Racial Terrorism and a Prominent Southern Family

First hand accounts by participants in the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan are rare. But a revealing set of intimate letters has recently become public. It shows how a prominent family responded to the Klan sympathies of their siblings, relations, and community.

The Pickens family, near Greensboro, Alabama, were well-connected, composed of a widow and the nephews and nieces of Governor Israel Pickens, one of the state’s founding figures. They enslaved more than two hundred people, but postwar misfortunes obliged them to take in two brothers-in-law, Murray and Eyre Damer. These troublesome teenaged orphans made common cause with the restive younger Pickens brothers. The family eventually apprenticed them to a nearby newspaper. The Damer boys’ work placed them amid a violent Klan network. The emotional neediness of young Eyre Damer made him document his involvement, and its intersection with his own romantic dramas. Decades later, he published a book celebrating the Klan eruption in his vicinity, drawing upon his own experiences.

This paper, and my forthcoming book, examine how the Damers experienced their terrorist involvement, and how their onetime host Pickens family responded. Their joint implication opened fissures within the extended family, along lines of age, gender, and financial prospects. The younger Pickens boys lauded the racist violence of the Klan. The older and female members of the family mostly ignored it as long as they could—until they wound up providing refuge in their mansion to racist fugitives after a major election riot. Strikingly, all these people shared similar political views. They had been secessionist Democrats and then hard-core Confederates. But they didn’t all verbally and actually embrace postwar nightriding and murder. The newly-accessible Pickens correspondence offers a unique vantage point into the intimate, familial aspects of Klan terrorism. That matters now, as we assess our own fraught time.