by After the passage of the first Enforcement Acts, written to protect the civil rights of the formerly enslaved, Congress created a bipartisan committee in 1871 to investigate reports of vigilante violence against freed people and their white allies in the former states. Confederacy. The following year, the Joint Joint Committee to Inquire into the Situation in Late Insurrectional States published its report: a 13 volume collection of testimonies from 600 witnesses, with a total of more than 8,000 pages.
The men and women who spoke before the committee attested to widespread violence and intimidation. There were countless reports of whippings, beatings and murders. “Tom Roundtree, alias Black, a Negro, murdered by a Ku Klux mob of about 50 or 60 people, who came to his house on the night of the 3rd of December last, took him out, shot him, and cut his throat.” , it reads. a typical entry in the volume dedicated to Klan activity in South Carolina. “James Williams,” reads another entry in the same volume, “taken from his house at night and hanged by the Ku Klux, some 40 or 50 members.”
There were also, as the historian Kidada E. Williams shows in “I saw death coming: A story of terror and survival in the war against reconstruction”, stories of terrible sexual violence. Williams describes an attack in which a group of vigilantes whipped her victim, Frances Gilmore of Chatham County, North Carolina, “set her pubic hair on fire and cut off her genitals.”
Thanks to these reports and others compiled by lawyers, journalists and other researchers, the American public had “access to more information about the Ku Klux than about almost any other person, event, phenomenon or movement in the nation,” said historian Elaine Frantz. Parsons. she observes in “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction.” Between government reports, witness testimony, Klan member confessions, and physical evidence of violence and destruction, it would seem impossible to deny the terrible extent of the Klan’s terror, much less the existence of the Klan itself.
However, that is exactly what happened.
“Despite massive and productive public and private efforts to gather, circulate, and evaluate information” about the group, Parsons writes, “the national debate over the Ku Klux failed to move beyond the simple question of whether the Ku Klux existed.”
In fact, as historian Stephen A. West says he pointed In The Washington Post in a 2022 article about the committee report, “for much of the last 150 years, critics of Reconstruction trivialized the testimony of black witnesses in the Klan report and instead used it to discredit the democratic possibilities of the period.”
It’s hard to look at this episode, which occurred just over 150 years ago, and not think of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, which compiled an equally thorough factual record of the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Thousands of pages of testimonies. Tens of thousands of hours of video footage. The words, under oath, of men and women who participated. The physical evidence. The broken bodies and the lives lost.
We know, as much as we can know, that Donald Trump led a conspiracy to overturn the results of an election he lost. We know this involved an attempt to derail the certification of electoral votes. We know that he gathered a crowd of thousands of people to protest against that process. We know that he told that crowd, soon a mob, to “fight like hell” to try to achieve the victory they could not obtain at the polls.
But despite this unequivocal evidence of insurrection, there is a concerted effort – whether out of skepticism or denial – to present the events of January 6, including the plans that led to the attack on the Capitol, as something else. The legitimate protest of an exuberantly disappointed group of ordinary American voters, perhaps, or—in Trump’s most devoted apologists – a last-ditch effort to save the Republic itself from the illegitimate control of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
It is tempting to say that the facts contained in the committee’s January 6 report stand on their own, that the body of evidence is simply too large to support a stance of skepticism and denial. But facts come to us through our beliefs, experiences and interests. Most people do not and will not believe facts that go against those beliefs, experiences and interests.
In the case of the Ku Klux Klan testimony, it was in the political, social, or ideological interest of many Americans (from supporters of the Democratic Party to prominent members of the national press) to downplay the testimony. The same applies today to the facts compiled by the January 6 committee.
Those facts will not speak for themselves. The fight over the meaning of January 6, like the fight over the meaning of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, will be resolved only through politics. And just as the collapse of Reconstruction and the political victory of the so-called Redeemers presaged the ideological victory of the Klan’s defenders, sympathizers, and apologists, it is Trump’s ultimate fate that will shape and determine our lasting memory of what which occurred on January 6.
In other words, the world in which the attack on the United States Capitol by the vengeful followers of a defeated president is just ordinary politics going a little haywire is a world in which Trump and his rioters ultimately won.
