Our political moment is opportune for new perspectives on American racial and political violence. This panel examines three major episodes, the Klan movement during Reconstruction, the terrorist aftermath of Reconstruction’s overthrow, and the resurgent Klan at the time of the early civil rights movement. The papers offer fresh evidence and novel viewpoints on that harsh history.

The first paper, by Michael W. Fitzgerald, explores contemporary insider accounts of Ku Klux operations, from the vantage point of one rich extended family during Alabama’s Reconstruction era. After a bloody riot in Eutaw, fleeing participants descended on the family mansion seeking shelter. The Pickens’ family’s implication in criminal activities did not please all of them, and their differing responses opened fissures of age, race, and class prospects. Such previously unexamined evidence, documenting a Klan- connected family’s domestic behavior, allows insight into the internal dynamics of racist participation.

Christopher Grasso’s paper on the Chisholm Massacre, too, utilizes a collection of materials long in private hands to examine partisan violence. In Kemper County, Mississippi, in April 1877, apparent ex-Klansmen besieged a jailhouse. They murdered a native white Republican leader, William Chisholm, two of his children, and some of his Republican defenders. Chisholm had been accused of killing a Democratic rival, and the survival of his widow, an eyewitness, left her able to pursue legal redress. Dueling books resulted in time for the next presidential campaign. Grasso uses these materials, and the family’s private correspondence, to assess how partisans responded to this episode thereafter. Democrats found the murder of Chisholm’s son and daughter too bloody to feature in their heroic narrative of Redemption, while national Republicans, as they retreated from civil rights enforcement, found the once prominent episode less useful over time. What happened, and the massacre’s treatment in public discourse, frame Grasso’s exploration of the politics of public memory.

Bertis English, a longtime resident of Montgomery, examines Klan violence in the aftermath of the bus boycott, in a study that raises different issues in a different setting. In January 1957, four Klan members abducted a Black man, Willie Edwards, forcing him to jump from a bridge to his death. Edwards was accused, inconsistently, of sexual misconduct, or of making advances to a white woman. In the trial, the judge dismissed the charges, on the grounds that jumping from a bridge should not necessarily have resulted in Edwards’s death. The author traces the legal and political situation that yielded that result, and efforts in later decades to prosecute the perpetrators.

All three papers illuminate public opinion and the legal system in the midst of these outbreaks. They remain unusually relevant now.