan and were called Ghouls. As this was happening, other organizations independently began to form in the South to combat the depredations of outlaws, renegade Whites and Blacks, the Union and Loyal Leagues, Carpetbag rule, and the outrages allowed by the Reconstruction Acts of Congress. Some of these new organizations were: the Knights of the White Camellia, the White League, the White Brotherhood, and the Red Shirts to name a few. These organizations were independent from, yet just as secret as, the Ku Klux. Having no legal rights, members of these organizations could not afford to have their identities made known and solemn oaths of secrecy were taken by all. The secrecy was both a help and a hindrance to the Klan. While it protected the identity of its members, it became difficult to tell if an act had been committed by the Klan, one of the other ant-reconstruction organizations, or by outlaws impersonating the Klan. In the forty seven volumes that make up the Ku Klux Report to Congress, there is ample documentation to prove that most of the atrocities attributed to the Klan were, in fact, committed by the other anti-reconstruction organizations, outlaws impersonating the Klan, and in many cases Loyal Leaguers and Black Union Leaguers who would disguise themselves as Klansmen and raid Negro hamlets to instill anti-white sentiment for political purposes. The Reconstruction authorities soon declared the Ku Klux Klan and all other resistance groups as outlaws. The Negro militias were ordered to kill on sight anyone believed to be a Klansman.
During all this the Klan tried to keep its intentions on a high level. When the Klan “Ku Kluxed” someone it was only after the victim was given a trial and was allowed to choose someone to speak on their behalf and defend them. The Klan also gave large sums of money to war widows and orphans.
The victims of the Klan, who were White as well as Black, tended to be people proven to be guilty of serious crimes such as barn burnings, theft, rape, or murder. Corrupt politicians, Carpetbaggers and Scalawags were also Ku Kluxed. Usually the Klan left cryptic messages to warn minor offenders, but if these warnings were ignored, they too could be Ku Kluxed, which meant anything from a flogging to execution. These were barbaric times, but the Klan sought to restore law and order, not to destroy it. There was, in fact, no law and the Klan only used force when the forces of the Radical Republicans gave it no other choice.
Ignored by most modern historians is the fact that after the Civil War many ex-Union soldiers chose to settle in the South. Shocked by the outrageous conditions reconstruction imposed upon the White South, many of these ex-Union soldiers either joined or supported the Klan or the other resistance groups. Many Union soldiers and officers occupying parts of the conquered South co-operated with the Klan in fighting Carpetbag rule and outrages committed by Negro organizations.
The term “ku klux” became popular and was widely used. Any resistance to reconstruction was given the label “ku klux”. In their efforts to crush all resistance, the Radical Republicans labeled ALL white southerners as “Ku Klux” and the atrocities committed by outlaws, bandits, impersonators, and anyone else were all laid to the Klan’s blame. With the death penalty hanging over their heads, Klansmen were in no position to come forward and openly deny the charges and defend themselves. But the Klan did attempt to police the situation. The Klan issued public warnings that anyone caught committing a crime while disguised as a Klansman would be executed. It is documented that the Klan publicly posted warnings condemning the mistreatment of innocent Blacks and it is equally documented that on at least one occasion the KKK even hung one of its own members for beating up an unoffending Black man. (See the “Execution of Bill German” below.)”
****This is a lengthy article, but you can clearly see why they formed and how they got a bad rap.
You may also see the reason here that when the situation changed that the black became severly oppressed.
It continues...http://www.kkklan.com/briefhist.htm
This is another good site.
It seems to get into matters not discussed on the other.
From the chapter on black members of the Klan:
“So, you don’t believe there ever were Negro (Black, Colored, Afro-American - every twenty to thirty years or so they want a name change) members of the Ku Klux Klan??? Well read on! By the way, we have received a few e-mails concerning the previous few lines. So, from now on we will refer to the darker folks as AFROPEANS. That is an accurate racial description since nearly all of them in the USA are a mix and have both African and European ancestors.
One of the last things today’s biased media wants anyone to know is that there were Negro members of the Ku Klux Klan. No one has ever written a book about them to my knowledge though such a book would be of great historical interest. In fact, very little documentation has survived. What little does survive speaks volumes and proves that Americans do not know their own history. Here I will simply give my sources of information and quote from them. If anyone has further documentation about the Black membership of the KKK I’d be grateful to be referred to it. Should I come across more documentation I will list it here.
My first source of Negro Klan membership is the book, “The Ku Klux Spirit”, by J.A. Rogers, noted Negro historian of the 1920’s. The Ku Klux Spirit was first published in 1923, by Messenger Publishing Co. It was republished in 1980, by Black Classic Press. On page 34 of his book we find the amazing passage: “A fact not generally known is that there were thousands of Negro Klansmen. These were used as spies on other Negroes and on Northern Whites.”
Very interesting. In the 1920’s, there were plenty of original Klansmen still living as well as many other people of both races who lived during the Reconstruction Era. J.A. Rogers would have been able to interview many. Why would a Black historian make such a thing up? And if he did make it up there would have been plenty of people who would have objected. His book would not have survived to this day. Yet, it did. “
Tampa and St. Petersburg both had particularly active Klans based upon my extensive research on the matter.
I clearly remember the Colored Only water fountains, restroom, lunch counters, etc.
One of my uncles was a member of the KKK, John Birch Society, and either treasurer or secretary for the American Party of Florida. He did his best to convert me to his corrupt worldview. I dearly love my uncle—long since deceased. I would never have thought he was a member of a hate group like the KKK and the American Party of Florida as he did not present otherwise. I did not learn of his affiliations with the KKK and the American Party of Florida until after his death.
And I have read much about American history, and much more about the southern states as Florida is one of them.
In addition, one-third of my family is Irish-Catholic and from Atlanta. I saw a lot of racism in Atlanta too as we traveled to Atlanta regularly.
The original KKK was founded upon the oppression, suppression and terrorization of the newly freed slaves. That is the way the KKK began and that is the way of the KKK ever since.
Even though their “creed” includes preserving and protecting the honor of white women, the KKK certainly had no interest in preserving and protecting the honor of black women.
The KKK alleged then and since that they are a moral organization. Lynching, whipping, bombing, setting on fire, et al. people of color, union members, Jews, et al. is certainly not moral. It is immoral. Period. Right and wrong type stuff.
Down the road, the KKK picked up more hatreds: The Jews, Eastern and Southern Europeans, Catholics, etc.
Any other view of the KKK is revisionist history, prevarication history, non-history, self-deluded history and worse—being an actual member of the KKK, the skinheads, Neo-Nazis and Nazis....or a sympathizer.
Paul, tell me your version of the conditions in the South right after the war.
Were the now x-soldiers without their civil rights?
Could they vote?
Could they hold office?
Were the Carpetbaggers Jews?
Did they direct the voting?
Would you say that the voting was fair?
Did the Carpetbagger Jews guide the illiterate black men who were put into office?
As to The-Oh-Zone; tell me what is it there that troubles you?
