The Daily Beast: “This week, Senate Republicans voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that would have restored voting rights protections created by the 1965 legislation but removed by John Roberts’ Supreme Court in 2013, on the bizarre premise that racial disparities were no longer a problem. With those protections gone, conservative politicians in the South are again trying to militarize and police voting.
This was all too predictable to anyone who knows American history, and part of the Republican Party’s anti-Democratic agenda is to ensure that much of that history is ignored or forgotten. It’s good that many Americans know about the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but more of them should know about Edmund Pettus, a white terrorist and politician from Alabama.
Pettus, born in Alabama in 1821, was a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. Following the Civil War, he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson along with thousands of other Confederates, and upon obtaining his freedom he became a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
From its inception, the Klan’s main purpose was to return, or “redeem,” the South to its pre-Civil War, antebellum status quo. The group existed to suppress newly emancipated Black voters and America’s first civil rights acts, known as the Force Acts, were created to outlaw the Klan and similar groups so that Black Americans could vote without the threat of terrorism.
Pettus’ status as a Grand Dragon reveals how the Klan was never the ragtag group of powerless, disgruntled Southerners that it sometimes presented itself as, but was actually led by the elites of Southern society and those with military experience. During Reconstruction, Pettus had his own law practice in Selma and was also the Alabama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Publicly, he helped the Democratic Party—in the 1860s the Democrats opposed voting rights—select their presidential candidates while privately he undermined democracy and orchestrated terrorism.
The Klan, the White League, and other domestic terrorist groups in the South, collaborated with “Redeemer” politicians and law enforcement to undermine American democracy and help Americans who opposed the expansion of voting rights win elections and maintain power. Sometimes, voter suppression would be enough for a Confederate sympathizer to win an election, but when that failed, America’s white terrorists would launch coups d’état claiming voter fraud and that the election had been stolen from them.”