They Called Themselves the K.K.K.

by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

  In January 1871, after arsonists torched ten or twelve barns and gin houses and one mill during one week’s time, the Klan rounded up thirty to forty black men and whipped them, not knowing or caring if the men were innocent of the arson.

  Later that month, the Klan posted a warning at a local Yorkville store, the county auditor’s office, and other sites throughout the county:

  Headquarters K. K. K.

  January 22, 1871

  Resolved, That in all cases of incendiarism, ten of the leading colored people and two white sympathizers shall be executed in that vicinity.

  That if any armed bands of colored people are found hereafter picketing the roads, the officers of the company to which the pickets belong shall be executed.

  That all persons reported as using incendiary language shall be tried by the high court of this order, and be punished at their discretion.

  The different offices are charged with the execution of these resolutions.

  By order of K.K.K.

  Fearful of a massive Klan attack, black leaders in the Clay Hill area attempted to broker a truce. They sent word to prominent white men, asking them to meet. The white men agreed, and on February 11, 1871, the two groups met at Tate’s Store, located at a fork in the road about three miles from Elias Hill’s home.

  At the meeting, the black leaders agreed to cease nighttime political meetings in order to calm white anxieties. In return, the white men pledged to use their influence to curb Klan violence. Feeling hopeful, the black men returned home.

  But the Klan broke the truce the very next day, and the raids continued over the coming weeks, increasing in frequency and cruelty. In reprisal, the freedmen burned more gin houses, barns, and mills. Furious, the Klan hunted down black preachers, accusing them of preaching sermons that incited black men to set fire to white-owned property.

  That spring, as the raids continued, night after night, Elias Hill lay awake, listening for hoof beats to thunder to his door, wondering if the Klan would come for him. “I thought my pitiful condition would screen me,” said Elias.

  But it wouldn’t. After midnight on May 5, 1871, Elias heard the Klan attack his sister-in-law, whipping her severely in the front yard to make her tell where Elias lived. Next they entered Elias’s cabin. They yanked him from bed and dragged him outside by his arms. As they pounded Elias with their fists, they told him he had no honor. “Haven’t you been preaching and praying about the Ku Klux?” said one of the men. “Haven’t you been preaching political sermons?” and “Didn’t you preach against the Ku Klux?”

  Elias denied the accusations. They also accused him of writing a letter to his congressman, and Elias replied yes, that he had. He also admitted that he had received a reply.

  Hearing that, several Klansmen plundered Elias’s cabin, looking for the letter. Others horsewhipped Elias, cutting him to the bone. Afterward, they ordered him to quit preaching and to publish a notice in the newspaper, renouncing all Republicanism and promising never to vote. “Don’t pray against us,” one of the men warned Elias. “Pray that God may bless and save us.”

  Despite the severity of the attack, one of the worst blows came later, when Elias realized that not one white man had aided the black community, despite the meeting at the fork in the road. “Those whites that professed to be our friends then have since cried out and rejoiced . . . over our injuries and sufferings,” said Elias. “We have lost hope entirely.”

  During this period, investigators counted at least eleven murders and more than six hundred other brutal attacks. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy came from white ministers who refused to preach against the Klan, even as they knew that the Klan was whipping and beating and hanging people to death.

  Many white ministers shared the views of the Reverend Robert E. Cooper. “I don’t preach political sermons at all,” explained Cooper, who lived in York County. “I never conceived that I had any right to preach against raidings of that kind. . . . I have no colored people belonging to my congregation at all. My idea is to preach Christ and him crucified, and I try to stick to my text.”

  Yet even as white clergy such as Robert E. Cooper refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan, they could not destroy the faith, spirit, and will of black Americans. In June 1871, when ministers and laymen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Florida held a convention, they discussed the progress that black Americans had made since the war’s end. With great pride, they noted the hard-working families who homesteaded and had small farms. They noted the number of black-owned industries and the growing number of schoolhouses and churches. They also noted that the freed people had nearly three million dollars in savings banks.

  These achievements were remarkable considering that most had been slaves just six years earlier. “We proudly point to these facts as a refutation of the slanders by our natural-born enemies, the democrats, that freedmen do not work,” said the chairman.

  Perhaps it can be said that the great number of Klan attacks shows the ministers’ and preachers’ resolve to preach freely and to transform the lives of their parishioners. Perhaps the number also shows the resolve of black Americans not to live as they had as slaves.

  From the pulpit, black clergy would continue to serve as leaders for social and political change. They would look out for the needs of their people. They would challenge the United States to live up to its creed and promise of freedom and equality for all Americans.

  “Sometimes at night us gather ’round the fireplace and pray and sing and cry, but us daren’t ’low our white folks know it. Thank the Lawd us can worship where us wants nowadays.”

  —Susan Merritt from Texas. Susan was picking cotton the day she learned she was free. She and her husband raised fifteen children on a small farm they worked as sharecroppers. Although Susan never knew her exact age, she figured she was eighty-seven when this photograph was taken in 1937.

  Library of Congress

  CHAPTER 9

  “Forced by Force, to Use Force”

  The Klan’s nighttime raids in York County, South Carolina, enraged men such as Jim Williams, captain of an all-black militia company. Born into slavery, Jim had escaped to freedom in the last year of the war and fought with the Union army. After the war, he returned home and changed his name from Rainey to Williams.

  White people called him Jim Rainey, as if he still belonged to the white Rainey family in York County, South Carolina. Jim and his young wife, Rosy, lived in a small cabin on rented land near Briar Patch, not far from Yorkville.

  Jim Williams belonged to a state militia, one of three black companies in York County, and his militia company had ninety-six guns. Real guns. Enfield rifles, sent by South Carolina’s Republican governor Robert K. Scott when he chartered the companies two months before the fall 1870 election.

  Like Jim Williams, this unnamed man escaped slavery to join the Union army. The artist noted that the soldier risked his life for the privilege of “fighting for the nation which is hereafter pledged to protect him and his.”

  Harper’s Weekly, July 2, 1864; Library of Congress.

  During the fall of 1870, Jim Williams drilled his men every two weeks and every Saturday evening, just as he had learned as a Union soldier. He doled out the practice ammunition sparingly, giving each man just two or three rounds. Jim and his men also patrolled the roads, stopping white men to inquire about their business. This galled the whites, who didn’t think they had to explain themselves to anybody, let alone a black man.

  A Yorkville lawyer claimed that some of the patrols taunted the white people. “They insulted white people along the road,” said William Simpson, “denouncing them occasionally as rebels, saying they had guns and the white people did not have them; that Scott, the governor, did not allow them to have guns.”

  After the Klan posted its ultimatum on January 22, 1871, promising to round up and kill black men who patrolled the countryside or in retribution for torched barns and gin houses, Jim stationed his militia at the Rose Hote
l in Yorkville, the headquarters for the Republican Party. Sensing it was a matter of time before the Klan led a massive raid against the black community, Jim wanted his men ready. He drilled them in the street and increased their patrols on the county roads.

  It was a bold move. There was little doubt that Williams realized the effect his black soldiers had on the white residents of Yorkville, that he knew how the white people detested the sight of the black men in blue uniforms—the very blue that Yankee soldiers had worn as they sacked and burned their way from Georgia to South Carolina near the war’s end. To many white Southerners, the black militia company symbolized all that the South had lost, and all the indignity and humiliation and racial equality that the North was forcing on the conquered South.

  Jim also knew the effect that his company’s government-issued guns had on white people. Before the war, white people so feared a slave uprising that in most places black people were not permitted to own a gun, not even to hunt.

  Few newspapers depicted black resistance to the K.K.K., but here is an armed man prepared to retaliate for the white supremacists’ violent acts.

  Harper’s Weekly, October 28, 1876; HarpWeek, LLC

  When the Klan threatened to take matters into their own hands, to disarm each and every black man, Jim Williams countered that he wasn’t going to allow it. Jim scarcely knew a black family that hadn’t been attacked or threatened. Men like Jim knew the importance of taking a stand, or there wouldn’t be any place left to stand. And so Jim vowed to his wife Rosy that he wouldn’t give up his guns, not without a direct order from the governor himself.

  Three days after the Klan’s public threat, on January 25, someone fired several gunshots from the Rose Hotel. Moments later, a mill, a barn, and three more cotton gin houses burst into flames on the outskirts of town.

  The fires sparked a rumor among the white people that black men had taken over the town and were threatening to burn it down. “Theire [sic] is great excitement to day,” wrote Mary Davis Brown in her diary. “The negroes have threattend [sic] to burn York up to night and the men has most all gone to York and they are going to make the negroes give up the guns that Governor Scott gave them.”

  Certain that the gunfire signaled the arsonists, white residents sent out messengers to other Klan dens, calling for help. Scores of armed Klansmen responded, some from dens as far away as North Carolina. They patrolled the Yorkville streets at night.

  Yorkville teetered on the brink of a race war. “Folks were pretty much scared,” said James Long, a farm laborer living in York County. “They did not know but what the niggers might come with their arms and kill them.”

  Jim Williams didn’t want such a clash, as was proved when he withdrew his militia from the Rose Hotel. In an attempt to ease the racial tension and dispel white fear, Governor Scott sent an officer to disarm the York County militia. The officer ordered the three black militia companies to relinquish their guns.

  The Klansmen took matters into their own hands. Night after night, they rode through the countryside, searching black homes, beating the occupants, and confiscating all weapons. They kept the guns for themselves.

  But Jim Williams refused to give up his government-issued guns, perhaps worried that the black community was defenseless against the Klan’s powerful rifles, or perhaps because he planned counterresistance. Somehow Jim managed to have more than a dozen militia guns in his possession.

  According to Milus Carroll, Jim Williams did himself in the day he rode his mule down the center of the street to the Rose Hotel. There, Williams allegedly stood on the hotel steps and promised that if ever the Ku Klux Klan rode into his neighborhood, very few if any would ride out again.

  Soon, it was rumored that Williams had threatened to “kill from the cradle up” before he would give up his guns. As news of Williams’s supposed threat traveled, whites grew alarmed. Even Julia Rainey, the widow of Jim’s former master, grew concerned. Was this the Jim she had known his entire life? The Jim who had been her carriage driver? Who had so often visited her home after the war, sitting in her kitchen, chatting comfortably?

  “He always felt at liberty to enter my kitchen at any time to see the old family servant,” said Julia Rainey. “There was always a great deal of politeness between us, and therefore [I] saw and heard a great deal of him.” But now, Rainey admitted, she feared Jim and his “disorderly” band of men.

  It will never be known if Jim Williams threatened an impending massacre or if the Klan fabricated the rumor to justify its actions. But later that day, the very day that Williams had stood on the hotel steps, three York County Klan dens hatched plans to raid his cabin, come the first Monday in March.

  Later, Klansman Milus Carroll would simply say, “He and his company became a nuisance to the surrounding country.”

  That Monday, March 6, 1871, the three dens met at Briar Patch. It was two o’clock in the morning, and under the bright moon about forty men stood, wearing red or white gowns with black hoods.

  In the spill of moonlight, they initiated several new members, including sixteen-year-old Sam Ferguson, who knelt and recited the Klan oath. No one knew the full extent of the plot, except the Grand Cyclops, James Rufus Bratton, a local physician, who had known Jim his entire life.

  Milus Carroll led the way to the Williams cabin. Reaching the small dark house, the men called for Jim Rainey, using his slave name. They waited a few minutes and then forced open the wooden door, cracking it as they stormed inside.

  Rosy Williams pleaded with the men, telling them her husband wasn’t home, that Jim had left and she didn’t know where he had gone. Bratton ordered the Klansmen to pry up the wooden floorboards.

  Someone held up a torch. There, in the darkness below, crouched Jim Williams. Several men grabbed Jim and hauled him outside, where Bratton tied a rope around his neck.

  As Rosy heard Jim struggling, making sounds as if he was strangling, she begged the men not to hurt her husband. But the Klansmen growled at her to shut the door and go to bed. Rosy closed the door, fearing for her life and for Jim’s. Through a crack, she watched as they dragged Jim across the yard and into the woods, until she could see them no longer.

  That night Rosy paced the cabin. She didn’t go for help, perhaps out of fear or perhaps because she knew no one could save her husband now. Anybody who was somebody in town, from the local doctors to the sheriff, was a Klansman. The nearest telegraph office was in the town of Chester, nearly twenty miles away, and its telegraph operator was a known Klansman.

  The next morning, Rosy mustered her courage to search for Jim. “I was scared,” said Rosy. “Then I went for my people. To get someone to go help me look for him; and I met an old man who told me they had found him, and said he was dead. They had hung him.”

  Fifty-three years later, Milus Carroll would reveal gruesome facts about the murder: how Jim had fought for his life; how he had pleaded and prayed; how, with the rope around his neck, he scrambled up the tall pine out of reach; how a Klansman climbed up after him and pushed him, and when Jim clung to the thick limb, the Klansman hacked at his fingers with a knife, forcing Jim to drop.

  “He died cursing, pleading, and praying all in one breath,” said Milus Carroll. In a final affront, Bratton pinned a paper to Williams’s shirt. It said, “Capt. Jim Williams on his big muster.”

  The murder sent another wave of fear throughout the black community. For two days Jim’s militia company threatened to kill all white men. But in the end, they didn’t retaliate.

  Thomas Nast called this illustration “Southern Justice.” Here, Nast depicts two victims of a lynch mob: a black man, left, and a white Yankee, right, and a crowd of onlookers including a small child.

  Harper’s Weekly, March 23, 1867; Library of Congress.

  On March 9, 1871, three days after the murder of Jim Williams, the Klan published a notice in the Yorkville Enquirer, declaring boldly: “The intelligent, honest white people (the taxpayers) of this county shall rule it! We can no l
onger put up with negro rule, black bayonets, and a miserably degraded and thievish set of lawmakers (God save the mark!), the scum of the earth, the scrapings of creation. We are pledged to stop it; we are determined to end it, even if we are ‘forced by force, to use force.’”

  Reports of these atrocities and countless others poured into President Grant’s office and before Congress. From Nashville, Tennessee, the president and Congress heard about Republicans who were whipped, maltreated, and shot, and driven into hiding out of fear for their lives. From Alabama they heard the schoolteacher William Luke’s last letter to his wife, written minutes before he was hanged by the Klan.

  From Meridian, Mississippi, they heard about a white judge and seven black witnesses who were shot and killed in a courtroom; an eighth black witness who survived the shooting was hurled to his death from a second-floor window. From Kentucky, where the state was described as a “smoldering volcano,” they heard from freedmen who wrote to Congress, begging for protection from the Klan. From North Carolina, they heard from a former Klansman himself, who admitted that the “Lost Cause” was still being fought, underground. The Klan’s objective, said this witness, was to overthrow Reconstruction policies and to prevent black men from voting.

  Other reports came from federal military officers such as Major Lewis M. Merrill who had witnessed the terror and violence in South Carolina firsthand. But under the laws of the United States Constitution, Merrill and his federal troops could not intercede unless the local and state authorities asked for help.