Answer:
Southern people who served in the confederate army, who were still resentfull, with bad blood and kept grudges after losing the war, hated slave descendants who were already freed and emancipated, intended to spoil the situation and diminish the value and quality of slave descendants rights by the use of cruel intimidation practices to harass them and persecute them, all basically to dissent from the new country's standpoint, which are repercussions and side effects out of the socio political conflict, and this was one of the backlashes from xenophobic consevatives who liked things better in "their good old days" when white supremacy was more explicit and accepted, so they started resisting social change up until these days in some form.