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Notes -
The difference between how reconstruction was taught to me in school in my state-mandated Texas history class and how it was taught in my American history class is striking; while the radical republicans can certainly be portrayed sympathetically, they were undoubtedly a disaster in practice.
Maybe a little bit, but what is known is that they were fairly explicitly using the robes and titles to try to convince freemen that their white former masters had magic powers- and it actually worked. The robes were intended to look like the ghosts of confederate soldiers(and had the added benefit of concealing accoutrements for magic tricks) and the wizards were supposedly their masters who summoned them.
The south in the nineteenth century was not a very literate or scientifically minded society, and black slaves were more superstitious than most. A lot of the theater has very different effects on us than it did on illiterate, unfree subsistence farmers who unironically believe in witches- it’s plausible that although Islamist movements are a better metaphor for the second wave of the klan(and it’s underdiscussed the extent to which the 20’s era klan saw themselves as a bastion of white Protestant morality being eroded by the then-ongoing first sexual revolution, for which they blamed foreign influence), the oprikhniki is a decent analogue for the first wave.
This, along with the numerous references to confederate relatives, has left me wondering if Scooby Doo was inspired by the KKK. They were literally Scooby Doo villains, disguising themselves as ghosts to scare people away.
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