During the Reconstruction era, the South was divided into military districts, which provided blacks some protection from mob violence, so that the Klan had to do its violent work against blacks and their white northern sympathizers in secret, at night, wearing hoods to hide its members’ identity. When KKK members were tried in courts, they could usually count on their neighbors and friends to find them “not guilty,” since all-white male juries almost never found white men guilty of lynching a black man.
