NY Times
April 9, 1868
According to Wikipedia George W. Ashburn was born in North Carolina and later moved to Georgia. He opposed the secession of Georgia and was commissioned a Colonel in the Union army. In 1867 Mr. Ashburn called to order the Georgia Constitutional Convention and “was the author of the provisions in the new Constitution that assured civil rights to blacks. At the Convention, Ashburn suggested that the new Constitution should be implemented even if the people of Georgia don’t concur.” He worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau and with African American leaders where he lived in Columbus, Georgia. Mr. Ashburn “lived amongst the African American population and garnered attention from the Ku Klux Klan, which established their Columbus chapter on March 21, 1868 after a visit from Nathan Bedford Forrest. … On the night of March 30, 1868, Ashburn participated at a huge gathering of blacks and Republicans at Temperance Hall in Columbus, Georgia. One of the featured speakers was Henry McNeal Turner. Just after midnight, Ashburn was murdered at a house on the corner of 13th Avenue and 1st Street by a group of five well-dressed men wearing masks.”
the end of a Radical Republican scalawag
On April 4, 1868 General George Meade, commander of the Third Military District (Georgia, Alabama, Florida) issued an order directed at suppressing the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Although the order didn’t mention the organization by name, The New-York Times on April 9, 1868 seemed to know exactly who the general was targeting.
General Meade included this order in his report on operations in the Third District for 1868 (at HathiTrust):
warning “evil organizations”
in “the secresy of the night”
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
I think I remember that after seeing the news report about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. 50 years ago tonight I went to bed on a very warm night for early April with the windows open and the strong wind blowing the curtains.
a century later
I’m not trying to say that I think the Klan killed Martin Luther King, but just more political violence against upsetting the racial applecart.
The Ku Klux Klan began in Tennessee sometime between December 1865 and August 1866. When I searched for Klan at The New York Times Archive from January 1866, I got a few possibilities in 1866 and 1867. The Northern press became much more aware of the Klan’s activities in early 1868. I was a little surprised that the first search result I clicked on was General Meade’s reaction to the murder of a white man, but according to the cartoon below the Klan wasn’t afraid to publicize its animosity to whites who stood with blacks.
The cartoon was republished in Ku Klux Klan Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment at Project Gutenberg and said to be “Cartoon by Ryland Randolph in Independent Monitor, September 1, 1868.”
The image of Martin Luther King, Jr. is from the Library of Congress
“The fate of the carpetbagger and the scalawag”
