Category: Ku Klux Klan
The White League Monument at Liberty Place in New Orleans
On September 13, 1891 the New Orleans newspapers announced that the following day there was to be a celebration on Canal Street on the anniversary…
John Lewis Crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge Named After a Klan Leader
Most of you know that John Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. You may have seen Lewis’s body carried across the…
On the Use of the Word “Terrorism” to Describe Violence During Reconstruction: Anachronism?
I am sometimes asked if my using the word “terrorism” to describe racial or political violence during the Reconstruction Era is anachronistic. It isn’t. I…
Man in BLM T-Shirt “Removed” from Gettysburg Cemetery Armed Right-Wing Militia and KKK Mobilize to Occupy Gettysburg for July 4
On Saturday July Fourth a man was removed from Gettysburg National Cemeterywhere he was visiting the grave of an ancestor because he was wearing a…
Family of KKK Leader General John B. Gordon Asks that His Statue Be Removed in Atlanta
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that the family of Ku Klux Klan leader and Confederate general John B. Gordon be removed from the grounds of…
Confederate Veteran William Simkins Describes His Role in the Ku Klux Klan
William Simkins was a professor of law at the University of Texas in Austin on Thanksgiving in 1914 when he decided to use his speech…
How Did American History Textbooks Remember the Ku Klux Klan?
The recent book Remembering Reconstruction has an essay titled “The Cultural Work of the Ku-Klux Klan in US History Textbooks, 1883–2015” by Elaine Parsons. The…
When Grant Literally Decapitated Seymour (at least Cartoon Grant did)! Nov. 1868
By the evening of November 3, 1868 it was pretty clear to most informed observers that Ulysses S. Grant had been elected president. If you…
When Black and White Refugees Fled to Atlanta to Escape the Klan May 1869
Political and racial violence in the Reconstruction Era South was a factor in setting Southerners, Black and white, into motion as refugees. Ku Klux attacks…
Ku Klux Kard Game January 1869
By the end of 1868 the Ku Klux Klan, unknown just a few years earlier, was so widespread in the South that its name was…