I SAW DEATH COMING

A broad-ranging study of anti-Black violence in the Reconstruction era.

Reconstruction was not so much a failure as an effort that was sabotaged from the outset. The administration of Andrew Johnson was committed to White supremacy, and the Confederates, though militarily defeated, never really surrendered. Immediately after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was founded, and “night riders” began visiting violence on Black Americans who dared press for civil and economic rights. As historian Williams shows, these visits were carefully coordinated, indicating some sort of central organization as opposed to the commonly held belief that they were impromptu and rare attacks. The attacks “frequently targeted prosperous Black people,” seizing income-producing tools and even whole crops. In some instances, as Williams chronicles, Black people organized resistance, and the night riders tended accordingly to steer clear of situations where they were likely to face gunfire. “Yet even within a limited space to operate, right-wingers committed extensive atrocities,” she adds. Because they demanded total domination over Southern society, another understandable Black response was to move, as happened in the Deep South in 1879, “a hurried, mass movement of significant numbers in months” on the part of people called Exodusters, with Kansas gaining 30,000 Black migrants almost overnight. A combination of anti-Black violence, economic disenfranchisement, and voter suppression—all of which lend this book an altogether timely feel—doomed efforts to make Black Southerners equal citizens. Too many historians, Williams observes, have brushed such matters aside, blaming the failure of Reconstruction on its Northern champions, but Black Southerners did not forget, and many of the testimonials and eyewitness accounts that she draws on come from field recordings from the 1930s—even though, as she concludes, “Black counter-histories of atrocity and betrayal were no match for the machinery of the Lost Cause.” Pair this book with Margaret A. Burnham’s By Hands Now Known.

A deeply researched work that exposes the shameful legacy of the neo-Confederacy, one that lingers to this day.