The Red Shirts or Redshirts of the Southern United States were white supremacist paramilitary terrorist groups that were active in the late 19th century in the last years of, and after the end of, the Reconstruction era of the United States. Red Shirt groups originated in Mississippi in 1875, when politically conservative private terror units adopted red shirts to make themselves more visible and threatening to Southern progressives, both whites and freedmen. Similar groups in the Carolinas also adopted red shirts.