Dick and Anna’s story was a symphony of notes composed through generations. Their children and grandchildren witnessed events that touched the history of our entire nation in ways even they couldn’t have imagined. Sometimes an event is the culmination of a series of people doing the wrong thing, the right thing or both, almost like a relay race. Each person contributing to the win or the loss and then passing the baton on to the next person. A series of necessary events, if you will. Humans completing actions, living out their destinies, gaining fortitude and strength along the way. (I am trying so hard not to use the symphony metaphor again, lest I bore you!) Its often not all that easy to track the connections of events, but the trail of events that lead to the 1946 race riot in Columbia, TN are distinctly vivid. 

 Let’s begin with the years following the Civil War. Reconstruction in Tennessee provided new rights for Black men. They were given the right to vote three years before the 15th Amendment was passed. The Tennessee General Assembly passed a law in March 1867 allowing Black men to vote and hold political office. This was at the same time that many former officers in the Confederate Army were told they could only vote if they could prove previous loyalty to the United States. It cannot be a coincidence that the first national meeting of the Ku Klux Klan was held the next month,  April 1867, in Nashville at the Maxwell House Hotel.  Southern White men were fighting for lost control. There was an intense anger that Black men could vote and they couldnt. Blame was assigned to everyone. The radical Republicans, who they saw as using freedmen for their own political gain. They bemoaned the fact that they had to pay taxes, but had no say in policy. They blamed state governments, local governments and even the school systems were said “to be organized in such a manner that it will be exclusively under the control of radical superintendents, and no teachers employed save those of undoubted ‘loyalty,’ whose duty it will be to instill into the minds of our children sentiments of hated to the principles of their fathers and their section.”  Freedmen’s Bureau Adjutant H.A. Eastman reported “The public sentiment is fairly against educating them [freedpeople]. They support and uphold Kuklux who burn and destroy school houses, threaten and abuse teachers.” 

Black men being educated and getting the right to vote lit a fire under the Ku Klux in Maury County. They tortured, abused and killed any Black man who would register to vote and any White man who was willing to help. H.A. Eastman reported multiple times of Ku Klux outrages on freedpeople and by Oct 1867 of an illegal poll tax being forced upon freedmen that needed to be dealt with. 

In my last post I started with a Ku Klux raid in Maury County, since then I’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole of Freedmen’s Bureau records and found deeply unsettling details of that night, a revisit was necessary to build upon the scanty details I previously mentioned. Very symbolically, the Ku-Klux planned their raid on the 4th of July in 1868. An estimated 100-200 men would meet, rally and then ride out into the community to terrorize. Local black citizens got wind ahead of time and themselves rallied together. Armed, they were able to secure a line of defense and defend themselves. They held the Ku-Klux off till the sheer numbers were too many and they retreated to the protection of US soldiers garrisoned in the area. 

Over the next couple weeks, the Ku Klux hunted down one by one the men that were involved. Tom Kelly was taken from his home and was beaten, shot and thrown in the river. His body was never found. This spree of torture went on and encompassed anyone the Ku Klux had a problem with: Matt Winser, Alph Rainey, Tom Jordan, Charles Ballanfant, Violet Wallace, Jacob Polk, Simon Ferguson, Ritter Bryant, Thomas White, Nim Wilkes, Nancy Wilkes and Gilbert Aiken all suffered “outrages” at the hands of the Ku Klux. Each name important. They were not anonymous victims. They were individuals. They were husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. There were also individual names of the Ku-klux mentioned in these documents. I almost feel it is more important to place a name to the evil. Because for the most part, the Ku-klux was faceless. They knew they were doing evil deeds. Thats why they hid their faces. Their names should be shouted from the rooftop and the stain of their sins be known. Joe Nickerson. Tom Whittaker. John Reeves. Fayette Pendleton. With bitterness these men helped to enact horrible atrocities on innocent people within their own communities. 

Just a few years later, Reconstruction very abruptly ended. White political and social dominance was firmly re-established. The transformative years of Reconstruction aborted before any true change could take root. Years of constant subjugation for the black citizens followed. In Maury County the next seventy years were filled with voter suppression, segregation and violence. Black citizens lived separately from White citizens, but at the same time their lives were intertwined in the experience of life. Seventy years of violence and fear festered and came to a breaking point in 1946, when a young man named James Stephenson and his mother Gladys walked into a shop to pick up a radio.