Annotation

The Fifteenth Amendment, and the fact that the victorious North stationed federal troops in the South during Reconstruction, led to a brief period of political gains for African Americans. But white southerners began a counterattack against black voting. In some cases they used legal means, like poll taxes, but more commonly they resorted to acts of terrorist violence designed to intimidate citizens. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was one of the secret organizations that led the attacks on black voters, using lynchings, beatings and other forms of violent intimidation to keep African Americans from the polls. The KKK's activities are described in three massive volumes of testimony compiled by Congress in the 1860s, but whether constitutional or not, the actions of the Klan were successful in drastically reducing voting by African Americans. Senator Benjamin Ryan Tillman, pictured in this cartoon from 1897, often worked to disempower blacks.