Wearing white robes and trying to restore the white supremacy were confederate veterans known as the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK would gather in groups to reunite and have ceremonies in which the cross was burned to ignite their bodies with the glow of the fire which was their interpretation of the  spirit of christ reaching out to them. The KKK terrorized african-americans due to the fact that they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, which caused the klan to kill african-americans by lynching them where their bodies were to be found; this would allow people to know that the klan existed and it wanted its powers back.