often exploited this resentment for their own economic benefit. For example, some industries used black workers as strikebreakers during labor strikes, pitting black people and immigrants against each other in an effort to prevent unionization: Stories of black strikebreakers were carried by numerous newspapers in Illinois. The disproportionate coverage of these instances fueled white antagonism against the black workers. In 1898, labor violence broke out in what was called the Battle of Virden, resulting in 11 deaths. Springfield's immigrants were anxious about competing with the city's black minority, and the city's native whites worried about growing political power among the city's black people. Black people had no allies among the whites, and were caught between the suspicions of native-born and immigrants. Black men as "menaces" Prior to the Civil War there had been some degree of tolerance for sexual relationships between black men and white women. However, after the war, keeping the races separate became essential in maintaining the racial hierarchy of white supremacy, because black men gained suffrage after the War, granting them political power to be social and economic competitors with white men. During Reconstruction, black male sexuality became a battle cry of Southern politicians decrying "negro domination", warning of the perils of racial equality. The idea of manhood was synonymous with the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. Whites began framing black manhood with sexual connotations, conflating the political and economic agency of black men with sexual agency (framed as "aggressive" and "transgressive"), from which whites, particularly white women, needed to be protected. Politics and black manhood became increasingly intertwined, even being debated on the floor of the United States Congress. In the lead up to the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1872, whites who testified before Congress exhibited "extreme anxiety" about sexual relations between black men and white women, with testimony linking to fears of black men's political and economic independence. Rape of white women, it was argued, was the natural proclivity of black men without slavery to restrain them; free black men were commonly equated to unchained animals ("black brutes") who lacked human intelligence and could, therefore, not be entrusted with the right to vote. Conversely, black women, who were routinely raped by white men, resulting in a population of over 1 million mulattos, were deemed as lacking sexual morals, casting the entire race as void of morality and intelligence, so that