ome excuse the rise of the Ku Klux and the White League and theKnights of the White Camellia in the South with the plea that theywere the answer to Negro suffrage, and that the Union Leaguesstarted among Negroes were the cause of secret orders among whites.There is no historic foundation for thi

How is it that men who want certain things done by brute forcecan so often depend upon the mob ? Total depravity, human hate andSchadenfreude, do not explain fully the mob spirit in America.

The report of the Ku Klux investigation published in 1 871 said ofSouth Carolina that "in the nine counties covered by the investigationfor a period of approximately six months, the Ku Klux Klan lynchedand murdered 35 men, whipped 262 men and women, otherwise outraged, shot, mutilated, burned out, etc., 101 persons. It committed twocases of sex offenses against Negro women. During this time, theNegroes killed four men, beat one man, commi tted sixteen other outrages, but no case of torture. No case is found of a white womanseduced or raped by a Negro.

Negro churches are burned. In one community, four-fifths of theNegro men are sleeping out in the woods. Gins and ginhouses areburned in retaliation by Negroes. Colored women are whipped andraped by whites.

In 1866, the first church for colored peoplewas opened by the American Missionary Association at Memphis, Tennessee. It was burned with all the colored churches in Memphis inthe riot that year.1

A lawlessness which, in 1 865-1 868, was still spasmodic and episodic,now became organized, and its real underlying industrial causes obscured by political excuses and race hatred. Using a technique ofmass and midnight murder, the South began widely organized aggression upon the Negroes

Theplantation laborer, under the conditions offered, would still be a slave,with small chance to rise to the position of i ndependent farmer, oreven of free modern laborer

The unrest and bitterness of post-war lawlessness were graduallytransmuted into economic pressure.

On their return, they met on the public highwaya Negro. They first castrated him, and afterwards murdered him incold blood."

Deadbodies of murdered Negroes were found on and near the highwaysand byways. Gruesome reports came from the hospitals-reports ofcolored men and women whose ears had been cut off, whose skullshad been broken by blows, whose bodies had been slashed by knivesor lacerated with scourges

From this, it changed to a war between laborers, white and black men fighting for the same j obs.

The wage of the Negro worker, despite the war amendments, wasto be reduced to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, peonage,caste, and every method of discrimination

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