Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan was among the forces that helped sustain racial control in the post–Civil War South. The account places its activity within a wider system of disenfranchisement, discriminatory law, and elite-backed coercion that restricted Black political and economic life and preserved the power of the landed elite.

Role in the Postwar South

The Klan operated alongside disenfranchisement, vagrancy laws such as the Black Code of Alabama, and Jim Crow laws. The book describes its actions as often financed and supported by the elite, situating the organization within a broader effort to control the Black population and its labor. Together, these practices made the postwar South an effective apartheid society in which Black and white people lived under sharply different conditions.

Political and Economic Order

Racial control was reinforced not only through local laws and violence but also through political decisions at the federal level. Southern politicians in Washington worked to preserve the South’s extractive institutions, ensuring that federal projects and public works that might weaken elite control over the Black workforce were not approved. The Klan is thus presented as one part of a political and economic order, rather than as an isolated organization.

Persistence and Decline

The system the Klan helped uphold rested on plantation agriculture, low-wage and low-education labor, and the political power of the landed elite. It persisted well into the twentieth century. The South remained largely rural and technologically backward: in 1900, 13.5 percent of its population lived in urban areas, compared with 60 percent in the Northeast. These institutions began to crumble after the Second World War and more decisively in the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movement destroyed the political basis of the system. Only after that decline did the South begin rapidly converging with the North.