The 1872 Memphis Mardi Gras featured a Klan float. This was the first-ever Mardi Gras parade in the city, which had seen a bloody massacre of Blacks in 1866 and Klan activity from 1867 onwards.
Note: Sources include racist language.
The rabidly pro-Klan Memphis Avalanche described the float; “Those mythical terrors to negroes, the Ku-Klux were well represented. . . . In every instance they were in black, with high hats of a conical shape. Each hat bore the skull and cross bones and the terrible letters K. K. K. in white. As they marched along, the Negroes [moved] back. Many of the K. K.’s had rope lassos, and it was a favorite bit of pleasantry to lasso a Negro. No violence was offered, but the contortions and grimaces of the captives were highly amusing.” The Klansmen, according to the paper, were “arrayed under a transparency bearing a skull and cross-bones and ‘K.K.K. Deadbeats.’ In their black dominos and hideous masks, they were not a party calculated to inspire confidence in the minds of the loyal. They were peaceable enough, though, as they amused themselves by blowing upon tin horns and beating miniature drums.” [Found in Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (pp. 206-207).]
What exactly was going on here? The float was apparently an attempt by Klansmen to poke fun at the depiction of the Klan. As historian Elaine Parsons says, the float depicted outrages by the Klan to ridicule the newspapers that reported outrages by the Klan. By the way, when the article says that the Klan wagon was not “calculated to inspire confidence in the minds of the loyal,” the term “loyal” means those people who had stayed loyal to the Union during and after the Civil War.
In the article excerpted below from the Memphis Daily Appeal, the float is described as having a white man impersonating what the paper describes as a “spade,” a common derogatory term for African Americans. Just to be clear, his color is described as “the butt-end of midnight.” The article says that the Black man was mock-executed by “all the forms made familiar by Nast’s pictures.” The Nast referenced here was Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast who sometimes drew depictions of violence by Klansmen against African Americans. In other words, the Klan float showed the mock-execution of a white man in blackface to mock the liberal sensitivities of Northern whites who though the Klan was a violent racist organization. Got it?
Memphis Daily Appeal, February 14, 1872
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