![]() ![]() Patrick and the examiners volleyed back-and-forth over this issue. “I am afraid,” Patrick explained, “somebody will know, and, perhaps, him or his friends will injure me for this again.” Part of Patrick’s reluctance to name his attackers came from his understanding of his family’s continued vulnerability to reprisal. Patrick provided answers to most of their questions without protest, except when it came to revealing the perpetrators’ identities. Examiners wanted to know the details of the attack-who attacked the family, when and why-especially information relating to Patrick’s political activity. When Patrick Tanner testified at the hearings, he attempted to convey the many layers of his family’s victimization. William probably heard the fracas and fled, prompting the men to fire on the running man, who escaped physical harm for the second time. When the men discovered Patrick’s escape, they told Missouri and Adrianna they would kill them all if they did not reveal his location, which they claimed they did not know. Patrick informed the men that William was sleeping in bed and they pushed him aside to pursue his son-in-law, enabling Patrick to slip away. They threw a pillowcase over Patrick’s head and took him outside, demanding to know his son-in-law’s whereabouts. Before she could fully awaken her father, the men barged in and made their way to his bed. Adrianna answered the door, assuming the visitors were people the family knew, but when she saw who they were, Adrianna cried out to Patrick. In June, armed men painted with black and red faces and wearing gowns and hoods with horns approached the house while Missouri and Adrianna were up talking and Patrick and other family members were asleep. Having disarmed the Tanners, white men in the community probably felt it was easier to strike them again. Insisting that bans on enslaved and free blacks owning guns or having ammunition stay in place-despite the war and emancipation-white men routinely swept communities, robbing black Americans of means to hunt for large game or defend their homes from intruders. ![]() Sometime after the attack on Moss, masked white men visited the Tanners and demanded Patrick’s Enfield rifle and the pistol carried by the young man the Tanners hired. In using both the present tense and collective language, Tanner wanted to communicate the full nature of the horrors his family endured. In so doing, they indicated a belief that “nightriding” was a discrete event with no further consequences for victims, which invalidated Patrick’s ongoing and potential long-term suffering. Congressional investigators at the Ku Klux Klan hearings interviewing Tanner used the past tense to describe the violence done to him as an individual. 1 A gang of armed and masked white men had attacked the Tanner family several weeks earlier and Patrick was there to report what transpired. Tanner testified to members of Congress on the Joint Select Committee Inquiring Into the Affairs of the Late Insurrectionary States on July 7, 1871. “What they did is hurting my family,” Patrick W. Goethals’ Reconstruction and the Arc of Racial (In)Justice, published by Edward Elgar. To learn more and to enroll, visit /Reconstruction.Īdapted from “Never Get Over It: Night-Riding’s Imprint on African American Victims” by Kidada Williams, in Julian Maxwell Hayter and George R. This article supplements Reconstruction, a Slate Academy.
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