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The Ku Klux Klan During Reconstruction

Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: Doubleday, 1965. Other editions/reprints: 1968, 1976, 1981, and 1987, by various publishers.

This is a comprehensive work that covers the Klan in all fifty states from Reconstruction to the recent past. Extremely useful—almost encyclopedic in its coverage.

Fleming, Walter Lynwood. Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1905. Reprinted 1949 and 1978 by various publishers.

Accepted in its day as the latest and most reliable scholarship, Fleming's account of the Reconstruction period, including the Klan in Alabama, is right out of the now-debunked "Dunning School" of historiography. Dunning and his graduate students depicted the Reconstruction era as tragic, the Klan as heroic, carpetbaggers and scalawags as evil incarnate, and blacks as ignorant, inferior, debased, and wholly subservient to manipulation and corruption.

Forster, Arnold and Benjamin R. Epstein. Report on the Ku Klux Klan. Ann Arbor: Univer sity Microfilms International, 1979.

Useful report on the Klan during Reconstruction, the 1920s, and the 1950s and 1960s.

Hoole, William Stanley, ed. Reconstruction in West Alabama: The Memoirs of John L. Hunnicut. Tuscaloosa: Confederate Publishing Co., 1959.

Hunnicut, a Klansman in west Alabama, was so proud of his activities that he wrote them down for posterity. Details acts of violence, ballot-box fraud, and connivance with area elites.

Howard, Gene L. Death at Cross Plains: An Alabama Reconstruction Tragedy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984.

Chilling account of the lynching of white Canadian Methodist missionary and school teacher William Luke, and several of his black students, by Alabama Klansmen.

Rogers, William Warren. "The Boyd Incident: Black Belt Violence During Reconstruction." Civil War History 21 (December 1975): 309-29.

Detailed account of Eutaw lynching of Republican and Greene County solicitor Alexander Boyd. Rogers clearly explains Klan relationship to lynching and Reconstruction politics.

Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995.

Comprehensive and excellent study of the reign of terror wreaked by the Reconstruction Klan. The KKK revealed as a para-military wing of the Democratic party in the South.