BROADCASTS.com

As it is in much of the South, Reconstruction\xa0is one of Spartanburg's least understood historical periods. A tumultuous time that is often glossed over, sandwiched between the Civil War and our area's well-covered industrialization\xa0and rise as a textile manufacturing powerhouse, Reconstruction in the Upstate was a bloody time when the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups terrorized African Americans through beatings, lynchings, and intimidation, all with the intent of stripping away political power and ensuring that recently freed former slaves would remain second-class citizens. Ultimately, the tactics were successful, helping to initiate an era of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement that would last for generations.\xa0 Now a local theater project, curated by Anna Abhau Elliott and Crystal Tennille Irby, seeks to tell part of that story.\xa0\xa0is a performance based on 1871 Congressional Joint Select Committee testimony of residents living in Spartanburg County who were terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan. For the project, interviews were adapted from the committee's report, part of a Federal investigation in which three Northern Congressmen interviewed freedmen, political organizers, white, black, rich, poor, town folks, and country folks throughout the South. Today on the podcast, we're talking with Elliott and Irby about the project and about this seldom understood time in Spartanburg's history.