Sometimes a comment sparks a discussion for reasons the commenter might not understand.
When we look at political violence during Reconstruction, we tend to equate it with the KKK. That’s a mistake. There was violence directed against blacks and their white supporters in the months after the war, before the KKK was established. The two major anti-black riots of 1866 in Memphis and New Orleans were not KKK actions. And, after the KKK as an organization fell apart in the early 1870s, new white supremacist organizations came on the scene, with the objective of taking back control of the southern states, as the folks in Mississippi put it, “peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”
Crossroads 