Camilla, Georgia, became the site of a racially motivated political riot on Saturday, September 19, 1868. Determined to promote political and social reform with an organized rally, at least 150 freedmen, along with Republican political candidates, advanced toward the town’s courthouse square. Local citizens warned the black and white activists of the impending violence and demanded that they forfeit their guns, even though carrying weapons was customary at the time. The marchers refused to give up their guns and continued to the courthouse square, where local whites fired upon them. This assault forced the Republicans and freedmen to retreat as locals gave chase, killing an estimated fifteen protestors and wounding forty others. The Camilla Massacre was the culmination of smaller acts of violence committed by white inhabitants that had plagued southwest Georgia since the end of the Civil War. Local whites had individually attacked freedmen and white Republicans for three years without repercussion. That lack of punishment assured the perpetrators that violence was a legitimate way to oppose black activism. At the same time, Camilla was part of a broader attempt across the South to keep former slaves and their Republican leaders in line. Contextualizing the event within the framework of other acts of political mob violence during Reconstruction demonstrates that knowledge of no forthcoming punishment, the oppression of blacks’ voting rights and an inherent racist tradition motivated southern whites to retaliate against freedmen, scalawags and carpetbaggers. At times, whites needed no political motive to attack, but this thesis explores instances when southern whites perpetrated violence on blacks and attempted to justify it using politics since a large quantity of violence occurred at campaign speeches or near elections. Whites who provoked violence used aggression to challenge gains made by blacks with the direct goal of returning the South to a racially oppressive utopia or simply ridding the region of Republicans. Although cut from the same cloth, these people had no recorded affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, but they orchestrated a systematic pattern of reactionary violence that peaked during certain occasions.