Susan Lawrence Davis’s inauthentic history of the Reconstruction-era Klan
Some 1924 Klucker propaganda packaged as “authentic history”
“Thou hast put forth a riddle unto the children of my people.” — Judges XIV:16 (as quoted by Albion Winegar Tourgée, 1875)
Advertised as a “true history of the Solid South,” Susan Lawrence Davis’s Authentic history, Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1877 (1924) sets forth “many details as to names, places, and dates of action and occurrence,” but it was apparently too extreme for even the Daughters of the Confederacy to comment. The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky called it “strongly partisan.” Published “in justification of the men and measures adopted which led to the redemption of the Southern States from Radical, Carpet-bag, and Negro rule” during Reconstruction, the book was written “with no reference to the present organization” in the 1920s.
The author claimed to be a descendant of both Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis…
