One of the most shocking racial crimes that ever took place in the United States occurred on October 17, 1981. That week a jury had been struggling to reach a verdict in the case of a black man, Josephus Anderson, accused of murdering a white policeman. The killing had occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, but the trial had been moved to Mobile, Alabama. Francis Hays, the second-highest Klan official in Alabama, and his fellow members of Unit 900 of the United Klans, knew that the presence of blacks on the jury meant that a guilty man would go free. According to Klansmen, who attended the unit's weekly meeting, Hays had preached that Wednesday saying, “If a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man”(Kornbluth). A young black male, Michael Donald, was abducted in downtown Mobile, Alabama and taken somewhere across the bay. Two Ku Klux Klan members, Francis Hays and James “Tiger” Knowles, were arrested and charged with the murder. A third individual, Benjamin Cox, was also charged as an accomplice. The three were sent to trial and one was executed, Hayes, and the other two are serving time in prison. The Klansmen got together that Friday night at Bennie’s house after the trial. According to James “Tiger” Knowles, Tiger brought a borrowed firearm. Henry Francis Hays took part in the crime by bringing supplies to help with the murder. The group of men devised a plan and drove around the city looking for a black man to kill. Michael Donald was walking home alone when the two saw him. They pulled over, asked him a few questions, then pulled out the firearm and pointed it towards Michael and demanded he get in the vehicle. They kept driving ... ... middle of paper ... ...ed before he could be retried. Henry Hays continued to protest his innocence until his execution on June 6, 1997. Works Cited "Lagniappe: Something Extra For Mobile." Lagniappe: Something Extra For Mobile. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2014. . Kornbluth, Jesse. "The Woman Who Beat The Klan." The New York Times. The New York Times, 31 Oct. 1987. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/01/magazine/the-woman-who-beat-the- klan.html "Henry Francis Hays | Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers." Henry Francis Hays | Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2014. henry-francis.htm>. "Michael Donald Lynching." KKK History Website Atom. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. recent-news/michael_donald_lynching>
A little less than a year after the Fifteenth Amendment passed, Harriet Hernandes and her daughter were dragged from their homes and beaten by the Ku Klux Klan because her husband voted in the recent election. In the Court Document, Harriet Hernandes, A South Carolina Woman, Testifies Against the Ku Klux Klan, 1871 in Spartanburgh, South Carolina, on July 10, 1871, Harrier gives her testimony about what has been happening to her and her family. The audience was the congressional committee appointed to investigate into Ku Klux Klan activity, until they made the testimony public, then the audience was all who cared to read about the terrorism that was brought by the KKK. Although African American men have been given
McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York, New York: Vintage Books. 2011.
On November 9, 1920, Byron de la Beckwith, an only child, was born to Byron De La Beckwith, Sr. and Susie Yerger in Sacramento, California. One of Beckwith’s early childhood memories was of the Ku Klux Klan marching through town, fully clad in their long white robes. During the twenties, there were over two million known members of the Klan and at least two were U.S. Senators. Needless to say, this left quite an impression on the young boy. Beckwith’s father died in 1926, his debts exceeding the value of his estate, leaving Susie and Byron Jr., whom they had nicknamed “Delay”, destitute. Susie left California, along with her son, for her native Greenwood, Mississippi. Beckwith’s mother passed away a few short years later, leaving Beckwith rearing to one of her cousins.
In her Fire in a Canebrake, Laura Wexler describes an important event in mid-twentieth century American race relations, long ago relegated to the closet of American consciousness. In so doing, Wexler not only skillfully describes the event—the Moore’s Ford lynching of 1946—but incorporates it into our understanding of the present world and past by retaining the complexities of doubt and deception that surrounded the event when it occurred, and which still confound it in historical records. By skillfully navigating these currents of deceit, too, Wexler is not only able to portray them to the reader in full form, but also historicize this muddled record in the context of certain larger historical truths. In this fashion, and by refusing to cede to a desire for closure by drawing easy but inherently flawed conclusions regarding the individuals directly responsible for the 1946 lynching, Wexler demonstrates that she is more interested in a larger historical picture than the single event to which she dedicates her text. And, in so doing, she rebukes the doubts of those who question the importance of “bringing up” the lynching, lending powerful motivation and purpose to her writing that sustains her narrative, and the audience’s attention to it.
On Friday April 24th J.P. Walker, Preacher Lee, Crip Reyer and L.C. Davis got into Reyer’s Oldsmobile and they took off on a mission to kill Mark Charles Parker. (3 other cars of men followed) They went to the courthouse/jail in Poplarville and they could not get in. So they went to Jewel Alford’s House (The jail keeper) to get the keys to the Jail. Alford went with the four men to the courthouse. When he got there he went in and down the hall to Sheriff Moody’s office and got the keys to the jail. He opened the door to the jail and Lee, Reyer, Davis, Walker followed Alford into the jail. Alford then opened Parkers cell and Lee and Davis pulled Parker out of the jail and courthouse to the Reyer's Oldsmobile. Alford then left and the men got into the car.
Do to the Whites belief that they were superior to the African-American it is only natural that their treatment of the African-Americans matched their distaste of them. Even though the KKK’s oath...
The first wave of the Ku Klux Klan was the founders. This band of brothers lasted from 1866 to 1874. Their goal was to restore the white supremacy by using violence and threats, including murder against blacks, which later spread to including other racial groups. They took on the look of all white with masks and robes to complete their look and hide their identities when “attacking,” usually at night. Some of the members in the Klan claimed to be the ghosts of the Confederate solders to frighten superstitious blacks. At the end of 1867, there were one hundred ninety-seven murders and five hundred forty-eight cases reported of assaults. In April 1868, 1,222 Republican votes were casted but by the ...
Before slavery was abolished, plantations and farms had patrols that rode on horses, making sure that if a slave had tried to escape, they would hunt he or she down and torture or kill the escaping slave worker. In the absence of slavery the KKK were the new “patrols.” The first Ku Klux Klan was founded by a group of Confederate veterans in Pulaski Tennessee in 1865, coincidental the same year when slavery was abolished in the U.S. The KKK was not connected with the law because slavery
The critical time periods in the Ku Klux Klan’s history can be simply broken down into separate “Klans.” Former Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee formed the first Klan around a year after the end of the Civil War. Soon after, Nathan Forrest, a former Confederate lieutenant general, was named the “Grand Wizard” of the organization. The “main objective of white supremacy organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White Brotherhood, the Men of Justice, the Constitutional Union Guards and the Knights of the White Camelia was to stop black people from voting” and restore the white supremacy the South saw prior to the Civil War ("Effects of the Klu Klux Klan"). At this point, Klansmen would ride at night through towns brutally intimidating, blacks and radical Republicans. These tactics got so bad that in 1870, Congress began passing the first of three...
brother, did the actually killing, but his mother in father aided in the coverup of the crime.
Black workers who had been confined to the South began to move to cities in the north to escape segregation, sharecropping, and racial violence. Access to jobs, housing, and public facilities became a major source of friction between blacks and whites. African Americans settled in all-black neighborhoods, and the largest was Harlem. Although it was a violent decade for African Americans, a powerful sense of racial pride gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance, the first self-conscious literary and artistic movement in African American history. However, the great migration of African Americans and the increasing visibility of black culture discomfited some white Americans. In consequence, a new version of the Ku Klux Klan emerged mainly due to post-war depression in agriculture, migration, religious intolerance, and nativism. Klan members considered themselves defenders of Prohibition, traditional morality, and true Americanism, and they were not only anti-black, but also anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-immigrant, anti-alcohol, and anti-science. By 1924, the Klan reached its peak in members and influence controlling 24 state legislatures. However, in 1925, after David C. Stephenson, one of the leaders, was accused of a serious crime, followed by the prosecution of many Klan-supported politicians on corruption charges, the majority of its members left the organization.
Campbell, Phil. "A Klan Victory." Cover Story. n.d. n. page. Web. 6 Dec. 2013. .
Alexander, Charles. The Ku Klux Klan In The Southwest. University Of Kentucky Press: Kentucky, 1925.
The Ku Klux Klan began in Pulaski, Tennessee, a small town south of Nashville. On the night of December 24, 1865 six ex-confederate soldiers were sitting around a fireplace it the law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones.(Invisible Empire, p.9) These six friends were having a discussion and were trying to come up with an idea to cheer themselves up.