This Day in History: April 20, 1871

The Civil Rights Act of 1871 destroyed the first incarnation of the KKK.

Every American over the age of ten know the abbreviation KKK stands for Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group founded in Tennessee by a former Confederates in 1865. Starting off as secret fraternal organization, the KKK morphed into a paramilitary organization that murdered and intimidated African-Americans and their white Republican allies throughout the American South. By the beginning of the 1870’s, their actions had successfully suppressed black and white Republican voters throughout the South; in Louisiana and Georgia, predominantly Republican districts voted overwhelmingly for Horatio Seymour, Ulysses Grant’s Democratic opponent in the 1868 election.

The Klan’s actions provoked backlash — even from Southern Democrats who, seeking the end of Reconstruction, felt that Klan violence would be used to justify the continuing oversight of the South by the federal government. In 1870, a federal grand jury officially designated the Klan as a terrorist organization. In February of the next year, Benjamin Butler, a Union army veteran and a congressman from Massachusetts introduced The Ku Klux Klan Act which gave the president unilateral authority to suspend habeas corpus and send federal troops to areas blighted by Klan violence. Subsequent enforcement of the legislation led to the arrest and convictions of hundreds of Klansmen. By the mid-1870’s, the first incarnation of the Klan had faded away.