Spectacle lynching and pogroms directed at African-Americans accelerated into the 1890s and really took off across the South in the 1920s. After Civil War Reconstruction failed, the Ku Klux Klan had gone dormant with the onset of Jim Crow because there was no need for a faith-based insurgent group when the local governments promoted white supremacy. Nobody wore robes at the Comanche purge because the extremest were in sync with enough public opinion. In 1915, Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons brought out the flag, a sword, and the Bible on Stone Mountain, Georgia and tried to bring back the klan. There wasn’t much interest because the economy was good and it rained. By 1920 it was a very different story and klan membership shot up to five million. What had happened? During WWI President Woodrow Wilson stoked bogus treasonous fears and the Red Scare of Communism which lasted long after the war; then President Wilson had a stroke during which his wife concealed and together with a few others, made dingbat decisions for a year, contributing to a horrendous recession; 1918-1919 were drought years (of course) and the knockout punch – in 1918-1919 , the misnamed Spanish Flu which swept the globe, killing fifty million people and around 500,000 in the United States; and the winter of 1917-1918 was brutal. These years were (probably more stressful than today) happened just as the boll weevil ruined cotton production and high wartime wheat prices collapsed, as did the Erath and Comanche populations as young people moved to Fort Worth and Dallas, where they developed a taste for motor cars, speak-easies, female employment, and evolution taught in the public schools. [I obtained a stack of recent KKK newspapers and had my history class list the most frequent articles – the winner was The Horrors of Women who Worked Outside the Home.] So. What did the Stephenville City Council decide to do on the night of April 22, 1922? They voted to exhume the graves of black pioneers from the West End Cemetery.