It was in the city of Pulaski in Giles County, Tennessee, that the original Ku-Klux Klan was organized in the latter part of 1865. The war had hardly been declared officially at an end when the cowardly “crackers” who couldn’t lick the Yankees began organizing to take it out of the Negroes. They passed laws declaring that any black man who couldn’t show three hundred dollars should be declared a vagrant; that every vagrant should be put to work in the chain-gang on the public works of their cities; that three Negroes should not gather together unless a white man was with them, and other such methods were used as were found necessary to maintain “white supremacy.” When the national Congress met in December, 1865, it looked upon these light diversions with an unfriendly eye and, noting that nothing short of the re-enslavement of the Negroes would satisfy the “crackers,” it kept them out of Congress until they would agree to do better. Finding that they were stiff-necked, Congress passed the 14th and 15th amendments and put the “cracker” states under military rule until they accepted the amendments. The result was that the Negro got the ballot as a protection from “the people who know him best.” In the meanwhile, the Ku-Klux after rampaging around under the leadership of that traitor, General Nathaniel B. Forrest, was put down-for good, as it was thought. Today, after the Negro has been stripped of the ballot’s protection by the connivance of white Republicans in Washington and white Democrats at the South, the Ku-Klux dares to raise its ugly head in its ancestral state of Tennessee. This time they want to increase that fine brand of democracy which every coward editor knows that Negroes were getting when they were bidding them to be patriotic. The Ku-Klux means to shoot them into submission and torture them into terror before they get to showing their wounds and asking for the ballot as a recompense. In this crisis what have the Negro “leaders” got to say on their people’s behalf? Where is Emmett Scott? Where are Mr. Moton and Dr. Du Bois? What will the N.A.A.C.P. do besides writing frantic letters? We fear that they can never rise above the level of appeals. But suppose the common Negro in Tennessee decides to take a hand in the game? Suppose he lets it be known that for the life of every Negro soldier or civilian, two “crackers” will die? Suppose he lets them know that it will be as costly to kill Negroes as it would be to kill real people? Then indeed the Ku-Klux would be met upon its own ground. And why not?