Historians record that six war-weary, restless, bored youths from Pulaski, Tennessee, organized a social club in the fall of 1865. They vowed to "have fun, make mischief, and play pranks on the public." To these youths, the black population constituted "the public," and the pranks consisted of dressing in ghostly garb and frightening ex-slaves. According to Walter L. Fleming in The Sequel of Appomattox, the Klans that resulted found that the "terrorizing of the Blacks successfully provided the amusement which the founders desired and there were many applications for admission to the society."
But repeated references have been made to the amusement some Southern whites purportedly enjoyed in chasing, frightening, and whipping slaves. Before 1865 these diversions had been a sideline of the patrollers, who were supposed to have been engaged in the more serious business of preventing slave assemblies.
The element of "fun" is a recurring theme in Southern historiography and oral tradition. Young boys of both races played ghosts at the graveyard, though blacks were usually the targets of the pranks. Perhaps one explanation for their excessive interest in "fun" is that many of the Klansmen were relatively young, according to contemporary accounts.
But ingenuity in Southern "fun" apparently knew no bounds. The report of the 1871 congressional hearing created to gather testimony about the Klan included the account of a visit by irate Klan members to a white man who had extended a Sunday school class into a two-day school for poor children. He was taken out, blindfolded, and forced to kiss the private parts of several assembled blacks.
The formalization of an old Southern custom into a social organization marked the beginning of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps out of a need to "whitewash" the motivations of the founders, defenders have perpetuated the myth of the Pulaski six as the group's origin. General historians, limiting themselves to threadbare written sources and blind to the value of oral tradition, have unwittingly kept the tale alive.
Reconstruction and the Klan
William Peirce Randel tells of the first parade through the Pulaski streets, the six original Klan members and their horses arrayed in stolen sheets:
One unexpected result, reported by various observers, was that the superstitious Negroes had not been amused by the spectacle, but instead, had taken the riders for ghosts of the Confederate dead. What had been conceived as a lark to relieve the general tedium took on a sudden new dimension: if idle Negroes could be frightened so easily, perhaps they could be persuaded to resume work, and something like the prewar balance could be restored - the plantation system that kept the Negroes subservient and at work, producing the income that white men had been accustomed to.
In fact, it was not the beginning, as Randel states and as students of Southern history now generally believe, but one of the final stages of a process aimed at controlling blacks. Note the tone of historian John Hope Franklin's remarks:
The Young Tennesseans
...
Read Full Article
|
