[This book draws from the once well-known Ku Klux Klan hearings
before Congress in the early 1870s, during which witnesses recounted
their experiences with post-Civil War white supremacist terrorism in
the Southern states.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

I SAW DEATH COMING: A HISTORY OF TERROR AND SURVIVAL IN THE WAR
AGAINST RECONSTRUCTION  
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Paula Tarnapol Whitacre
February 15, 2023
Washington Independent Review of Books
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_ This book draws from the once well-known Ku Klux Klan hearings
before Congress in the early 1870s, during which witnesses recounted
their experiences with post-Civil War white supremacist terrorism in
the Southern states. _

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I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War
against Reconstruction
Kidada E. Williams
Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9781635576634

Edward Crosby insisted on his right to vote in St. Landry’s Parish,
Louisiana. Samuel and Hannah Tutson farmed their own land in central
Florida. Warren Jones refused to be cheated by the man who owned the
land on which he sharecropped in Georgia. For these transgressions,
the Crosby, Tutson, and Jones families, like thousands of other Black
people, were terrorized by “night riders” in the years following
the Civil War.

The harrowing title of Kidada E. Williams’ new book, _I Saw Death
Coming_ [[link removed]], is a quote from
Abraham Brumfield of South Carolina, who was targeted, along with his
wife, Emeline, because he engaged in “big talk” about his civil
and political rights. (Each chapter title, except for the wrap-up,
directly quotes a survivor.) Williams, an associate professor of
history at Wayne State University, places us inside people’s homes,
alongside them in bed in some cases, as they hear men riding up on
horseback and must calculate in a split second whether to fight, flee,
or hide.

One estimate from the 1890s was that 53,000 people were killed by
night riders. But really, there is no tally of the number of deaths,
nor of the many thousands more who were physically harmed and
psychologically traumatized; of the property burnt, stolen, or
destroyed; or of the spillover fear and insecurity suffused throughout
communities. While each attack was unique, they shared some horrific
characteristics. Groups of white men, from a few to many dozen,
charged up in darkness with the specific intent to threaten and
intimidate Black people in their homes, to violate their sanctuaries.
They wore the robes of “the Ku-Klux” or other masks to hide their
identities and look more menacing.

Night riders almost always targeted the man of the house, pursuing him
in the presence of his family to inflict even more trauma. In fact, as
Williams describes it, “lying out” became one defense tactic:
Black men would sleep away from their homes — whether outside in the
woods or further away, often for weeks at a time and in all types of
weather — so they wouldn’t be there when the mob arrived.

Williams’ accounts principally come from testimonies given at
Congressional hearings held in six Southern states in 1871 and 1872.
Only a small percentage of victims had the fortitude, not to mention
the logistic capability, to travel to a hearing and relive their
experiences by responding to a set of often obtrusive questions, all
the while knowing their attackers could come after them again. They
received no compensation or legal remediation, but they nonetheless
spoke up. Their stories, the author notes, were published and
available yet largely forgotten over time.

Commenting on another of her trove of sources — oral accounts from
terrorized Black families collected by the Works Progress
Administration in the 1930s — Williams observes that, 50 years after
the fact, “the abundance of discussion of Reconstruction-era
atrocities…attests to how central they were to Black family
histories.”

Stepping away from ground zero, Williams draws on neuroscience to
untangle the effects of the violence. Quoting neuropsychiatrist Bessel
van der Kolk (“the body keeps the score”), she explains what might
have happened physiologically as victims responded to assault in real
time and then processed the experience afterward. We now understand
what trauma does to the body, brain, and soul; without knowing the
science, these people lived it.

Who helped them? Almost no one. As Williams details, white people did
virtually nothing to prevent or punish the late-19th-century violence.
Some who were in positions to help — sheriffs, judges, etc. — were
actually complicit, while others chose not to stick their necks out
for Black people. The Freedmen’s Bureau and U.S. Army troops who
tried to intervene were too few and too scattered to have much effect.
Most Northern whites wanted to move on from the Civil War and turned
away from the violence and, more broadly, from what Reconstruction was
trying to achieve. Back in victims’ communities, Black neighbors
sometimes offered assistance after an assault (and even banded
together to resist) but were themselves extremely vulnerable.

To fulfill the promise of the book’s subtitle (_A History of Terror
and Survival in the War against Reconstruction_), Williams writes
about how people overcame the horror of the night riders. “That so
many lived to tell their stories is a testament to how shrewd their
many calculations for surviving raids were,” she points out. This
was indeed war, she maintains — in this case, a war against Black
equality during Reconstruction. It was “not the impulsive antics of
defeated soldiers. It was the pursuit of the Confederate cause by
other means.”

While she does not include the accounts of all those who participated
in the Klan hearings, Williams lists in an appendix all the
testifiers’ names, family members (or at least numbers of children),
and home counties, as well as where readers can go to locate their
complete transcripts.

Reading these survivors’ words, even from a distance of time and
place, is excruciating. Untold numbers of men, women, and children
suffered sadistic abuse during the time America was allegedly healing
from the Civil War. Yet “this history faded from national memory,”
Williams writes. By focusing on the people — Edward Crosby, the
Tutsons, and others — she ensures that their heroism is no longer
forgotten and our country’s history is accurately portrayed.

_Paula Tarnapol Whitacre writes about history, with a focus on
19th-century social history. She is currently working on a book about
the Civil War and Reconstruction focused on Alexandria, Virginia._

* Reconstruction
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* Ku Klux Klan
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* white supremacy
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* Terrorism
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* Racism
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* resistance
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