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Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery
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Historical SummaryIN the South the reaction to the rule of carpetbaggers and Negroes took the form of a secret society, the Ku Klux Klan, which first appeared in 1866. The avowed object of the Klan was to make the South a white man’s country. White-robed Klansmen patrolled at night, relying upon terror, floggings, torture, and even death to coerce the Negro into withdrawing from political life. Condemned as a "set of drunken and lawless vagabonds," the Klansmen, in the words of one historian, perpetrated "a reign of outrage and crime which, taken together, forms a record of wrong among the most hideous in the history of any modern state." In thirteen bulky volumes Congress published its committee findings on the Klan, and an act of 1871, later declared unconstitutional, authorized the President to suspend the privilege of habeas corpus and to proclaim martial taw when the operations of such unlawful organizations in fact constituted a rebellion against the government of the United States. Since then, the Klan has attracted from time to time those frustrated bigots who gratified their self-esteem by persecuting minority groups behind the protection of bed-sheeted anonymity. Like other fascist plants, it is doomed to wither away in the soil of democracy. How did the Klan look to its victims? In Lay My Burden Down, Ben A. Botkin has gathered first-hand recollections of those days of terror from ex-slaves still living in recent years. The first account below comes from the mouth of Ben Johnson, an elderly Negro of Durham, North Carolina. The second tale, which illustrates the fact that some Negroes spoke of themselves as "Us Confederates" and were hostile to the "uppity niggers" who worked with the carpetbaggers, was told by Brawley Gilmore, a resident of Union, South Carolina.
Key Quote"I will never forgit when they hung Cy Guy."
B. A. Botkin
University of Chicago
1945
The Ku Klux Klan Through Negro Eyes
[c.1874]
I
I never will forgit when they hung Cy Guy. They hung him for a scandalous insult to a white woman, and they comed after him a hundred strong.
They tries him there in the woods, and they scratches Cy’s arm to git some blood, and with that blood they writes that he shall hang ’tween the heavens and the earth tilt he am dead, dead, dead, and that any nigger what takes down the body shall be hunged too.
Well, sir, the next morning there he hung, right over the road, and the sentence hanging over his head. Nobody’d bother with that body for four days, and there it hung, swinging in the wind, but the fourth day the sheriff comes and takes it down.
There was Ed and Cindy, who ’fore
the war belonged to Mr. Lynch, and after the war he told ’em to move. He gives ’em a month, and they ain’t gone, so the Ku Kluxes gits ’em.
It was on a cold night when they corned and drugged the niggers outen bed. They carried ’em down in the woods and whup them, then they throws ’em in the Pond, their bodies breaking the ice. Ed come out and come to our house, but Cindy ain’t been seed since.
Sam Allen in Caswell County was told to move, and after a month the hundred Ku Klux come a-toting his casket, and they tells him that his time has come and iffen he want to tell his wife goodbye and say his prayers hurry up.
They set the coffin on two chairs, and Sam kisses his old woman who am a-crying, then he kneels down side of his bed with his head on the pillow and his arms throwed out front of him.
He sets there for a minute and when he riz he had a long knife in his hand. ’Fore he could be grabbed he done kill two of the Ku Kluxes with the knife, and he done gone outen the door. They ain’t catch him neither, and the next night when they corned back, ’termined to git him, they shot another nigger by accident. . . .
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Chicago: Ben Johnson, "The Ku Klux Klan Through Negro Eyes—I," Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, ed. B. A. Botkin in History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, ed. Louis Leo Snyder and Richard B. Morris (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Co., 1951), Original Sources, accessed November 23, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=KHMCHFXH6VZGMTF.
MLA: Johnson, Ben. "The Ku Klux Klan Through Negro Eyes—I." Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin, in History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, edited by Louis Leo Snyder and Richard B. Morris, Harrisburg, Pa., Stackpole Co., 1951, Original Sources. 23 Nov. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=KHMCHFXH6VZGMTF.
Harvard: Johnson, B, 'The Ku Klux Klan Through Negro Eyes—I' in Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, ed. . cited in 1951, History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, ed. , Stackpole Co., Harrisburg, Pa.. Original Sources, retrieved 23 November 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=KHMCHFXH6VZGMTF.
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