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Fake Ghosts and 'Pretend' Hell
| Article
# : |
13242 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
8,721 Words |
| Author
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Gladys-Marie Fry
Folklorist Gladys-Marie Fry teaches at the University of
Maryland in College Park. The original version of this article
appeared in Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976,
published by the George Council for the Arts and Humanities. |
Historians record that six war-weary, restless, bored youths from Pulaski, Tennessee, organized a social club in the fall of 1865. They vowed to "have fun, make mischief, and play pranks on the public." To these youths, the black population constituted "the public," and the pranks consisted of dressing in ghostly garb and frightening ex-slaves. According to Walter L. Fleming in The Sequel of Appomattox, the Klans that resulted found that the "terrorizing of the Blacks successfully provided the amusement which the founders desired and there were many applications for admission to the society."
But repeated references have been made to the amusement some Southern whites purportedly enjoyed in chasing, frightening, and whipping slaves. Before 1865 these diversions had been a sideline of the patrollers, who were supposed to have been engaged in the more serious business of preventing slave assemblies.
The element of "fun" is a recurring theme in Southern historiography and oral tradition. Young boys of both races played ghosts at the graveyard, though blacks were usually the targets of the pranks. Perhaps one explanation for their excessive interest in "fun" is that many of the Klansmen were relatively young, according to contemporary accounts.
But ingenuity in Southern "fun" apparently knew no bounds. The report of the 1871 congressional hearing created to gather testimony about the Klan included the account of a visit by irate Klan members to a white man who had extended a Sunday school class into a two-day school for poor children. He was taken out, blindfolded, and forced to kiss the private parts of several assembled blacks.
The formalization of an old Southern custom into a social organization marked the beginning of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps out of a need to "whitewash" the motivations of the founders, defenders have perpetuated the myth of the Pulaski six as the group's origin. General historians, limiting themselves to threadbare written sources and blind to the value of oral tradition, have unwittingly kept the tale alive.
Reconstruction and the Klan
William Peirce Randel tells of the first parade through the Pulaski streets, the six original Klan members and their horses arrayed in stolen sheets:
One unexpected result,
...
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