"The Ku Klux Klan weren't just after Negroes. They got after white folks
and Negroes both. I didn't think they were so much after keeping the
Negro from voting as some other things.
"There was one colored fellow in Alabama--I think his name was Egbert
Bondman--that wasn't influenced. He was a politician and they got after
him one time. He lived about six miles south of Vernon in Lamar County,
Alabama. He went down to the hole where they watered their horses and
stretched an old cable wire across the road just high enough to trip up
their horses. He hid in the woods and cut down on them with his shotgun
when they came up. I hear there was one more scramble when those horses
commenced stumbling, and those men started running through the forest to
get away from that shot.
"I remember one night my mother woke me up, and I looked out and there
was a lot of the Ku Klux riding down the road. They had on long white
robes and looked like a flock of geese in the dark.
"The main thing the Ku Klux seemed to try to do, it seemed to me, was to
try to keep the colored folks obedient to their former masters and to
keep the white folks from giving them too much influence. And they
wanted to stop the white men that ran after colored women.
"But they didn't last long. They whipped a fellow named Huggins in the
early seventies, and he was a government man. After that government men
camped on their trail, and they didn't amount to much."