Clyde W. Ford: How white violence crushed the progressive change formerly enslaved people won during Reconstruction
Clyde W. Ford is an award-winning author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction. His latest book,n Feb. 18, 1868, in Charleston, S.C., Radical Republican Solomon George Washington Dill, known as S.G.W. Dill, rose at South Carolina’s Second Constitutional Convention to offer a resolution that would protect sharecroppers and tenant farmers, including formerly enslaved Black people, from gouging by white landowners.
In taking this strong stand, Dill put his life at risk. Elected to represent Kershaw County he never got to serve his full term in Columbia. On the night of June 4, 1868, Dill was assassinated by assailants who were never found, though many reported the men belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Dill’s killing fit theDuring Reconstruction, the Klan acted as the paramilitary arm of the Southern Democratic Party and of white landowners.
Increased taxation sent plantation owners up in arms, and gave them a way to shift the focus of their attack from race to taxes, even though race was very much beneath the taxation issue. Such anger on the part of wealthy whites contributed to the rise of violent groups supported by them, such as the KKK, and ultimately to an organized, successful political effort to undo Reconstruction through violence.
The era of Jim Crow began. Lynchings became commonplace entertainment for whites. Voting rights came under attack as Black voters were forced at gunpoint to vote for racist white Democrats. Armed gangs patrolled polling stations to prevent Blacks from voting. Groups like the White League and the Red Shirts joined with the Klan. On Dec.
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