[The KKK should be understood not just as a white supremacist
organization, but as an employers’ organization: it violently
resisted the revolutionary gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction,
and sought to keep the black masses toiling in submission]
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THE KU KLUX KLAN WAS ALSO A BOSSES’ ASSOCIATION  
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Chad Pearson
July 27, 2021
Jacobin
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_ The KKK should be understood not just as a white supremacist
organization, but as an employers’ organization: it violently
resisted the revolutionary gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction,
and sought to keep the black masses toiling in submission _

"Ku Klux Klan" by Arete13, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

 

The Civil War revolutionized Southern labor relations. Enslaved people
fled plantations, took up arms against their brutal exploiters, and
forged new political horizons. The future appeared promising.

For plantation owners, however, this transformation was a nightmare
— the laborers they held in bondage had waged a “general strike
[[link removed]],”
as W. E. B. Du Bois later called it, leaving them financially
vulnerable and intensely rattled. This racist, revanchist group
didn’t simply mourn their defeats — they organized.

Through the Reconstruction years, the mostly planation-based Southern
ruling class fiercely resisted the efflorescence of black freedom.
Restrictive Black Codes, the pro-planter polices of President Andrew
Johnson, racist riots in Memphis and New Orleans, and, above all, the
widespread terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan brutally demonstrated the
limits of emancipation. Led by former slave owners, the Klan meted out
various forms of violence to prevent African Americans from voting or
attending schools, intimidate northern “carpetbaggers,” and
ensure, according to an undated Klan document, that freed people
“continue at their appropriate labor
[[link removed]].”

Klan chapters, spread out unevenly throughout many parts of the South,
promised to address the planters’ most pressing labor problems.
After learning about the organization, Nathan Bedford Forrest — the
former slave trader, lead butcher at the 1864 battle at Fort Pillow,
and the organization’s first Grand Wizard — expressed approval
[[link removed]] of
its secrecy, activities, and goals: “That’s a good thing; that’s
a damned good thing. We can use that to keep the niggers in their
place.”

Keeping “them in their place” was no easy task — African
Americans eagerly left farms and plantations, causing widespread labor
shortages. Alfred Richardson, an African American from Georgia,
observed that planters remained deeply frustrated because they were
unable “to make their crop
[[link removed]].”
But the KKK proved to be one of Southern employers’ best tools for
violently imposing their will.

The Planters’ Labor Problems

For decades, historians have debated how best to characterize the KKK,
a white supremacist terrorist organization launched by Confederate
veterans that first emerged in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866 before
spreading across the South. Hundreds of thousands joined, though
obtaining a detailed count of actual members is practically impossible
because of the organization’s hyper-secrecy.

Yet much is not in dispute: Klansmen were closely tied to the
Democratic Party and used violence — whippings, hangings, drownings,
sexual violence, drive-out campaigns — against “insubordinate”
African Americans and Republicans of all races. Klansmen also used
“softer” forms of repression, including school and book burnings
and blacklisting of northern teachers. Sometimes they mobilized to
prevent African Americans from becoming educated. According to Z. B.
Hargrove of Georgia, Klansmen occasionally whipped freed people “for
being almost too smart
[[link removed]].”

Nathan Bedford Forrest. (Wikimedia Commons)

Racism united white members of the Klan regardless of class
differences, but not all played an equal role in the organization. The
Klan leadership consisted mostly of downwardly mobile plantation
owners, lawyers, newspaper editors, and storeowners — those most
harmed by the radical transformation of the South’s economy and
labor relations.

These men were infuriated at their declining economic position and the
ascension of black men to positions of political power. Newly
empowered black men, North Carolina–based Klan leader Randolph
Abbott Shotwell complained
[[link removed]],
had helped the federal government strike down “the rights of the
master” and disfranchise “a large proportion of the ablest and
best men in the naturally dominated race.”

Resentful elites like Shotwell and Forrest were determined to
reestablish their power. Abundant evidence suggests that the
Reconstruction-era Klan functioned like an employers’ association
with goals that, in some ways, resembled the aims of other anti-labor
business organizations.

Klan leaders demanded that the black masses perform one function:
engage in tiring, brutally intense forms of labor that resembled
pre–Civil War plantation life. Klansmen sought to prevent African
American from departing worksites, taking part in political meetings,
pursuing education, accessing firearms, or joining organizations meant
to challenge their exploiters. As one observer from Georgia told
[[link removed]] a
congressional investigation committee in 1871, “I think their
purpose is to control the State government and control the negro
labor, the same as they did under slavery.”

The Klan leadership consisted mostly of downwardly mobile plantation
owners, lawyers, newspaper editors, and storeowners — those most
harmed by the radical transformation of the South’s economy and
labor relations.

While Klansmen insisted that the black masses spend their waking hours
planting and picking crops, many refused to believe these same
laborers deserved the financial benefits of their efforts. According
to a 1871 report from Tennessee
[[link removed]],
frequently “the employer frames some excuse and falls out with the
laborer, and he is forced to leave his crop and abandon his wages by
the terror of the Ku Klux, who, in all cases, sympathize with the
white employers.” Such cases resembled slavery more than the free
labor system promised by emancipation.

The Klan as Employers’ Association

Few scholars have labeled the Klan an employers’ association, and
most management historians have ignored the Reconstruction South.
Clarence Bonnett’s important 1922 book, _Employers’ Associations
in the United States: A Study of Typical Associations_
[[link removed]],
is mute about the Klan, focusing exclusively on business-led
organizations that formed in the late-nineteenth-century North to
counter the increasingly restive labor movement.

Yet Bonnett’s definition is flexible, allowing us to apply it to the
actions of Reconstruction vigilante organizations: “_An employers’
association is a group which is composed of or fostered by employers
and which seeks to promote the employers’ interest in labor
matters._ The group, accordingly, is either (1) a formal or informal
organization of employers, or (2) a collection of individuals whose
grouping is fostered by employers.”

African Americans who had been enslaved participating in an election
in New Orleans, 1867. (Wikimedia Commons)

Of course, Reconstruction-era Klansmen and Progressive Era
employers’ associations framed their respective labor issues quite
differently. While members of northern employers’ and “citizens’
alliances” touted the freedom that industrial workers supposedly
enjoyed (namely, to not join unions), Klansmen had zero interest in
trying to win legitimacy from the African American masses.

This is not to say that Northern-based employers’ associations
accepted outbursts of labor unrest. They, too, used coercive
techniques, including private guards and kidnappings, beatings, and
hangings, and they benefited from the swift interventions of the
police and National Guardsmen. But rhetorically, Progressive Era
employers’ associations often employed the Lincolnesque language of
“free labor,” signaling to the masses of “free” workers that
they were best served by laboring diligently and cooperating with
their bosses. Those who opted for more confrontational paths often
found themselves fired and blacklisted — coercive, yes, but very
different from what former slaves experienced.

Klansmen spoke the unvarnished language of racial and class dominance
— and they followed through with extreme brutality. If we measure
the number of killings and beatings, the Klan was far more violent
than most Northern-based employers’ associations. Historian Stephen
Budiansky has calculated
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white vigilantes murdered over three thousand people during the
Reconstruction period.

Klansmen were nevertheless strategic, employing threats, kidnappings,
and whippings to achieve the primary goals of the Southern ruling
classes. This meant keeping freed people from polling booths, breaking
up political gatherings, and murdering the most irredeemably
rebellious men and women. “White raiders,” historian Douglas
Egerton has pointed out
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“did not simply assault blacks for being black.” Instead, they
used intimidation and violence against what they considered shiftless,
unreliable, disrespectful, and defiant men and women.

Gruesome actions like whippings and hangings served management’s
needs, helping to discipline countless numbers of laborers.
Mississippi cotton grower Robert Philip Howell, for
example, expressed appreciation
[[link removed]] for the Klan because its
members helped solve his problems with “free negros” in 1868:
“had it not been for their deadly fear of the Ku-Klux, I do not
think we could have managed them as well as we did.”

Nor does the fact that poor and working-class whites participated in
Klan chapters mean that we shouldn’t regard the KKK as a bosses’
organization — achieving labor control has almost always involved
coordinating cross-class groups of participants. After all, the mostly
Northern-based employers’ associations could not have succeeded in
breaking strikes and busting unions without the mobilizations of scabs
during industrial conflicts.

The Klan was a _particularly vicious, particularly
racist_ employers’ association — but it was an employers’
association all the same.

The Klan, then, was a _particularly vicious, particularly
racist_ employers’ association — but it was an employers’
association all the same. And it was brutally effective.

Fear blanketed the mostly agricultural black laboring class. Although
black people throughout the South were no longer “property,” the
threat of Klan-organized violence loomed large. Too many missteps,
including subtle and overt forms of insubordination, might lead to
unwelcome encounters with hooded men followed by threats, beatings,
and even death. Klansmen were management’s vicious enforcers,
ensuring that the masses kept their heads down and labored
efficiently.

Some freed people still joined resistance organizations like
the Union Leagues [[link removed]].
These Republican-allied organizations were active in states like
Alabama, where members held meetings, mobilized voters, and often
armed themselves — activities far outside of their “appropriate”
workplace-based duties.

But in response, Klansmen plotted with one another before raiding the
homes of league members, whipping residents, snatching their guns, and
demanding that they stay away from polling booths. They spared lives
only when their targets promised to abandon the leagues. In Alabama
alone, Klansmen murdered
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league members between 1868 and 1871.

“Counter-Revolution of Property”

Ensuring that African Americans remained tied (sometimes literally) to
farms, plantations, and other worksites while receiving little
compensation was one of the central goals of Southern elites — the
same people who benefited from slavery before the Civil War. While
whites of all classes joined Klan branches — and eagerly
participated in attacks against Northern teachers, Freedom Bureau
administrators, and Union League members — elites called most of the
shots.

This was a “Counter-Revolution of Property,” as W. E. B. Du
Bois famously put
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Reconstruction-era reformers failed to provide genuine freedom to
former slaves, he wrote, partially “because the military
dictatorship behind labor did not function successfully in the face of
the Ku Klux Klan.” Like Northern-based employers’ associations,
the KKK fought for the interests of the most powerful members of
society — meting out violence and terror on behalf of
agricultural-based employers.

We should appreciate the enormous emancipatory breakthroughs of the
Civil War without losing sight of the ways that the Southern ruling
class fought to cling to power. They did so in part by holding
leadership roles in the Klan and by actively supporting the numerous
racist vigilante organizations that demanded labor subordination.

By highlighting their fundamental class interests, we can better
understand the reasons for their strategic acts of terror. These men
lost perhaps the most meaningful conflict for democracy in US history
— but they did not cease fighting the forces of liberation.

_Chad Pearson is a professor of history at Collin College. He is
finishing a book entitled Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and
Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century, forthcoming from the
University of North Carolina Press._

_THE NEW ISSUE OF JACOBIN, “THE WORKING CLASS,” IS OUT IN PRINT
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