I looked at
some testimonies of Ku-Klux clan victims. One was in 1871 and the other has not
date, also there is no description to what they were giving the testimony for.
One of the accounts is of a black man that was lucky enough to escape the clan
one night when they came to his house to kill him. He gives an account of the
fight between him and the men and how he was narrowly able to escape. The
second account is from a white man on the relationship between a few black
women and white men living together that were ran out of town by the clan. When
comparing these two testimonies you can see how the white men of the Ku-Klux
saw the black men as a threat to their livelihood and wanted to put things back
to the way they were with slavery with white men dominant over black men.
The men of the Ku-Klux were taking things into
their own hands. They didn’t like the idea of black men owning land, making
money, and holding political office. To them, being raised during slavery, they
were taught that black people were inferior to white people. In the first
testimony you get a good picture of that. A man named William Coleman is
describing the night a group of white men came to his house to kill him. According
to Coleman he had done nothing wrong besides being “a radical in that part of
the land”. (163) Coleman describes what seems to be a very nice life for a
black man in the south that only gained his freedom six years ago. He owns his
own land, built a house, and owns a lot of live stock. It is obvious that the
white men of the county he lived in did not like seeing a black man living a
comfortable live; he was better off probably than some white men at the time. The
white men came to his house late at night and broke down his door while he was
sleeping, and told him they were there to kill him.
The second
account is of a relationship between black women and white men. We have talked
a lot about the fear of the black men taking the white men’s daughters. That
was one of the excuses for not wanting to free the slaves; they painted the
black men as savages. This testimony gives us the other side; what was thought
about white men choosing to live with free black women. Apparently the Klan was
not happy with this either. There were four white men and four black women
living together and the Klan showed up at their house not to kill them, but to
whip them. This seems more of a warning, maybe to all white men thinking of
living with their black female partner. The man giving the testimony
acknowledges there are sexual relations between white men and black women, even
after slavery was abolished, but living together was different than that. It
was not ok for the two races to be in a relationship and live together. There
is no account of what happened to these people after the whipping but the man
gives his thoughts about what will happen with the freed slaves and he says his
fear, along with most other white people’s fears, was the two races going to
school together. This is probably from the fear that the black population won’t
be suppressed as easily if they are educated along with the white population.
If they are all going to school together and learning the same things how can
one race claim superiority over the other?
Wish, Harvey, ed. Reconstruction in the South,
1865-1877: Firsthand Accounts of the American Southland
After the Civil War, by Southerners and Northerners. New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1965.
Information in the vein of things like this relates to me in much the same way as our last assigned book for class. Even when understanding it's just historical information, reading through content like this is difficult because it can be pretty upsetting. Just as Dr. Weise had mentioned, it almost makes me furious at times when reading through injustice after injustice committed in the name of racial superiority in the Reconstruction period. Even when faced with the evidence of its existence, it is almost impossible to me to believe anything could have been so repeatedly tragic.
ReplyDeleteI think that the Klan whipping the white men and black women who were living together really shows the ideas of race and sexual relations during that time period. Since it was considered acceptable for white men to have sex with black women (but not to live with them), I think that demonstrates that black women were seen as simply an animal or another object. It could be concluded that the Klan was fine if a white man raped a black woman, since they probably didn't believe slaves were human enough to have feelings, but living together as a couple in a relationship would give blacks too much of a humanistic quality, and that went against how many white southerners felt about the blacks during the time.
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