Race, Rape, and Injustice: Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era

3. Meeting the Klan

Chapter 3 Meeting the Klan In 1965 it was the Ku Klux Klan and its many klaverns sprinkled across the southern countryside that posed the greatest threat to our mission and our safety. Had their members been made aware that the objective of our survey was to nullify the death penalty in the South, we would have become compelling targets for their wrath. To fully appreciate the peril we faced requires an understanding of Klan history and the evolution of white supremacist thinking in the South. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) enjoyed a long and sordid history in the American South. Founded in 1866,1 its power sprang from a willing use of terror, including cross burnings, rape, and bombings.2 Klansmen and other white supremacists understood the public spectacle of execution to be white society’s most potent tool for keeping African American males in check.3 In the nineteenth century, lynching that combined torture and hanging was commonplace. In 1868, the Klan murdered over 290 black men. In the next three years another 118 were burned alive, hanged, or killed by other sadistic means.4 After Reconstruction ended in the South and federal troops pulled back to the North, Klan violence became public and condoned by local authorities as a way to maintain the racial caste system.5 In 1892 there were 161 lynchings. By the 1880s and 1890s, African Americans accounted for 73 percent of all lynching victims.6 Lynching Replaced by the Death Penalty Beginning in 1909, the NAACP campaigned to publicly expose the savagery of southern violence. Soon the national and international community voiced dismay at what was viewed as an uncivilized region in 32 Meeting the Klan the United States. Southern businessmen grew concerned that outside investment would be redirected elsewhere. Also, many African Americans were leaving the South. Their departure meant that cheap labor was becoming harder to find, which put an added strain on a troubled regional economy. In the twentieth century the number of lynchings declined as southern community leaders proposed new laws and policies later adopted by their state governments to curb violence towards African Americans.7 As a result, white supremacists including Klansmen relied increasingly on the courts to impose terror by execution. The electric chair replaced the noose as the threat that would intimidate blacks and ensure their submission. White judges and juries would commonly impose capital punishment on black males, particularly if they were convicted of grave interracial transgressions. Terror imposed by lynching gave way to terror by capital punishment as the number of executions grew.8 State legislatures authorized capital punishment for a panoply of crimes including robbery, burglary, and rape.9 And the most serious transgression of all, whether real or imagined, was the rape of a white woman by a black male.10 Miscegenation threatened the “purity” of the white race. The worst kind of miscegenation was that imposed by force (i.e., by rape). The most compelling statistics supporting this perspective were published by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1932. There the federal government revealed that during the period from 1920 to 1929 there were 437 executions in southern and border states. Of those, 313 were African Americans. Though they only composed 25 percent of the population, about 72 percent of those executed were African American. Because of these disproportionate numbers, blacks were executed about twelve times more often than whites.11 Later Census Bureau statistics reaffirmed this trend. Capital punishment had thus been transformed into a tool to maintain the caste system in the South and was only secondarily used as a means to dispense justice. Resurgence of the Klan In response to the “invasion” of the South by northern civil rights activists in the 1960s, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence. During that decade its membership grew to twenty thousand.12 The Klan fanned the fears of southern whites with claims that their political and economic power was under siege by “outside agitators.”13 These agitators included a Communist-Jewish conspiracy to upset the South’s social order and bring tumult to the region. The Klan was responsible for the 1961 attacks Meeting the Klan 33 ontheFreedomRiderswhotriedtointegrateinterstatebuses,andduring the sixties the KKK was responsible for numerous murders and bombings of African American churches.14 White Citizens’ Councils were also being formed as federal pressure to implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 grew. However, the councils resorted mostly to...