Freedom on Trial
eBook - ePub

Freedom on Trial

The First Post-Civil War Battle Over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Freedom on Trial

The First Post-Civil War Battle Over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression

About this book

The Confederacy lost the Civil War but quickly began to win the peace when a mysterious organization arose called the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux, as it was then called, sought to restore white supremacy by terrorizing the formerly enslaved to prevent them from voting or owning firearms. To support Black resistance to the KKK’s campaign of murder and mayhem, President Ulysses S. Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus in large portions of South Carolina and sent the famed 7th Cavalry to make mass arrests.

Grant’s new attorney general, the first former Confederate to serve in a presidential Cabinet and an ardent advocate for Black equality, Amos T. Akerman, aggressively prosecuted the Ku Klux in a series of sensational trials that shocked the nation and forced a reckoning regarding just how much the Civil War and the recently enacted Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution had changed America and its notions of citizenship.

Highlighting forgotten Black and white civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author’s own great-grandfather’s crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn. It is a story that also offers a sober lesson for those engaged in the ongoing work of fulfilling the American promise of equality for all.

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Yes, you can access Freedom on Trial by Scott Farris in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Preface
  2. Introduction
  3. Chapter 1: “The dismal hour draws nigh”
  4. Chapter 2: “No special privileges or peculiar favors”
  5. Chapter 3: “Pray that God may forgive Ku Klux”
  6. Chapter 4: “All kindness [is] evidence of timidity”
  7. Chapter 5: “Such a state of social disorganization”
  8. Chapter 6: “Teach the negro his duty to be quiet”
  9. Chapter 7: “We will not be able to control the court”
  10. Chapter 8: “The Constitution is on trial”
  11. Chapter 9: “The right to bear arms is not a right”
  12. Chapter 10: “It has got to be a bore”
  13. Chapter 11: “After they got done with me, I had no sense”
  14. Chapter 12: “I had [no] right to preach against [such] raids”
  15. Chapter 13: “The shortest cut is the ‘shanghaiing process’”
  16. Chapter 14: “Freedom is not safe while we have a Supreme Court”
  17. Chapter 15: “Jim Williams’s truth is marching on”
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. Notes
  20. Bibliography
  21. About the Author