The First Time the Ku Klux Klan Was Covered in a National Newspaper Was for a Murder Jan. 18, 1868

While the Ku Klux Klan would later claim that it had begun life on Christmas Eve, 1865, historians now believe it started six months later. The Klan attracted only local and regional notice in 1866 and 1867, but on one day in 1868 it became a national sensation. On January 18, 1868, both the New York Tribune and the New York Times published articles on the Klan that caught the eye of readers around the country. Historian Elaine Parsons writes:

Aside from a few scattered mentions in 1867, the Ku-Klux’s long run of frequent coverage in the national press began with an article about the killing of Orange Rhodes in the New York Tribune on January 18, 1868. The writer of the Tribune piece had likely encountered the story through reporting of the event in Nashville papers, probably the Nashville Press and Times. The Pulaski riot
had all of the elements necessary to catch the eye of an editor: on January 18, 1868, the Tribune reprinted Michael Walsh’s letter under the headline “The Pulaski Riots: Tennessee Chivalry Fighting for Miscegenation.” The next few days saw a new attack, this time in Linnville, just outside Pulaski, in which white men whipped three black men on a Saturday night. The Tribune picked this up, and on January 20 ran a story, which replaced the “riot” frame with a “gang” frame, “The ‘Ku-klux’ Gang Again.” Events might have unfolded quite differently if nineteenth-century Americans had categorized violent rural antiblack, anti-Republican southern groups together with urban street toughs, but it was not to be. The same day, the New York Times published its first Ku-Klux story, this time using the term “organization,” which would prove to be much more persistent than “riot” or “gang”: “The Ku-Klux Klan. The Rebel Organization in Tennessee—Its Outrages upon Unoffending Men.” This story was on the Linnville whippings, and was sourced from the Press and Times. The next day, the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel also published a version of the Press and Times piece titled “A Dangerous Organization.” “Organization” would be the category that stuck. Descriptions of the Klan in the national press would consistently emphasize the Klan’s coordination and discipline over, say, the thuggish nature of its members… From: Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (p. 147). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.

Here is the New York Tribune article that started the ball rolling. The article is almost entirely a report from the Sub Assistant Commissioner (SAC) of the Freedmen’s Bureau, named Michael Walsh, describing a riot in Pulaski, Tn. The small city of Pulaski was the birthplace of the Klan.

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