Hurrah for Hampton!: Black Red Shirts in South Carolina During Reconstruction

Edmund Lee Drago does a good job in his use of primary sources to create what is essentiually a docmuentary history of the Black Red Shirts. To novices-The "Red Shirts" of South Carolina formed after the KKK was outlawed as the terrorist schock troops desgined to get the (mostly Black) Republicans out of power during the Reconstruction era. Sadly, it worked. Dr. Drago disscusses the littel-known fact that a number of these men were actually Black! He explains why this has not been publicized over the years (and not JUST for the obvious reasons) and provides us with transcripts of trial testimonies of the political violence of Reconstruction-era South Carolina as well as WPA Slave Narrative interviews with ex-slaves in the 1930s who rode with the Red Shirts in their youth. Since the latter two come from the own words of the participants, it adds to the value as I am personally quite fond of books that use documentary histories and books of obscure history. As is the case of Larry Koger's "Black Slaveowners" and a book I once read (whose title I forget) about men of remote Jewish ancestry who served as Nazis, this goes to show that history does not always follow nice neat lines of logic.