In the days immediately after the vote, there was a wave of violence. Some people were dragged from their homes by members of a white-hooded mob and killed for supporting the wrong party — but that was only the beginning. A Republican governor wrote to the White House to warn that insurrectionists were plotting to storm the seat of government and prevent certification of the winner.
Gov. Robert K. Scott told the president that loyalists to the party that got fewer voters “will not submit to any election which does not place them in power.” He further warned: “I am convinced that an outbreak will occur here [on] the day appointed by law for the counting of ballots.”Those white-hooded nightriders who murdered their neighbors — all of them recently enslaved African Americans — for exercising their voting rights belonged to groups like the newly formed Ku Klux Klan, or KKK.
The popular 18th president used his political clout to gain passage of three sweeping laws that today are often referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Acts — giving the federal government muscles it had never flexed before, including the power to send troops to ensure fair elections, and to criminally charge Klan leaders in a U.S. courtroom.
More than 150 years later, Washington’s commitment to Black voting rights and curbing white supremacists
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