Shades of Complicity : One Family's Experience of Klan Participation

In Shades of Complicity, Michael W. Fitzgerald explores one family's involvement with the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan. Using the newly available Pickens family correspondence housed at the University of South Alabama, he examines the varying roles of family members as terrorists, supporters, and observers.

After the Civil War, the wealthy Pickens family of western Alabama offered a home to Eyre and Murray Damer, the orphaned brothers-in-law of James Pickens, until the disruptive behavior of the young men prompted the Pickenses to apprentice them elsewhere. The Damers became involved with a cluster of terrorists operating out of a newspaper in Eutaw, Alabama, a center of Klan activity. They provided firsthand accounts of violent activities they participated in, with one later writing a Klan memoir.

Fitzgerald reveals how the criminal activities of the Damers affected the Pickens family along age, gender, and class lines. The younger Pickens boys were drawn to the rebellious lifestyle of the brothers-in-law, expressed through sexual aggressiveness, alcohol consumption, and endorsement of racist violence. Other members of the family also shared the Damers' political and racial grievances, feeling wrongly dispossessed by defeat in the Civil War. While the whole family resented the financial and psychic losses brought by emancipation and Black suffrage, some of the Pickenses distanced themselves from the violent acts that characterized the Damers and the attitudes expressed by their own younger siblings.

Shades of Complicity provides a unique inside look at how one extended family experienced the Klan, and what came of their involvement afterward.