American Experience
About the Film

     video | transcript


War of Terror: Secret groups like the Ku Klux Klan form to attack black political power with violence.
Introduction: After a bloody Civil War, Americans fight about how to rebuild the nation. Chaos: Southern planters and liberated slaves are thrown into chaos as Union victory nears. Revolution on the Land: The Federal government allots abandoned plantation acreage to freed slaves as Southern whites face defeat. Uncertainty: After President Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson takes office amid deep uncertainty. Cultivating Liberty: Activist Tunis Campbell and former slaves start self-sufficient lives in Georgia. Freedmen's Bureau Agent: Union veteran Marshall Twitchell moves to an isolated, battle-hardened Confederate district. 'White Men Alone': President Johnson plans to restore the Union quickly with few changes to the social order. An Independent Black Community: Tunis Campbell's black settlement establishes schools and bans whites from the island. Losses and Reconciliation: As Southerners return home to catastrophic losses, the president pardons planters and returns their lands. Slavery Without the Chain: To rebuild their cotton economy, Southern whites force black submission. Opportunity: Yankee Marshall Twitchell and Southerner Adele Coleman marry, over her family's objections. War in Congress: Deep rifts divide Washington as Congress passes the first law to protect civil rights. Radical Reconstruction: Shocked by Southern violence, Northerners support military governance and black suffrage. Citizens at Last: White Southerners' sense of injustice and fear of vengeance grow as black men obtain the vote. Credits Introduction: As Abraham Lincoln warned, Reconstruction is a task 'fraught with great difficulty.' Interracial Democracy: Black suffrage is imposed in the South, though blacks cannot vote in many Northern states. Sharecropping: Landowner Fan Butler negotiates new labor arrangements with her former slaves. Carpetbagger: Southerners start to view Northerners like Marshall Twitchell with suspicion. 'Let Us Have Peace.': As racial conflicts continue, Ulysses Grant gains the presidency by promising reconciliation. The New Order of Things: Republican legislators like former slave John Lynch introduce new services -- and new taxes. War of Terror: Secret groups like the Ku Klux Klan form to attack black political power with violence. Seeking Profit: Southern whites and blacks struggle to gain political power and forge a workable economy. A New South: The Federal government cracks down on violence, and Grant's re-election promises more change. The Lost Cause: The nation loses patience for the plight of Southern blacks as whites take back power. The Coushatta Massacre: President Grant makes an unpopular decision to send troops South to suppress an insurrection. Ideals and Intimidation: Congress passes a visionary civil rights bill, but Southern vigilantes continue their violence. At War: White vigilantes in Coushatta, Louisiana try to kill Marshall Twitchell. Secret Compromise: The North abandons Reconstruction in a secret political deal. Looking Back: By 1913, Reconstruction is widely viewed as a mistake, though its progressive legacy will endure. Credits
Episode 1 Episode 2

NARRATOR
A shadowland of secret clubs and societies began to take shape: in Mississippi, the White Liners; in Louisiana, the Knights of the White Camellia -- and across the South, the Ku Klux Klan.

WALKER
If you grow up in a society in where, for centuries, you have been taught that other people are your racial inferiors, it's very hard to accept the enormous social change involved in their emancipation. Any benefit that accrued to blackness was interpreted as a loss of whiteness. Education, the acquisition of property, was viewed as somehow unnatural.

AYERS
The Ku Klux Klan does not see itself as lawlessness, but as the Law. Because they do not believe that black men deserve political power or know what to do with it once they have it, they think that it's their right, maybe even their Christian responsibility, to destroy black political power before it has a chance to become too entrenched.

NARRATOR
Abram Colby had been elected to the Georgia legislature, along with Tunis Campbell. The Democrats wanted to curb his power in the county. They tried bribes, but Colby turned them away. In October of 1869, the Klan set out to teach him a lesson.

PAINTER
They were the mercenary forces of the Democrats, who were trying to regain power. They were not simply using the ballot, because they felt they would lose at the ballot box. They were using violent coercion. They were eliminating their competitors.

NARRATOR
Colby's attackers could not hide behind their hoods.

V/O Abram Colby
Some of them were the first-class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers. I knew the voices of those men as well as I know my own.

BLIGHT
They would take people out of their houses or their cabins in the dark of the night, strip them out in a road, make them run down the road, make them sometimes lie on a rock where they would be whipped, where men would line up to whip them. Sometimes they would burn parts of their bodies. These were sadistic tortures.

V/O Abram Colby
They said to me, "Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?" I said, "If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket." They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more.

WALKER
This was a war of terror. The Ku Klux Klan, organized in 1867, is an original American terrorist organization.

buy the program video or DVD
support PBS programming | feedback