KKK Threat - American History, 1493-1945

Demand from the Ku Klux Klan for Davie Jeems to resign

Circa 1868

View the notice to Davie Jeems in the resource

Davie Jeems was an African American working for the Sheriff’s Office in Lincoln County, Georgia, in the late 1860s, when he received a note from the Ku Klux Klan. It told him to know his place and quit his post. He was to join the Democrats and vote as they instructed. If he refused, the writer claimed to have a box ready for him, in which his body would be nailed.

Similar threats had prevented other Republican officials from taking their commissions before Jeems. The wording typifies the style of the Klan. The writer claims to be a dead Confederate soldier, a common assertion made by members. The threat of violence, to be carried out after dark, fits with the usual tactics employed by Klansmen.

The first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was founded on 24 December 1865 by six former Confederate soldiers in Tennessee. It was one of a number of oath-bound organizations in the Reconstruction era. The large number of veterans struggling to cope with a social structure that had been radically altered led to violence across the south, with some states seeing Confederate soldiers roaming freely and attacking people and property at will. The Klan fitted into this situation by providing a way for people unwilling to adapt to the restructured social order to reassert White supremacy.

Former Confederate Brigadier General George Gordon came up with a prescript for the Klan that emphasised White supremacy. General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the Grand Wizard, claiming to be the Klan’s national leader. Even so, there was little practical organization beyond the local level.

The KKK was opposed to Republican governments in the south and the loyalist Union Leagues. It turned on so-called ‘carpet-baggers’, northerners working in the south who were supposedly profiting financially from the torrid post-war conditions. African Americans who voted Republican, or who had social, political, economic or agricultural success, were also particular targets. Whether seen as a military force serving Democratic ends by undermining Republican policies, or as a series of independent vigilante groups using violence to reassert white advantage, the Klan focused on using terror as a means of controlling a heavily disrupted society.

The Force Acts of 1870-1871 were used by the federal government to prosecute Klan members. This effectively suppressed the movement, with hundreds of supporters fined or imprisoned. This happened at a time when membership and activities were already down. The KKK had some successes in forcing Republicans out of power and weakening African American political movements, but the harsh backlash against it and strong federal response reinvigorated southern Republicans and caused the Democratic leaders of the south to look elsewhere in pursuit of their aims.

The first KKK did have a lasting impact on the American imagination. The 1920s saw the emergence of a new Klan, with the now infamous white robes, burning crosses and parades – adopted from the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which mythologized the first Klan. From the 1950s a series of smaller, localized groups reappeared, often in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.