I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction

The Ku Klux Klan was at the forefront of “a shadow army of paramilitary gangs” launched in the post–Civil War South in “the pursuit of the Confederate cause by other means,” according to this gripping debut from historian Williams. Basing her study on eyewitness testimonies given in congressional hearings during the early 1870s and recollections gathered by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, Williams documents how formerly enslaved people worked to reunite scattered families, find homes and employment, and exercise their new political rights, while facing constant threats of violence from white Southerners who sought to prevent these advances. Among other horrors, Williams documents the whipping of Black children by “night riders,” campaigns of intimidation and torture waged against Black landowners by their white neighbors, and a father witnessing his son’s stabbing death in Limestone County, Ala. Along the way, Williams also pays tribute to Black families’ resilience and determination to fight back against harassment, details federal efforts to stop the terror campaign and the forces that undermined them, and examines how the trauma of racialized violence is passed down through generations. This harrowing report hits home. (Jan.)