Source

Intimidating Former Slaves

Classification

primary

Type

other

Date

1868-06-04

Citation

1868

Rights

public-domain

By 1868, a variety of armed groups wearing disguises had emerged in Texas to intimidate former slaves, burning crops, stealing horses, and assaulting and murdering Black Texans. This ritual questionnaire, used to initiate new members of one such group, the Knights of the Golden Circle, ties membership explicitly to a pledge of white racial superiority and political exclusion of Black Texans.

Notion's page title for this source reads "Intimidating Former Slaves (1860)", but the ritual document itself is dated June 4, 1868, in its own citation string -- a real discrepancy in the source corpus (not a migration error) between the page title's year and the cited document's year. This record uses the citation's more specific date rather than the title's; the discrepancy is preserved in provenance.notes rather than silently resolved.