They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group (review)

In 1866, a half-dozen Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee whiled away the time on their jobless hands by talking politics and starting a club. Although their original motivation is open to debate, their initial goofy antics of dressing in sheets and pranking neighbors quickly morphed into more sinister activity, squarely aimed at the newly freed slaves they regarded as a threat to their livelihoods and social order. More dens were formed, and by 1867 a formal convention had drawn up a governing hierarchy, selected Nathan Bedford Forrest as Grand Wizard, and sworn its members to loyalty and secrecy, and the Ku Klux Klan was up and running. Bartoletti traces the Klan's Reconstruction-era mayhem, focusing particularly on their assaults on black voters, educators, and ministers, and on those white citizens who attempted to aid the African-American population in their quest for justice. Details of the raids and lynchings are set within the context of overturned Southern social norms, a battered agricultural system, federal infighting between President Johnson and radical Congressional Republicans, and a victorious North more interested in a return to normalcy than civil rights for freedmen. Though there's a bit of explanatory confusion about legislation and the pace slows on occasional shifts of focus away from the K.K.K. to lengthy stretches of general background on Reconstruction, the passion and clarity of the presentation more than compensate for these relatively minor quibbles. Students who have heard little more than passing curricular reference to the Klan's atrocities will begin to comprehend the daunting nineteenth-century legacy inherited by twentieth-century civil rights activists. A wealth of period illustrations are included, as well as a timeline, quotation notes, bibliography and source notes, and index.