Ku Klux Klan

During the period that republicans controlled state governments in the South, groups of southern whites organized various secret societies to intimidate white reformers and blacks. The most prominent was the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 by an ex-Confederate general, Nathaniel Forrest. The "Invisible Empire of the South" as it was also called , burned black owned buildings and flogged and murdered freedmen to keep them from exercising their voting rights. In 1870, Congress in the Force acts of 1870 and 1871 gave power to federal authorities to stop the Ku Klux Klan violence and to protect the civil rights of citizens in the south.