23. The Civil Rights Movement Emerged in an Environment of Oppressive Terror by the Klan and Klan-Friendly Authorities
The Civil War freed millions of slaves, and for years after the surrender at Appomattox, blacks in much of the former Confederacy voted, ran for office, and were elected. However, the end of Reconstruction ushered in a concerted disenfranchisement campaign that relied mainly on discriminatory voter registration practices and poll taxes. By the 1890s, blacks were essentially eliminated from politics in the South, and were subjected to the full panoply of oppressive Jim Crow laws. Disenfranchisement was backed by terror and violence perpetrated by white vigilantes, and reinforced by hostile white police.
Blacks were seen as “troublemakers” if they tried to assert their rights, or worse if they tried to organize other blacks to assert their rights. They were often beaten, mutilated, imprisoned, or lynched. It was against that backdrop that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s emerged and operated. By then, violent white supremacists such as those of the Ku Klux Klan were accustomed to preying on blacks with impunity. Close cooperation between the Klan and law enforcement was pervasive and open. Southern cops denied civil rights activists police protection, and sometimes cooperated with the KKK in murdering them. In 1964, for example, police in Philadelphia, Mississippi, detained three civil rights volunteers, then coordinated with the Klan to lynch them upon their release from jail.