 The Red Shirts disrupted Republican rallies, intimidated or assassinated black leaders, and discouraged and suppressed black voting at the polls.Men wearing red shirts appeared in Charleston, South Carolina on August 25, 1876, during a Democratic torchlight parade.This was to mock the "waving the bloody shirt" speech by Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, in which he was falsely claimed to have held up a shirt stained with the blood of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction Era.