Response on Kaitlyn's Reis CDL. What did the KKK really want?

1. Why did the KKK target black education?

Ultimately, I believe that it was due to the inferiority complex that many of the Southerners had following their crushing defeat in the Civil War. Although the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) allegedly started with innocent intentions, they quickly masked their destructive, terrorist motives. Their resentment and hostility for the “Negro population” spilled over into the educational arena, especially among uneducated whites.

According to the text, schools were easy targets and many felt that teaching blacks would make them like whites, potentially giving them superiority. As a result, the uneducated whites sought to keep them down by committing heinous acts and instilling fear among the black population throughout the South. Plantation owners also sought to prohibit this, because a black in the classroom meant one less former-slave (plantation worker) in the field tending to the harvest.


2. After a lot of violence and the death tolls rising to the thousands, the federal government finally intervened with the KKK Acts of 1870 and 1871. Why did they allow the violence to happen for so long without stepping in?

It was not that they necessarily condoned the violence; the problem was that there were no laws on the books in a state like Florida that prohibited whites from actually killing blacks. As Reconstruction collapsed during President Grant’s term, Republicans proved to be no match for those Democrats’ who engaged in political violence, economic coercion, and bloody violence. According to the text, masked Klansmen employed hit-and-run guerilla warfare tactics against those Republicans and blacks who engaged in civil equality, free labor, and political democracy. It was challenging to arrest them and virtually impossible to convict, since they often held higher office. Although he KKK Acts of 1870 and 1871 marked federal intervention into the problem, it did little to curb the counterrevolutionary violence in the South with other groups perpetuating the terrorist activities.