The Report of the Congressional January 6 Committee demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that a group gathered and incited by Donald J. Trump sought to block the transfer of power after an election which Trump lost. It reminds us that the perpetrators of the slave-holders insurrection known as the Civil War succeeded in regaining power. Power which their descendants hold today.
Opinion | Letting Trump Off the Hook Will Change the Shape of History - The New York TimesBy Jamelle Bouie
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 states of the former Confederacy. The next year, the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States released its report, a 13-volume collection of testimony from 600 witnesses, totaling more than 8,000 pages.
The men and women who spoke to the committee attested to pervasive violence and intimidation. There were innumerable reports of whippings and beatings and killings. “Tom Roundtree, alias Black, a Negro, murdered by a Ku Klux mob of some 50 or 60 persons, who came to his house at night on the third of December last, took him out, shot him and cut his throat,” reads a typical entry in the volume devoted to Klan activity in South Carolina. “James Williams,” reads another entry in the same volume, “taken from his home at night and hung by Ku Klux numbering about 40 or 50.”
There were also, as the historian Kidada E. Williams shows in “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction,” accounts of terrible sexual violence. Williams describes one attack in which a group of vigilantes whipped their victim, Frances Gilmore of Chatham County, N.C., “set fire to her pubic hair and cut her genitals.”
Because of these reports and others collected by lawyers, journalists and other investigators, 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,” the historian Elaine Frantz Parsons observes in “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction.” Between government reports, testimony from witnesses, the confessions of Klansmen and the physical evidence of violence and destruction, it would seem impossible to deny the awful scope of Klan terror, much less the existence of the Klan itself.
Yet 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 the historian Stephen A. West pointed out in The Washington Post in a 2022 article on the committee’s report, “for much of the last 150 years, Reconstruction’s critics trivialized Black witnesses’ testimony in the Klan report and used it instead to discredit the period’s democratic possibilities.”
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 states of the former Confederacy. The next year, the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States released its report, a 13-volume collection of testimony from 600 witnesses, totaling more than 8,000 pages.
The men and women who spoke to the committee attested to pervasive violence and intimidation. There were innumerable reports of whippings and beatings and killings. “Tom Roundtree, alias Black, a Negro, murdered by a Ku Klux mob of some 50 or 60 persons, who came to his house at night on the third of December last, took him out, shot him and cut his throat,” reads a typical entry in the volume devoted to Klan activity in South Carolina. “James Williams,” reads another entry in the same volume, “taken from his home at night and hung by Ku Klux numbering about 40 or 50.”
There were also, as the historian Kidada E. Williams shows in “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction,” accounts of terrible sexual violence. Williams describes one attack in which a group of vigilantes whipped their victim, Frances Gilmore of Chatham County, N.C., “set fire to her pubic hair and cut her genitals.”
Because of these reports and others collected by lawyers, journalists and other investigators, 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,” the historian Elaine Frantz Parsons observes in “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction.” Between government reports, testimony from witnesses, the confessions of Klansmen and the physical evidence of violence and destruction, it would seem impossible to deny the awful scope of Klan terror, much less the existence of the Klan itself.
Yet 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 the historian Stephen A. West pointed out in The Washington Post in a 2022 article on the committee’s report, “for much of the last 150 years, Reconstruction’s critics trivialized Black witnesses’ testimony in the Klan report and used it instead to discredit the period’s democratic possibilities.”
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