16. Reconstruction, 1863

Quiz for Making Historical Arguments: What Did the Ku Klux Klan Really Want?

Select the best answer for each question. Click the “submit” button for each question to turn in your work.

1. What historical change spurred the Ku Klux Klan to shift from a benign fraternal group to a terrorist organization?

The Confederacy's surrender to the Union, ending the Civil War

The election of the first black member of the House of Representatives

The implementation of congressional reconstruction after the Civil War

The 1876 presidential election, which officially ended Reconstruction

2. During the Reconstruction era, why might the Ku Klux Klan have found black education particularly threatening and appalling?

Educated black Southerners were more likely to actively oppose the Klan through their participation in black fraternal organizations.

Education allowed black Southerners to pursue better jobs than field work, and Klansmen wanted to preserve the plantation economy.

Attempts to pass the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871 in Congress were led primarily by educated black Southerners.

Black schoolteachers were some of the most radical activists for black freedom and equality during Reconstruction.

3. How did the Ku Klux Klan make it difficult for freedmen to exercise their right to vote?

Klan-sympathizing voter registrars refused to register black Southerners to vote.

They lobbied southern legislatures to pass state laws that contradicted the Fifteenth Amendment.

They wrote literacy tests that black Southerners were forced to take in order to vote.

The Klan physically prevented black Southerners from making it to the polls on election day.

4. Although the Ku Klux Klan targeted many groups with violence during Reconstruction, the people they terrorized the most were

Republicans.

mixed-race couples.

carpetbaggers.

school teachers.

5. What was the overarching goal of the Ku Klux Klan’s violence during Reconstruction?

To drive all African Americans out of the southern states

To reverse abolition and reinstate slavery in the South

To restore the South to what it had been before the Civil War

To have the South succeed from the Union permanently