Rosa McCauley was six years old during the Red Summer. She recalled nights staying up late with her grandfather as he sat by the door with a shotgun, protecting the family during Klan raids in rural Alabama. But McCauley was not afraid. When asked by a biographer why she couldn’t sleep, she said she was waiting for her grandfather, a devout member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, to fulfill one of her childhood dreams. “I wanted to see him kill a Ku-Kluxer,” she explained. “He declared that the first to invade our home would surely die.”24
