The Reconstruction of Wyatt Outlaw

In one of the better passages of The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw, the authors note how, despite the racy name, back in the nineteenth century, outlaw did not necessarily mean a criminal,but literally someone who was outside the law — in many cases because the law wouldn’t or couldn’t protect them. And the actual Wyatt Outlaw only had that name because he (probably) lived as a freeman with a white family whose ancestors bore that name because they lived the kinds of lives where they couldn’t count on the law to help them. There’s a perverse irony in Outlaw being a civil servant trying to legitimize the government in the Reconstruction-era South, given that his main contribution to history was to be lynched around 1870 by actual outlaws in the Ku Klux Klan who eventually succeeded in retaking that government.

The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw: from Reconstruction through Black Lives Matter  
By Sylvester Allen Jr. and Belle Boggs
The University of North Carolina Press; 283 pages

The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw comes courtesy of playwright Sylvester Allen Jr., who discusses his modern Outlaw stage play in depth, and university professor Belle Boggs, who adds historical perspective to Allen’s fundamentally personal story connecting Outlaw to the present day. The book has an interesting educational structure. Wyatt Outlaw himself is minimized. Partially this is due to the fact that there’s relatively little real information about him. But the authors are also trying to build a coherent bridge from past to present with his narrative, observing how their own personal stories relate to his.

The authors are quite notieable, at points, Sylvester and Belle explicitly preface sections of the text with their own names, to make it clear when they are discussing their own stories rather than speaking in the broader third-person voice common to most historical nonfiction. There’s not as much genre-hopping as you might expect from this structure. Allen and Boggs briefly use “I” to discuss events they personally witnessed and research they personally conducted.

In principle, I like a lot of what The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw is doing, presenting itself more as a conversation than a purely informational text. Much historical nonfiction concentrates exclusively on the past, leaving contemporary relevance implicit. This makes the past seem alien, when in fact people then were people just like us — with blindnesses, yes, but with motives that should be parsed in context. Before he was a legend, Outlaw was just a guy who took up public service because he was respected in his community.

The main problem with The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw is the frame the authors use to connect the Reconstruction era to the present: the January 6 insurrection. There are several problems with this comparison. First, it is surprisingly difficult to make January 6 feel like a genuine existential threat to democracy even in documentary form.

None of this is to suggest that January 6 wasn’t significant. But the comparison with Outlaw’s story is deeply flawed. Aside from the word “insurrection” being applied to both events, they share little structural similarity. The Ku Klux Klan’s targeted assassination squads engaged in a months-long terror campaign, carefully providing material and legal resistance to their members, and ultimately succeeded not only in winning elections but in impeaching Governor Holden, who had dared to fight back. To mention January 6 — with its ignorant yahoos who barely knew what they were doing — in the same breath feels insulting to the nineteenth century victims of the KKK.

To be fair, the book doesn’t only discuss January 6. As the subtitle suggests, Black Lives Matter also figures prominently. But this comparison runs into its own problems. Yes, Black Lives Matter brings attention to systemic racism, but it is primarily a protest against police conduct, not paramilitary terror squads. While the book predates them, the ongoing ICE protests offer a closer analogy, as they involve a different kind of policing that state authorities could theoretically mobilize against.

Even so, this framing is difficult to reconcile with Wyatt Outlaw himself, whose historical importance lies largely in the fact that his assassination helped prompt President Grant to invoke the Insurrection Act against the Klan’s reign of terror. There is no useful modern parallel. Wyatt Outlaw had institutional support, and it failed him. Allen and Boggs never fully explore what institutional support means today, or whether it would fare any better.

One line mentions “surprising” civil rights progress under the Biden administration but offers no reason why it would be surprising nor examples beyond the removal of Confederate statues. While that is not nothing, as the text itself acknowledges, those statues were largely victory laps taken by the Klan long after they had already won. Their removal is very literally symbolic.

Still, the dark stain of Southern apologism around the Civil War’s so-called “noble failed cause” remains widely taught in American schools. There is a case to be made that the Civil War should not be taught as a Northern victory at all. The South achieved nearly everything it wanted for a century afterward through insurgency campaigns like the one that killed Wyatt Outlaw. Allen and Boggs cite thousands murdered, emphasizing not numbers but brutality: Joseph Holmes killed on courthouse steps while reporting a crime; officials murdered in their homes while families watched.

What The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw illuminates most clearly is how seriously Reconstruction-era Black leaders took civil rights, even under credible threat of death. Yet while Outlaw is a martyr, he does not rise to the mythic proportions implied by the title. As cruel as it sounds, he failed. He was not the first or last to do so. What distinguishes later civil rights movements was the learning process — understanding what went wrong.

The Black Panther Party built structures independent of the state. Malcolm X advocated militancy as deterrence. Martin Luther King Jr. used mass participation and public pressure. Any coherent path from Reconstruction to Black Lives Matter must pass through these moments. The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw largely skips them. None of King, X, or Black Panthers even appear in the index.

Without even a cursory bridge, the analogy between Reconstruction-era terror and Black Lives Matter relies heavily on Confederate imagery — imagery whose modern bearers might be shocked to learn that their forebears behaved more like gangsters than patriots.

To the authors’ credit, they emphasize the lie of “states’ rights” doctrine and note its function as propaganda. Authority itself is never inherently just. Both Outlaw’s North Carolina and the one ruled by the Ku Klux Klan were equally “legitimate” in the eyes of the law. The book’s mistake is assuming authority naturally bends toward justice.

The book ends on an optimistic note about modern protest, implying that because Outlaw was killed to suppress the vote, the vote must be powerful. Unfortunately, faith in the system didn’t save Outlaw, and it is unlikely to save us. The failure of systemic change since George Floyd’s murder haunts this narrative as much as Outlaw himself.