Freedom on Trial

The First Post-Civil War Battle over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression

By: Scott Farris

Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright

The Confederacy lost the Civil War but quickly began to win the peace when a mysterious organization arose called the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux, as it was then called, sought to restore white supremacy by terrorizing the formerly enslaved to prevent them from voting or owning firearms. To support Black resistance to the KKK's campaign of murder and mayhem, President Ulysses S. Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus in large portions of South Carolina and sent the famed 7th Cavalry to make mass arrests.

Grant's new attorney general, the first former Confederate to serve in a presidential Cabinet and an ardent advocate for Black equality, Amos T. Akerman, aggressively prosecuted the Ku Klux in a series of sensational trials that shocked the nation and forced a reckoning regarding just how much the Civil War and the recently enacted 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution had changed America and its notions of citizenship.

Highlighting forgotten Black and White civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author's own great-grandfather's crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn.

©2020 Scott Farris (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

The story of my family

This story is about my family. I want to thank the author for doing this.

Fascinating story; very well-read

Wild story. It feels like it should become a movie or HBO series. The author seems to have come across some previously unnoticed historical sources that provide a very "on-the-ground" look at Reconstruction-era South. Will definitely listen to again soon. The reader did an excellent job.