An Annual Conference on 19th Century Media and Free Expression
ABSTRACT
In the post-Civil War South, freedmen who could read cringed when newspapers described them as inferior and editorialized about whites’ God-given duty to hold blacks down, even by the most violent means. Bitter whites commonly wrote about the need to kill blacks to keep them in their place. At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups began functioning as military arms of the Democratic Party. This paper looks at the role Democratic editors played in inflaming this terrorism.
Racist whites feared "herrenvolk democracy" — black suffrage, equality, farm ownership, insolence, armed blacks, and mostly the perceived threat black men posed to white women. The Klan and their editor allies also attacked "scalawags" — white Southern Republicans — and "carpetbaggers" — white Northerners come south to befriend freedmen. Many supported Klan terrorism and even the murder of blacks. Assaults were commonplace. Newspaper-sanctioned riots in Memphis and New Orleans ended with scores of blacks murdered. Editorials also supported economic sanctions against voting blacks and their white allies. A few newspapers adopted new names, aligning themselves officially with the KKK, and some used their pages to issue violent threats.
Early historians supported the Klan, blaming Reconstruction violence on the Union Leagues, organizations seeking black suffrage. In the 1930s scholars began taking a more realistic look at violence.
Officially the war had ended, but in fact it continued. Newspaper responsibility for the crimes is clear. Had Democratic editors acted more responsibly, hundreds of lynchings might not have occurred, the South would not have remained an economic, political, and social backwater for another century, and black progress would have come much sooner. Rarely in American history has the power of the pen been greater; never did it have more tragic consequences.
Dr. Kittrell Rushing or Dr. David Sachsman 311 Frist Hall Communication Department The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403-2598 http://www.utc.edu/commdept/conference/
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