From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
The violence of the Klan proved so pervasive that Congress was moved to pass the Ku Klux Klan Act of April 1871, making offences against constitutional rights a federal crime. From South Carolina to Texas, every time the federal government intervened, the Klan fled and the violence ended. Public hearings were held, culminating in a 632-page report that detailed the widespread torture, rape, and sadism Black American endured following the fall of the Confederacy. The report revealed that the leniency of Southern amnesty led to the brutal reentrenchment of the South’s racial hierarchy, not repentance or the rewriting of Southern life. Without repentance, only two paths to national reconciliation existed; the nation could invest more deeply in the struggle to realize racial justice through Reconstruction, or the nation could retreat from Reconstruction, ignore the new Constitution and Southern atrocities, and reconcile on the grounds of white supremacy.
At both economic and emotional levels, white American thirsted for national reconciliation – even if that reconciliation rendered the sacrifices made for Black emancipation meaningless. At an economic level, the North was poised to return to the business of getting wealthy from Southern agriculture. To discerning eyes in the North, Reconstruction in the South was providing interracial political and economic alliances capable of recalibrating every aspect of America’s infrastructure. This was as terrifying and unacceptable to the economic elites of the North as it was to the former plantation owners in the South.
On an emotional level, the Civil War left psychic and social wounds with few equals in American history. America longed to heal those wounds, and reconciliation between white people – North and South – provided a quicker and less costly path to healing than Reconstruction’s struggle to realize an interracial democracy. With each passing year, America’s will to realize racial justice waned as its appetite for white reconciliation waxed. Horace Greely captured the mood of the moment in the nation’s felt need “to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided.”
With an appetite whetted for white reconciliation, the Ku Klux Klan Report was dismissed by many in white America as inaccurate or irrelevant.