Perspective: The importance of an unambiguous report that can’t be weaponized by Trump supporters
totaled 13 volumes and more than 8,000 pages, at the time the longest published congressional investigation in history. It contained the testimony from 600 witnesses, about one-third of them African Americans, who told of violent assaults and murders, rapes and arson committed by the Klan.
The Democratic minority, however, submitted its own report shot through with racist and inflammatory language. It denounced “Negro supremacy” and called the enfranchisement of Black men “one of the most terrible blunders ever committed.
In the short term, little came of the investigation. The Republican majority recommended extending an existing law that allowed the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to effect mass arrests. President Ulysses S. Grant had put it to good use a few months earlier, employing the U.S. Army to help quash terrorism in South Carolina.
The “tragic era” mythology also pervaded American popular culture, providing a useful narrative for justifying the Jim Crow laws, codes and racist ideas that limited the economic, political and social advancement of Black Americans. For instance, white supremacist Thomas Dixon touted his research in the congressional Klan report as proof of the historical accuracy of “The Clansman,” his 1905 novel glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. It reached the silver screen in 1915 as D.W.
The voices of Hill and other Black witnesses, to be sure, were never entirely silenced. W.E.B. Du Bois included an account of Hill’s testimony in his 1935 work “Black Reconstruction in America.” Many White scholars at the time ignored Du Bois’s work. But the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s — called a “second Reconstruction” by some — drove a reconsideration of the period.
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