Negro Klan Members

Maxwell House Hotel in the spring of 1867, did not begin as an avowedly racist organization; it was founded to play jokes and reorganized to oppose Radical proponents of what it perceived to be black domination, not to scourge blacks themselves. Although it has been written that Ku Klux ranks were open only to the more than 100,000 honorably discharged ex-Confederate veterans, the hierarchy in some areas and in some instances seems to have accepted and even recruited blacks, provided they went along with Conservative-Democratic political philosophy. So did the Democratic Party for which it worked. In Memphis in late July of 1868, sixty-five blacks organized a "Colored Democratic Club" under the watchful eye of Klansman-editor Gallaway-who, according to an account in the Appeal, "made a motion on behalf of the white men present, that they give employment and protection to colored Democrats." Gallaway presumably would not have advocated "protection" for friendly blacks had they not needed it. Organized but not very well controlled violence was spreading across the former Confederate states to the horror and revulsion of the rest of the nation. About this time New York attorney George Templeton Strong wryly confided to his diary that the Klan seemed at work throughout the South, going "about nocturnally in large parties, masked and disguised, shooting inconvenient niggers and uncomfortable Union men. Southern papers applaud and encourage them in a guarded and semi-ironical way."

From Nathan Bedford Forrest  A Biography  by Jack Hurst page 305