What you are about to read is the story of the first war on terror.
No…wait.
This is actually the origin story of second-wave white supremacy known as “Jim Crow laws.”
This is a war narrative. This is a horror story, but it’s also a suspense thriller that ends in triumph. It also ends in tragedy. It’s a true story about a fantastic myth. This is a narrative, nonfiction account of the all-American fairy tale of liberty and justice for all.
Behold, the untold story of the Great American Race War.
Before we begin, we shall introduce our hero.
The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black people. The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers—they are all protagonists in our epic adventure.
Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die.
Ever.
This hero is long-suffering but unkillable. Bloody and unbowed. In this story—and in all the subsequent sequels, now and forever—this hero almost never wins. But we still get to be the heroes of all true American stories simply because we are indestructible. Try as they might, we will never be extinguished.
Ever.
Our story begins at the end of the War for White Supremacy. Also known as the “War for Slaveholders’ Rights”; the “War of White Tears”; or more recently, “Conflict for Future Racist Monuments.” Demographic historian David J. Hacker contends that this war’s death toll could possibly outweigh the combined total of all the casualties of the nation’s other wars. (Whatever one chooses to call it, just remember: no war is civil.)
By 1869, the worst fears of the Confederate white supremacists had all come true.
The Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution had been ratified, abolishing slavery, guaranteeing citizenship, and promising equal protection under the law. The treasonous states that previously decided they didn’t want to be a part of the United States if they couldn’t own Black people were now occupied by Union troops, some led by Black freedmen. Then came the last straw:
On February 26, 1869, the U.S. Congress passed the proposal that would become the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, proclaiming that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the legislation resulted in more than 700,000 Black people registered as voters, slightly outnumbering the number of white voters in the South. In some states, the Black population equaled or surpassed the white population. But for the first time in decades, white Democrats—the original racists—were a minority in the South.
Something had to be done, so they started a war.
While many historians describe Reconstruction as a period of “racial unrest” marked by lynchings and “race riots,” it was undoubtedly a war. The network of terror cells that sprang up during Reconstruction was no different from the organized militias of the American Revolution or the ragtag Confederate squads. Although they went by many names, including the White League, the White Knights, the Knights of the White Camellia, and—the most famous of all—the “Circle of Brothers” known as the Ku Klux Klan, the loose confederation of historically white fraternities had one common goal: to overthrow the government and create their own white supremacist state.
Ku Klux Klan members in North Carolina lynched so many Black voters in 1870 that Governor William Woods Holden declared an insurrection and suspended habeas corpus (the right against unlawful detention), imposing martial law in two counties. After Klansmen assassinated Republican state senator John W. Stephens—along with Wyatt Outlaw, a Black town commissioner—Holden had no choice but to hire Union colonel George Washington Kirk to quell the violence. Kirk and three hundred soldiers traveled to North Carolina, arresting some of the most prominent men in the state for conspiring with the Klan—including ex-congressman John Kerr—for fueling what would become known as the Kirk-Holden War.
But the Klan’s rampage worked.
Battered by rampant murder and intimidation, the Tarheel State’s Black voters were successfully suppressed in the 1870 statewide elections. When Democrats won control of the state legislature, their first order of business was to impeach Holden for treating Klansmen too harshly. None of the more than one hundred terror leaders arrested in the Kirk-Holden War were ever charged with a crime. But on December 4, 1870, William Woods Holden became the first governor in American history to be removed from office.
North Carolina’s Klansmen had successfully overthrown their state’s government.
It was not the first time, and it would not be the last.
In June 1869, thirty-three Georgia legislators were officially removed from office when the state’s supreme court ruled 2–1 that “there is no existing law of this State which confers the right upon the colored citizens thereof to hold office.” The decision, however, was largely ceremonial. By the time the court handed down the decision, the Klan had already driven the “Original 33” from office, slaughtered at least a dozen antiexpulsion protesters in the Camilla Massacre, and forced Republican governor Rufus Bullock to ask for military intervention. One-quarter of the Original 33 would be killed by white supremacist violence, and Governor Bullock would be “obliged” by the Klan to resign the governorship and flee the state in 1871.
In Eutaw, Alabama, Black voters so outnumbered their white counterparts that in the 1868 presidential election, Republican Ulysses S. Grant easily won Greene County by more than two thousand votes. But on October 25, 1870, two weeks before the gubernatorial election, white radicals opened fire on thousands of Black citizens at a political rally. Because of the Eutaw Massacre, Black voters were bullied into staying home on election day, allowing Robert Lindsay, the Democratic candidate for governor, to win the county by forty-three votes.
In Laurens, South Carolina, “ten or twelve persons” were slaughtered the day after the 1870 state elections. A congressional committee investigating Klan violence heard accounts of white and Black ballot-casters being “waited upon” after voting, which sounds biblically scary. Being attacked by dingy-robed horseback riders is one thing, but being “waited upon” sounds like Stephen King–novelesque, next-level racism.
In an attempt to vanquish the Klan’s reign of fear, Congress passed a series of three increasingly restrictive laws aimed at curbing the terror groups’ power. The Enforcement Act of 1870 prohibited groups from banding together, using force, or even wearing disguises to violate the constitutional rights of other citizens—namely the right to vote.
It did not work.
The Second Enforcement Act was similar but imposed harsher fines and allowed federal oversight of local and federal elections. It was cute but, of course, it didn’t work, either. It wasn’t necessarily the elections that concerned Black voters, it was the fireworks at the Klan afterparties that caused so much consternation. It’s almost like Congress didn’t hear that whole “waited upon” part. Still, they gave it one more try.
The Third Enforcement Act gave the president the right to suspend habeas corpus, an extraordinarily controversial power to hand to the commander in chief. Outside wartime, the United Sates has never invoked the authority to suspend this constitutionally guaranteed right, but Congress thought it was the only way to win this rapidly escalating race war. They didn’t even try to pretend why they passed the legislation by calling it something like the “Patriot Act” or the “Please Be Nice to Black People Law of 1870.”
They called it the Ku Klux Klan Act.
It did not work.
In 1871 the Klan continued its Klannish ways by slaughtering thirty people in Meridian, Mississippi. No one knows how many people a white militia mob murdered on Easter Sunday in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. A military report lists eighty-one Black men; another fifteen to twenty bodies were fished out of the Red River, and another eighteen were secretly buried, according to historian Charles Lane. In August 1874, the White League killed at least a dozen freedmen in Couschatta, Louisiana. One month after the Couschatta Massacre, five thousand members of the Crescent City White League successfully overthrew the state government and installed the Democrat John McEnery as governor. Although their victory was quickly erased by federal troops, the White League later erected a monument to their cause, containing the following inscription:
McEnery and Penn having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people, were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored).
United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.
By now, you may be wondering, where is our hero?
Well, perhaps the most inconceivable thing about this story is neither the details of the horrific massacres nor the fact that—for the most part—Black people haven’t even succumbed to the primal seduction of vengeance. (Remember, the ones who were “waited upon” outnumbered the waiters.) There were more of us than them, yet we did not reciprocate the terror. Still, that is not the magnificent part.
The most marvelous, unbelievable thing about Black people in America is that they exist. Every imaginable monstrosity that evil can conjure has been inflicted on this population, yet they have not been extinguished.
The hero remains.
Still.
And that is the most wondrous part of all.