Chad Pearson, a professor of history at Collin College in Texas, has an article in Jacobin on the importance of the Ku Klux Klan to Southern employers during Reconstruction. Emancipation had wrought a revolution in labor relations in the South. Black labor, previously enslaved, was now free to seek the highest bidder for its services. According to Pearson:
Through the Reconstruction years, the mostly planation-based Southern ruling class fiercely resisted the efflorescence of black freedom. Restrictive Black Codes, the pro-planter polices of President Andrew Johnson, racist riots in Memphis and New Orleans, and, above all, the widespread terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan brutally demonstrated the limits of emancipation. Led by former slave owners, the Klan meted out various forms of violence to prevent African Americans from voting or attending schools, intimidate northern “carpetbaggers,” and ensure, according to an undated Klan document, that freed people “continue at their appropriate labor.”
The Klan tended to be led by planters whose fortunes were damaged by Emancipation as well as lawyers and other professionals. According to Pearson:
These men were infuriated at their declining economic position and the ascension of black men to positions of political power. Newly empowered black men, North Carolina–based Klan leader Randolph Abbott Shotwell complained, had helped the federal government strike down “the rights of the master” and disfranchise “a large proportion of the ablest and best men in the naturally dominated race.”
Resentful elites like Shotwell and [Nathan Bedford] Forrest were determined to reestablish their power. Abundant evidence suggests that the Reconstruction-era Klan functioned like an employers’ association with goals that, in some ways, resembled the aims of other anti-labor business organizations.
Klan leaders demanded that the black masses perform one function: engage in tiring, brutally intense forms of labor that resembled pre–Civil War plantation life. Klansmen sought to prevent African American from departing worksites, taking part in political meetings, pursuing education, accessing firearms, or joining organizations meant to challenge their exploiters. As one observer from Georgia told a congressional investigation committee in 1871, “I think their purpose is to control the State government and control the negro labor, the same as they did under slavery.”
Pearson argues that the Klan functioned as an employer association to control Black labor.
Klansmen spoke the unvarnished language of racial and class dominance — and they followed through with extreme brutality. If we measure the number of killings and beatings, the Klan was far more violent than most Northern-based employers’ associations. Historian Stephen Budiansky has calculated that white vigilantes murdered over three thousand people during the Reconstruction period.
Klansmen were nevertheless strategic, employing threats, kidnappings, and whippings to achieve the primary goals of the Southern ruling classes. This meant keeping freed people from polling booths, breaking up political gatherings, and murdering the most irredeemably rebellious men and women. “White raiders,” historian Douglas Egerton has pointed out, “did not simply assault blacks for being black.” Instead, they used intimidation and violence against what they considered shiftless, unreliable, disrespectful, and defiant men and women.
Gruesome actions like whippings and hangings served management’s needs, helping to discipline countless numbers of laborers. Mississippi cotton grower Robert Philip Howell, for example, expressed appreciation for the Klan because its members helped solve his problems with “free negros” in 1868: “had it not been for their deadly fear of the Ku-Klux, I do not think we could have managed them as well as we did.”
Nor does the fact that poor and working-class whites participated in Klan chapters mean that we shouldn’t regard the KKK as a bosses’ organization — achieving labor control has almost always involved coordinating cross-class groups of participants. After all, the mostly Northern-based employers’ associations could not have succeeded in breaking strikes and busting unions without the mobilizations of scabs during industrial conflicts.
The Klan, then, was a particularly vicious, particularly racist employers’ association — but it was an employers’ association all the same. And it was brutally effective.
Fear blanketed the mostly agricultural black laboring class. Although black people throughout the South were no longer “property,” the threat of Klan-organized violence loomed large. Too many missteps, including subtle and overt forms of insubordination, might lead to unwelcome encounters with hooded men followed by threats, beatings, and even death. Klansmen were management’s vicious enforcers, ensuring that the masses kept their heads down and labored efficiently.
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