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reveal white fear of black political power
than the character of the league.
The Union League’s growth and success
in mobilizing black voting is what most
directly led to the emergence of the Ku Klux
Klan across the South, and in Athens. The
Times and Messenger in Selma, AL urged
white citizens to “organize a Ku-Klux Klan
whenever they organize a league.” The
Mobile Register suggested forming “Ku
Klux clubs” and that “the first object of
these clubs should be a persevering and
systematic movement to break up the
‘Loyal Leagues.’” In Athens, the sudden rise
of the Union League was matched by the
emergence of the Klan. A later account by
a Klan-sympathetic historian declared that
in Athens “the Ku Klux kept [the Union
League] in wholesome restraint.”
By December 1867, both white and black
communities in Athens were more orga
nized and prepared for violent conflict. That
month, a group of college boys assaulted a
black man in the post office, accusing him
of “insolence,” an act that found retal
iation that night, when two white
men were hit with brickbats. On the
night of Dec. 10, a group of around
100 black men organized and, armed
with pistols, knives and clubs, took to
the streets. Only the intervention of
federal troops garrisoned in Athens
prevented what might have been a
small war downtown. Troops took
command of the city streets that
night and the next, and widespread
bloodshed was avoided. But white
violence would continue. Reports of
murders and beatings grew in num
ber, and with the start of the new
year, the momentous election of April
1868 approaching, the incipient Klan
began to challenge black voting with
white terror. “From January on,”
writes Robert Gamble, “there was
vigorous activity among the whites
to organize a militant conservative
group” to oppose black political
participation.
In Elberton, “pistols were drawn
on negroes” during the four days
of the election, according to Amos
Akerman, a white lawyer in northeast
Georgia at the time. Akerman, who
would later become U.S. attorney gen
eral, described the Elberton “election”
in a dispatch: “During the election
there was a reign of lawlessness,”
and “the negroes were utterly cowed” by
white forces. He explained that hundreds of
black voters abstained from voting in fear.
In Athens, however, the threat of white
violence was not enough to keep black vot
ers from sending Richardson to represent
Clarke County in Atlanta, alongside another
freed slave. But the victory shook whites to
the core, and the Klan exploded in Athens
and across the state as 33 black represen
tatives and senators traveled to join Gov.
Bullock’s “Radical” outrage in the capital.
By early June, the Southern Watchman
reported optimistically that, in response,
“the Ku Klux Klan is on a rampage” across
Northeast Georgia.
Terror Spreads
The shocked fury of white conservatives
continued to grow, and by September 1868,
a little more than a month after they’d been
seated in the Georgia General Assembly,
all but four of the black legislators were
expelled from the body. The Ku Klux Klan’s
reign of terror began to permeate the entire
state. Reports of violence, intimidation and
murder began to come out of virtually all
surrounding and nearby counties. A black
school teacher in Lexington was terrorized,
his school burned to the ground. Another
Lexington man begged the governor for
full “Military Rule with Garrisons at every
county seat in this part of the state.” In
Greene County, a black legislator would be
viciously beaten by 65 Klansmen. White
Republicans, few as they were in this part
of the state, were not safe. The Klan in
Walton County attacked a white woman
because of her father’s Union loyalty. In
Jefferson County, the Klan terrorized
white Republican legislator Benjamin Ayer,
who was exiled in Atlanta after the attack,
unable to come home. He and nine other
white Republican lawmakers in the same
danger wrote a letter to Congress in early
January 1869 begging for protection. Ayer
would be murdered in Jefferson County in
May. A white Republican senator, Warren
County’s Joseph Adkins, would be brutally
murdered that month, too.
Klan violence continued to terrorize
black Georgians throughout 1869. Most
attacks went unreported, and Richardson
estimated that whippings, at least, occurred
weekly in the region. Increasingly desperate
pleas to the governor and to Republicans
in Washington continued, and Governor
Bullock and some of the expelled black leg
islators travelled to Washington to make
their case in person. Even Bullock worried
that he’d be “‘Ku-Kluxed’ by a mob.”
The appeals in Washington by Bullock
and black legislators resulted in a December
1869 sweeping ruling by congress that
Georgia be remanded to even harsher mil
itary control, with Major-General Alfred
Terry installed to effectively preside over
the Georgia government (at Governor
Bullock’s request) and forming a three-
man panel of military officers to decide
who should be seated in the legislature
in Atlanta. The military overseers judged
that Richardson and all black legislators
be restored to the seats they’d won nearly
two years before and, furthermore, that
two dozen white conservative members be
removed due to their prior loyalty to the
rebel Confederacy. With Richardson and his
black colleagues restored and the deposed
Democrats replaced by their Republican
runners-up, Governor Bullock now had
full Republican control. This is when the
radical black wing of the party sought their
juggernaut government, attempting, at the
time, almost revolutionary innovations like
women’s suffrage and a state police force to
give muscle to Republican control and be
an armed phalanx against white terrorism.
It was an unthinkable outrage to the white
conservatives, and the terrorist wing of the
Democratic Party roared.
By the elections in the fall of 1870, Klan
attacks—or “outrages,” as they came to be
called—continued to spread terror, with
the white conservative power structure
tacitly, when not explicitly, lending aid. All
the way up to the Atlanta Constitution, the
conservative press began its role of aider
and abettor of the growing terrorist threat
in earnest. The Atlanta Constitution exem
plified the tactic in 1870, implying that the
increasing attacks were fabricated in its sar
donic “Wanted—Ku Klux Outrages”: “They
must be as ferocious and bloodthirsty as
possible. No regard need be paid to truth.”
There began in the Georgia press, and in
Athens specifically, a sort of dance the con
servative press performed, whereby Klan
violence was at times celebrated and given
its necessary widespread announcement
(terrorism only works within a media that
communicates the terror) but also strategi
cally doubted. John Christy, the overtly rac
ist publisher of Athens’ Southern Watchman,
would soon travel to Washington to testify
before a committee investigating the Klan,
“There never has been any organization in
the State of Georgia known as the Ku-Klux,
or any other sort of secret organization,
except the Loyal League.”
Richardson counted about two attacks
per week in Clarke County during this
STATE
STATE OF GEORGIA,
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who states that lie resides in the / 2" Election Precinct of
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in lire presence of Almighty God, lh»t I »m a cilisen of tbe Stive or Grose,I,
non precoiling Ibis .lop, and nore reside in the County of .re re—yt v/ /
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ntn -1 years old . that I hare not been disfranchised for participation in any rebellion or civil war ae/nst tbe Unite,! r r ,
ranted against the laws of any State or the United States : that I have never been a memher X . r • . S ’ Ror for felony con
judicial office in any Siam, and nflemards engnged in in.nrrcclion or rebellion again,I lire Unil"cdX„,c,° hC 'r '" rU,i ".‘
thereof; that I bare never taken an oalb ae a member of Congress or ibe United'sintc, or a, an/Ler If the n ■, ° r C ° rl lhc
.Ulion and obey ,he .are. of,be Uni,m, Stale,, and "i, Ae ^ °~
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that he has not been previously registered under the provisions of -‘^aet supplementary to ‘an act to provide fc
the more efficient government of the rebel Sta.es’-passed March 2,1807-and to facilitate restoration” under tl.
or any other name, in this or any other Election District; and further, that lie was born in
and naturalized by
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SWORN TO AND SUBSCRIBED hefo
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Register of the Registration District.
Richardson’s signature on a voter registry.
time, mostly brutal whippings. Others
were murders or attempts, like the one
on Richardson’s life in December. The
terrorism was in pursuit of two goals: to
frighten black voters from participation
and to coerce labor to return to something
like slavery. Richardson defied whites on
both counts, rising as a black politician
and achieving enough wealth to keep his
wife and children off of white plantations.
Former white slavers found their plan
tations failing when freed black parents
managed to exempt their children, and
sometimes wives, from field work. Under
the slavery regime, entire familes were
made to work, young children beside men
and women. Farm productivity was pred
icated on this violent coercion of women
and children, and all evidence points to
Richardson’s wife and three children all
escaping the workforce of wealthy whites.
Richardson was surprised when James
Thrasher, a wealthy white man, visited
him a few weeks after the Ku Klux attack
attack. Thrasher had been asked by
local Klansmen to join their ranks,
but he’d refused. And now he was
risking some danger by warning
Alf of their plans. “Keep your eyes
open,” the white man warned. “They
are after you.” The sun went down as
Thrasher told Alf everything he knew.
“They say you can control the colored
votes,” he continued. “They say you
are making too much money. They do
not allow any nigger to rise that way.”
There was no more dangerous man in
Clarke County than Alf Richardson.
Across Georgia and all of the former
Confederacy there were few men
who so challenged the rule of white
supremacy. Thrasher delivered the
news: “They intend to kill you.”
The KKK Attacks
At midnight that night, the thun
der of men battering the door shook
the house. Fearing the worst, Alf
had barred the door with boards,
and eight or 10 men were acting as
a human battering ram. Another fif
teen or so men waited behind them.
When the men couldn’t break down
the reinforced door a man emerged
with an axe and began slashing into
it. Alf watched from the inside as
his carefully barricaded door was
methodically torn through by the axe,
the Klan torches’ firelight from the front
porch visible more and more through the
widening gash. They were going to make
it in. He ran up the stairs and decided to
fire at them from the top of the steps. But
they were soon inside spraying gunfire, too
many of them rushing up the stairs, and Alf
abandoned his position again further into
the house. He thought he might make it to
the cramped garret at the top of the house
where he had some more guns stashed. The
house filled with Klansmen.
Meanwhile, Alf’s wife reached a window
upstairs, opened it and screamed desper
ately for help into the cold mid-January
night. Gunmen below sprayed the win
dow with bullets, sinking about fifteen
into the wood, but somehow missing
Mrs. Richardson. Others, seeing the open
window, called out that Alf had come out
through the window, either up onto the
roof or down to escape. They emptied the
house and returned outside to find him.
V continued on p. 15
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