Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

Following his amateur career as a serial killer and his term as governor, Tillman represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate until he died in 1918.3 Tillman was just one of many ethnic cleansers elected after Reconstruction. Georgia governor turned U.S. senator John Brown Gordon, one of the engineers of the Compromise of 1877,* was also commonly recognized as the head of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan.4 Alabama’s Klan leader, John Tyler Morgan, served in the Senate for three decades, from 1877 until 1907. Morgan fought to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment and introduced bills to “legalize the practice of racist vigilante murder [lynching] as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South.”5 Morgan served in the Senate alongside another Alabama Klan leader, Edmund Pettus, who represented the state for a decade until his death in 1907. Tennessee congressman George W. Gordon doubled as his state’s Grand Dragon (and had written the precept for the Ku Klux Klan). Mississippi’s “Great White Chief,” Governor James K. Vardaman, was unapologetic about his pro-lynching stance: There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the “ignorant and vicious,” as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the nigger . . . Let the world know it just as it is . . . In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the ...