Stolen Justice: The Struggle for African American Voting Rights (Scholastic Focus) - Hardcover

Lawrence Goldstone has written more than a dozen books for adults, including three on Constitutional Law. Unpunished Murder was his first book on that subject for young readers. He lives in Sagaponack, New York, with his wife, medieval and Renaissance historian Nancy Goldstone.

With the army concentrated in the cities or other densely populated areas, the Klan’s reputation in the countryside as a terrorist organization beyond the reach of law spread dread among black residents. Often, Klan members needed simply to show up to keep black men from the voting booth. Even worse, in those cases, the Klan would not specifically have broken any laws.

"If a party of white men, with ropes conspicuous on their saddlebows, rode up to a polling place and announced that hanging would begin in fifteen minutes, though without any more definite reference to anybody, and a group of blacks who had assembled to vote heard the remark and promptly disappeared, votes were lost, but a conviction on a charge of intimidation was difficult. Or if an untraceable rumor that trouble was [looming] for blacks was followed by the mysterious appearance of horsemen on the roads at midnight, firing guns and yelling at nobody in particular, votes again were lost, but no crime or misdemeanor could be brought home to any one."

Even with the army in occupation, Klan terror was successful. In the presidential election of 1868, in eleven counties in Georgia, each with a majority of black voters, not a single vote was reported for Grant and the Republicans. That same year, when the Reconstruction state constitution was up for a vote in Mississippi, "it was charged by the Republicans . . . that whites terrorized the negroes by the Kuklux method, and either kept them away from the polls or intimidated them into voting against the Constitution."

By 1875, largely because of the campaign of terror by Klan groups and other violent white supremacist organizations, seven of the eleven secessionist states had been "Redeemed," or returned to Democratic control. The remaining four, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, would become the centers of both the war-at-any-cost effort to restore white rule and the last desperate attempts to maintain at least some areas of equal rights in the South.

Perched on the fulcrum of this seesaw was the United States Supreme Court.