Interviewer’s Comment

Badgett’s distinctions between jayhawkers, Ku Klux, patrollers, and Ku Klux Klan are most interesting.

I have been slow to catch it.  All my life, I have heard persons with ex-slave background refer to the activities of the Ku Klux among slaves prior to 1865.  I always thought that they had the Klux Klan and the patrollers confused.

Badgett’s definite and clear-cut memories, however, lead me to believe that many of the Negroes who were slaves used the word Ku Klux to denote a type of persons who stole slaves.  It was evidently in use before it was applied to the Ku Klux Klan.

The words “Ku Klux” and “Ku Klux Klan” are used indiscriminately in current conversation and literature.  It is also true that many persons in the present do, and in the past did, refer to the Ku Klux Klan simply as “Ku Klux.”

It is a matter of record that the organization did not at first bear the name “Ku Klux Klan” throughout the South.  The name “Ku Klux” seems to have grown in application as the organization changed from a moral association of the best citizens of the South and gradually came under the control of lawless persons with lawless methods—­whipping and murdering.  It is antecedently reasonable that the change in names accompanying a change in policy would be due to a fitness in the prior use of the name.

The recent use of the name seems mostly imitation and propaganda.

Histories, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, in general, do not record a meaning of the term Ku Klux as prior to the Reconstruction period.

Circumstances of Interview

State—­Arkansas

Name of worker—­Samuel S. Taylor

Address—­Little Rock, Arkansas

Date—­December, 1938

Subject—­Ex-slave

1.  Name and address of informant—­Jeff Bailey, 713 W. Ninth Street, Little Rock.

2.  Date and time of interview—­

3.  Place of interview—­713 W. Ninth Street, Little Rock.

4.  Name and address of person, if any, who put you in touch with informant—­

5.  Name and address of person, if any, accompanying you—­

6.  Description of room, house, surroundings, etc.

Personal History of Informant

State—­Arkansas

Name of worker—­Samuel S. Taylor

Address—­Little Rock, Arkansas

Date—­December, 1938

Subject—­Ex-slave

Name and address of informant—­Jeff Bailey, 713 W. Ninth Street, Little
Rock.

1.  Ancestry—­father, Jeff Wells; mother, Tilda Bailey.

2.  Place and date of birth—­born in 1861 in Monticello, Arkansas.