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Chapter 20. Underlying Factors 449
in nearly the opposite way. Already in the ante-bellum elections, political
campaigning and voting had acquired a ceremonial significance as marking
off a distinct sphere of power and responsibility for the free citizen. From
Reconstruction on, voting remained to the white Southerner more than a
mere action: it was, and still is, a symbol of superiority. Partly because it
is a public activity and does not lend itself to privacy or segregation, it
becomes so hard for the white Southerner to admit the Negro to full
participation in it.® This is one side of the general difference between the
two regions so often noticed: that the white Northerners may dislike and
ignore the Negro but are prepared to give him his formal rights, while in
the South even individual whites who like and care for Negroes cannot
afford to give them their rights because this would imply equality.
In order to understand fully Southern conservative illegality, we have
also to remember that the actual trickery, cheating and intimidation neces-
sary for the smooth operation of disfranchisement need be indulged in by
only a small number of persons. Most people can almost avoid it. Their
collaboration is necessary only to the extent of preserving a public senti-
ment upholding and supporting the system. In most cases, a resolute
registrar can himself take care of the matter. And even he does not need
to act openly when it has once become generally known among the Negroes
in a community that they had better keep away from all politics.
The illegal practices have also the sanction of tradition behind them.
The present situation is conceived of as the outcome of the successful
revolutionary movement against the Reconstruction governments. The
chronicle of the Restoration—symbolized by the Ku Klux Klan and a great
number of ‘^protective” leagues and secret terror organizations such as the
Pale Faces of Tennessee 5
the Constitutional Guards and the White Broth-
erhood of North Carolina j
the Knights of the White Camellia in Louisiana
and Arkansas; the Council of Safety in South Carolina; the Men of Justice
in Alabama; the Society of the White Rose, the Seventy-Six Association,
and the Robinson Family in Mississippi; the Knights of the Rising Sun
and the Sons of Washington in Texas—offers a most amazing, sometimes
ludicrous, but more often pathetic and tragic, reading.
Guy B. Johnson characterizes Reconstruction as, in a sense, “a prolonged
race riot”:
The Ku Klux Klan and a dozen similar organizations which sprang up over the
South were as inevitable as a chemical reaction. Their purpose was punitive and
regulatory, the restoration of absolute white supremacy. They flogged, intimidated,
maimed, hanged, murdered, not only for actual attacks and crimes against whites, but
for all sorts of trivial and imagined ofl’enses. Every Negro was assumed to be “bad”
• We do not mean, of course, that the Southerner’s purpose in disfranchising the Negro
is not to prevent him from having power. We are merely pointing out that the “no
social equality” theory applies to politics. (See Chapter a 8, Section 6.)
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