Ku Klux Klan: Difference between revisions
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The '''Ku Klux Klan''' ('''KKK'''), or simply "'''the Klan'''", is the name of three distinct movements in the [[United States]]. The first began violence against [[African American]]s in the [[Southern United States|South]] during the [[Reconstruction Era]] of the 1860s, and was disbanded by 1869.<ref name=SPLC_History>{{cite book|author1=Klanwatch Project|title=Ku Klux Klan: a History of Racism and Violence|date=2011|publisher=Southern Poverty Law Center|location=Montgomery, Alabama|page=15|edition=Sixth|url=http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/Ku-Klux-Klan-A-History-of-Racism.pdf|accessdate=16 December 2014|ref=SPLC_History|format=Pamphlet|quote=Whatever the actual date, it is clear that as an organized, cohesive body across the South, the Ku Klux Klan had ceased to exist by the end of 1869.}}</ref> The second was a very large, controversial, nationwide organization in the 1920s. The current manifestation consists of numerous small unconnected groups that use the KKK name. They have all emphasized racism, secrecy and distinctive costumes. All have called for purification of American society, and all are considered part of [[right-wing extremism]].<ref>Rory McVeigh, ''The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics'' (2009)</ref><ref>Matthew N. Lyons, ''Right-Wing Populism in America'' (2000) ch 3, 5, 13</ref> |
The '''Ku Klux Klan''' ('''KKK'''), or simply "'''the Klan'''", is the name of a terrorist organization guilty of starting three distinct movements in the [[United States]]. The first began violence against [[African American]]s in the [[Southern United States|South]] during the [[Reconstruction Era]] of the 1860s, and was disbanded by 1869.<ref name=SPLC_History>{{cite book|author1=Klanwatch Project|title=Ku Klux Klan: a History of Racism and Violence|date=2011|publisher=Southern Poverty Law Center|location=Montgomery, Alabama|page=15|edition=Sixth|url=http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/Ku-Klux-Klan-A-History-of-Racism.pdf|accessdate=16 December 2014|ref=SPLC_History|format=Pamphlet|quote=Whatever the actual date, it is clear that as an organized, cohesive body across the South, the Ku Klux Klan had ceased to exist by the end of 1869.}}</ref> The second was a very large, controversial, nationwide organization in the 1920s. The current manifestation consists of numerous small unconnected groups that use the KKK name. They have all emphasized racism, secrecy and distinctive costumes. All have called for purification of American society, and all are considered part of [[right-wing extremism]].<ref>Rory McVeigh, ''The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics'' (2009)</ref><ref>Matthew N. Lyons, ''Right-Wing Populism in America'' (2000) ch 3, 5, 13</ref> |
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The current manifestation is classified as a [[hate group]] by the [[Anti-Defamation League]] and the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]].<ref>Both the [http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/ Anti-Defamation League] and the [http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan/ Southern Poverty Law Center] include it in their lists of hate groups. See also Brian Levin, "Cyberhate: A Legal and Historical Analysis of Extremists' Use of Computer Networks in America" in Perry, Barbara, editor. ''Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader''. p. 112 [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kUa5r4aUCYIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Hate+and+Bias+Crime:+A+Reader&client=firefox-a&sig=ACfU3U0BTv0Z6yF16DVSMxKh7GOzZQKc5Q#v=onepage&q=&f=false/ p. Google Books].</ref> It is estimated to have between 5,000 and 8,000 members as of 2012.<ref name="Ku Klux Klan"/> |
The current manifestation is classified as a [[hate group]] by the [[Anti-Defamation League]] and the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]].<ref>Both the [http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/ Anti-Defamation League] and the [http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan/ Southern Poverty Law Center] include it in their lists of hate groups. See also Brian Levin, "Cyberhate: A Legal and Historical Analysis of Extremists' Use of Computer Networks in America" in Perry, Barbara, editor. ''Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader''. p. 112 [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kUa5r4aUCYIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Hate+and+Bias+Crime:+A+Reader&client=firefox-a&sig=ACfU3U0BTv0Z6yF16DVSMxKh7GOzZQKc5Q#v=onepage&q=&f=false/ p. Google Books].</ref> It is estimated to have between 5,000 and 8,000 members as of 2012.<ref name="Ku Klux Klan"/> |
Revision as of 01:08, 11 April 2015
![]() Ku Klux Klan's emblem | |
In existence | |
---|---|
1st Klan | 1865–1870s |
2nd Klan | 1915–1944 |
3rd Klan | 1946–present |
Members | |
1st Klan | unknown |
2nd Klan | 3,000,000–6,000,000[1] (peaked in 1920–25) |
3rd Klan | 5,000-8,000[2] |
Properties | |
Origin | United States of America |
Political position | Far-right racism |
Religion | Protestantism |
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or simply "the Klan", is the name of a terrorist organization guilty of starting three distinct movements in the United States. The first began violence against African Americans in the South during the Reconstruction Era of the 1860s, and was disbanded by 1869.[3] The second was a very large, controversial, nationwide organization in the 1920s. The current manifestation consists of numerous small unconnected groups that use the KKK name. They have all emphasized racism, secrecy and distinctive costumes. All have called for purification of American society, and all are considered part of right-wing extremism.[4][5]
The current manifestation is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.[6] It is estimated to have between 5,000 and 8,000 members as of 2012.[2]
The first Ku Klux Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. Members made their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities.[7][8] The second KKK flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, and adopted a standard white costume (sales of which together with initiation fees financed the movement) and code words as the first Klan, while adding cross burnings and mass parades.[9] The third KKK emerged after 1950 and was associated with opposing the Civil Rights Movement and progress among minorities. The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent reference to the America's "Anglo-Saxon" blood, harking back to 19th-century nativism.[10] Though most members of the KKK saw themselves as holding to American values and Christian morality, virtually every Christian denomination officially denounced the Ku Klux Klan.[11]
Overview: Three Klans
First KKK
The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by six veterans of the Confederate Army.[12] The name is probably derived from the Greek word kuklos (κύκλος) which means circle.[13]
Although there was little organizational structure above the local level, similar groups rose across the South and adopted the same name and methods.[14] Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement during the Reconstruction era in the United States. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes.[15] Prosecution of Klan crimes and enforcement of the Force Acts suppressed Klan activity. In 1874 and later, newly organized and openly active paramilitary organizations, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, started a fresh round of violence aimed at suppressing blacks' voting and running Republicans out of office. These contributed to segregationist white Democrats regaining political power in all the Southern states by 1877.
Second KKK
In 1915, the second Klan was founded in Atlanta, Georgia. Starting in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of recruiting (which paid most of the initiation fee and costume charges as commissions to the organizers) and grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions of urban industrialization and vastly increased immigration, its membership grew most rapidly in cities, and spread out of the South to the Midwest and West. The second KKK preached "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality and better enforcement of prohibition. Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti-Catholicism and nativism.[16] Its appeal was directed exclusively at white Protestants.[17] Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses and carried out other violent activities. The violent episodes were generally in the South.[18]
The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.[19] Klan organizers also operated in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan in 1926-28, where members of the Klan attacked immigrants from Eastern Europe.[20][21]
Third KKK
The "Ku Klux Klan" name was used by a numerous independent local groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, they often forged alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama.[22] Several members of KKK groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Today, researchers estimate that there may be 150 Klan chapters with upwards of 5,000 members nationwide.[23]
Today, many sources classify the Klan as a "subversive or terrorist organization".[24][25][26][27] In April 1997, FBI agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and to blow up a natural gas processing plant.[28] In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the Klan to be a terrorist organization.[29] In 2004, a professor at the University of Louisville began a campaign to have the Klan declared a terrorist organization in order to ban it from campus.[30]
First Klan: 1865–1874
Creation and naming
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Kkk-carpetbagger-cartoon.jpg/250px-Kkk-carpetbagger-cartoon.jpg)
Six well-educated Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, during the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War.[31][32] The name was formed by combining the Greek kyklos (κύκλος, circle) with clan.[33] The group was known for a short time as the "Kuklux Clan". The Ku Klux Klan was one of a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, which included the Southern Cross in New Orleans (1865) and the Knights of the White Camelia (1867) in Louisiana.[34]
Historians generally see the KKK as part of the post Civil War insurgent violence related not only to the high number of veterans in the population, but also to their effort to control the dramatically changed social situation by using extrajudicial means to restore white supremacy. In 1866, Mississippi Governor William L. Sharkey reported that disorder, lack of control and lawlessness were widespread; in some states armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will. The Klan used public violence against blacks as intimidation. They burned houses, and attacked and killed blacks, leaving their bodies on the roads.[35]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Anti-kkk-cartoon.jpg/220px-Anti-kkk-cartoon.jpg)
At an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting up to a national headquarters. Since most of the Klan's members were veterans, they were used to the hierarchical structure of the organization, but the Klan never operated under this centralized structure. Local chapters and bands were highly independent.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/NathanBedfordForrest.jpg/175px-NathanBedfordForrest.jpg)
Former Confederate Brigadier General George Gordon developed the Prescript, or Klan dogma. The Prescript suggested elements of white supremacist belief. For instance, an applicant should be asked if he was in favor of "a white man's government", "the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights."[36] The latter is a reference to the Ironclad Oath, which stripped the vote from white persons who refused to swear that they had not borne arms against the Union. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became Grand Wizard, claiming to be the Klan's national leader.[12][37]
In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments, people like Tennessee governor Brownlow and other ″carpetbaggers″ and ″scalawags″.[38] He argued that many southerners believed that blacks were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues.[39] One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."[40]
Despite Gordon’s and Forrest’s work, local Klan units never accepted the Prescript and continued to operate autonomously. There were never hierarchical levels or state headquarters. Klan members used violence to settle old feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore white dominance in the disrupted postwar society. The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership:
- "Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen."[41]
Historian Eric Foner observed:
In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.[42]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg/38px-Wikisource-logo.svg.png)
To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks.[42] The Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a "reign of terror against Republican leaders both black and white. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions."[43]
Activities
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/Mississippi_ku_klux.jpg/170px-Mississippi_ku_klux.jpg)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg/38px-Wikisource-logo.svg.png)
Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks. Many of them operated in small towns and rural areas where people otherwise knew each other's faces, and sometimes still recognized the attackers. "The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night."[45] The Ku Klux Klan night riders "sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious blacks. Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously."[46]
The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen's Bureau workers. When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in society. Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks. "Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites." Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. "Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault."[47]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/George_W._Ashburn.jpg/200px-George_W._Ashburn.jpg)
Klan violence worked to suppress black voting. More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact.[48]
In the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock. By the November presidential election, Klan intimidation led to suppression of the Republican vote and only one person voted for Ulysses S. Grant.[49]
Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties. Freedmen's Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen's beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies.[50]
Milder encounters also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry:[51]
One of these teachers (Miss Allen of Illinois), whose school was at Cotton Gin Port in Monroe County, was visited ... between one and two o'clock in the morning on March 1871, by about fifty men mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long white robe and his face was covered by a loose mask with scarlet stripes. She was ordered to get up and dress which she did at once and then admitted to her room the captain and lieutenant who in addition to the usual disguise had long horns on their heads and a sort of device in front. The lieutenant had a pistol in his hand and he and the captain sat down while eight or ten men stood inside the door and the porch was full. They treated her "gentlemanly and quietly" but complained of the heavy school-tax, said she must stop teaching and go away and warned her that they never gave a second notice. She heeded the warning and left the county.
By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease.[52] Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way to avoid prosecution for freelance violence. Many influential southern Democrats feared that Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to turn against it.[53] There were outlandish claims made, such as Georgian B. H. Hill stating "that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain."[52]
Resistance
Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized "the anti-Ku Klux". They put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks formed their own defense in Bennettsville, South Carolina and patrolled the streets to protect their homes.[54]
National sentiment gathered to crack down on the Klan, even though some Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan really existed or believed that it was just a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors.[55] Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.[56]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg/38px-Wikisource-logo.svg.png)
In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Scott convened a Congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. They accumulated 12 volumes of horrifying testimony. In February, former Union General and Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act). This added to the enmity that southern white Democrats bore toward him.[57] While the bill was being considered, further violence in the South swung support for its passage. The Governor of South Carolina appealed for federal troops to assist his efforts in keeping control of the state. A riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse were reported, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.[58] The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed President Ulysses S. Grant to suspend Habeas Corpus.[59]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/BenFrankButler.jpg/170px-BenFrankButler.jpg)
In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation. The Ku Klux Klan Act was used by the Federal government together with the 1870 Force Act, another act that President Grant signed, to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution. Under the 1871 Klan Act, after the Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve, President Grant issued a suspension of Habeas Corpus, and stationed Federal troops in close to 9 South Carolina counties. The Klansmen were apprehended and prosecuted in court. Judges Hugh Lennox Bond and George S. Bryan presided over the trial of Ku Klux Klan members in Columbia, South Carolina during December 1871.[60] The defendants were sentenced to five years to three months incarceration with fines.[61] More African Americans served on juries in Federal court than were selected for local or state juries, so they had a chance to participate in the process.[59][62] In the crackdown, hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned.
End of first Klan
Although Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and that he could muster 40,000 Klansmen within five days' notice, as a secret or "invisible" group, it had no membership rosters, no chapters, and no local officers. It was difficult for observers to judge its actual membership.[63] It had created a sensation by the dramatic nature of its masked forays and because of its many murders.
In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist organization".[64] It issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina.[65] Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan's costume for anonymity, to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence. Forrest called for the Klan to disband in 1869, arguing that the Klan was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace".[66] Stanley Horn, a Klan historian argues that "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment".[67] Moreover, a Georgia based reporter wrote in 1870 that, "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux".[68]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/NCG-WilliamHolden.jpg/170px-NCG-WilliamHolden.jpg)
Others may have agreed with lynching as a way of keeping dominance over black men. In many states, officials were reluctant to use black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised.[62] When Republican Governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, it added to his unpopularity. Combined with violence and fraud at the polls, the Republicans lost their majority in the state legislature. Disaffection with Holden's actions led to white Democratic legislators' impeaching Holden and removing him from office, but their reasons were numerous.[69]
Klan operations ended in South Carolina [70] and gradually withered away throughout the rest of the South where it had gradually been faltering in prominence. Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions.[71]
In some areas, other local paramilitary organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs continued to intimidate and murder black political leaders.[72]
In 1874, organized white paramilitary groups were formed in the Deep South: the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in Mississippi, North and South Carolina. They campaigned openly to turn Republicans out of office, intimidated and killed black leaders, tried to disrupt organizing and suppressed black voting. They were out in force during the campaigns and elections of 1874 and 1876, contributing to the conservative Democrats regaining power in 1876, against a background of electoral violence.
Shortly after, in United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the Supreme Court ruled that the Force Act of 1870 did not give the Federal government power to regulate private actions, but only those by state governments. The result was that as the century went on, African Americans were at the mercy of hostile state governments that refused to intervene against private violence and paramilitary groups.
Whereas the number of indictments across the South was large, the number of cases leading to prosecution and sentencing was relatively small. The overloaded federal courts were not able to meet the demands of trying such a tremendous number of cases, a situation that led to selective pardoning. By late 1873 and 1874, most of the charges against Klansmen were dropped although new cases continued to be prosecuted for several more years. Most of those sentenced had either served their terms or had been pardoned by 1875.
The Supreme Court of the United States eviscerated the Ku Klux Act in 1876 by ruling that the federal government could no longer prosecute individuals although states would be forced to comply with federal civil rights provisions. Republicans passed a second civil rights act (the Civil Rights Act of 1875) to grant equal access to public facilities and other housing accommodations regardless of race. Ironically, the Klan during this period served to further Northern reconstruction efforts, as Ku Klux violence provided the political climate needed to pass civil rights protections for blacks. Although the Ku Klux Act of 1871 dismantled the first Klan, Southern whites formed other, similar groups that kept blacks away from the polls through intimidation and physical violence. Reconstruction ended with the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who suspended the federal military occupation of the South; yet blacks still found themselves without the basic civil liberties that Congressional Republicans had sought to secure.[73]
In 1882, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional. It ruled that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend to the right to regulate against private conspiracies.[74]
Klan costumes, also called "regalia", disappeared by the early 1870s (Wade 1987, p. 109). The fact that the Klan did not exist for decades was shown when Simmons's 1915 recreation of the Klan attracted only two aging "former Reconstruction Klansmen." All other members were new.[75] By 1872, the Klan was broken as an organization.[76]
Second Klan: 1915–1944
Refounding in 1915
In 1915 the film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologising and glorifying the first Klan and its endeavors. The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta, with fifteen "charter members".[77] Its growth was based on a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, prohibitionist and antisemitic agenda, which developed in response to contemporary social tensions. The new organization and chapters adopted regalia featured in The Birth of a Nation.
The Birth of a Nation
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Birth-of-a-nation-poster-color.jpg/220px-Birth-of-a-nation-poster-color.jpg)
Director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan. His film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the standardized white costume and the lighted cross, are derived from the film. Its imagery was based on Dixon's romanticized concept of old England and Scotland, as portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott. The film's influence was enhanced by a purported endorsement by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner. A Hollywood press agent claimed that after seeing the film Wilson said, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Historians doubt he said it.[78] Wilson's remarks generated controversy, and he tried to remain aloof. On April 30, his staff issued a denial. Wilson's aide, Joseph Tumulty, said, "the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it."[79]
The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons on top of Stone Mountain. It was a small local organization until 1921. Simmons said he had been inspired by the original Klan's Prescripts, written in 1867 by Confederate veteran George Gordon, but they were never adopted by the first Klan.[80]
Social factors
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Ku_Klux_Klan_Virginia_1922_Parade.jpg/200px-Ku_Klux_Klan_Virginia_1922_Parade.jpg)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/KKK_-_St_Patricks_Dau.jpg/220px-KKK_-_St_Patricks_Dau.jpg)
The Second Klan saw threats from every direction. A religious tone was present in its activities; "two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers," says historian Brian R. Farmer.[81] Much of the Klan's energy went into guarding "the home;" the historian Kathleen Blee said its members wanted to protect "the interests of white womanhood."[82] The pamphlet ABC of the Invisible Empire, published in Atlanta by Simmons in 1917, identified the Klan's goals as "to shield the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood; to maintain white supremacy; to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism; and by a practical devotedness to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles and ideals of a pure Americanism."[83]
The second Klan emerged during the nadir of American race relations, but much of its growth was in response to new issues such as urbanization, immigration and industrialization. The massive immigration of Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe led to fears among Protestants about the new peoples, and especially about job and social competition. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North stoked job and housing competition and racism by whites in Midwestern and Western industrial cities. The second Klan achieved its greatest political power in Indiana; it was active throughout the South, Midwest, especially Michigan; and in the West, in Colorado and Oregon. The migration of both African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern and Midwestern cities increased social tensions.
The Klan became most prominent in urbanizing cities with high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit, Memphis, and Dayton in the Upper South and Midwest; and Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston in the South. In Michigan, close to 50% of the Klan members lived in Detroit, where they numbered 40,000; they were concerned about with finite housing possibilities, rapid social change, and competition for jobs with European immigrants and Southerners both black and white.[84]
The founder of the new Klan, William J. Simmons, joined twelve different fraternal organizations. He recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, and consciously modeled the Klan after fraternal organizations.[85]
Klan organizers, called "Kleagles", signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and received KKK costumes in return. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials. When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a huge rally, often with burning crosses, and perhaps presented a Bible to a local Protestant preacher. He left town with the money collected. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.
The Klan's growth was also affected by the mobilization for World War I and postwar tensions, especially in the cities, where strangers came up against each other more often and competed for housing and jobs. Southern whites resented the arming of black soldiers. Black veterans did not want to return to second-class status in the South. Some black veterans in the South were lynched while still in uniform, after returning from overseas service.[86]
Activities
Simmons initially met with little success in either recruiting members or in raising money, and the Klan remained a small operation in the Atlanta area until 1920, when he handed its day-to-day activities over to two professional publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke.[87] The revived Klan appealed to new members based on current social tensions, and stressed responses to fears raised by immigration and mass migrations within industrializing cities: it became anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant and later anti-Communist. It presented itself as a fraternal, nativist and strenuously patriotic organization; and its leaders emphasized support for vigorous enforcement of prohibition laws. It expanded membership dramatically; by the 1920s, most of its members lived in the Midwest and West. It had a national base by 1925.
Religion was a major selling point. Baker argues that Klansmen seriously embraced Protestantism as an essential component of their white supremacist, anti-Catholic, and paternalistic formulation of American democracy and national culture. Their cross was a religious symbol, and their ritual honored Bibles and local ministers. No nationally prominent religious leader said he was a Klan member.[88]
Prohibition
Historians agree that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over prohibition.[89] The historian Prendergast says that the KKK's "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation".[90] The Klan opposed bootleggers, sometimes with violence. In 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas. The national Klan office was established in Dallas, Texas, but Little Rock, Arkansas was the home of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. The first head of this auxiliary was a former president of the Arkansas WCTU.[91][verification needed] Membership in the Klan and in other prohibition groups overlapped, and they often coordinated activities.[92]
Urbanization
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Theendkkk.jpg/220px-Theendkkk.jpg)
A significant characteristic of the second Klan was that it was an organization based in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in both the North and the South. In Michigan, for instance, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, where they made up more than half of the state's membership. Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class whites who were trying to protect their jobs and housing from the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who tended to be Catholic and Jewish in numbers higher than earlier groups of immigrants; and black and white migrants from the South. As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods created social tensions. Because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the U.S. Midwest. The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.[93]
In the medium-size industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts in the 1920s, the Klan ascended to power quickly but declined as a result of opposition from the Catholic Church. There was no violence and the local newspaper ridiculed Klansmen as "night-shirt knights". Half of the members were Swedish American, including some first-generation immigrants. The ethnic and religious conflicts among more recent immigrants contributed to the rise of the Klan in the city. Swedish Protestants were struggling against Irish Catholics, who had been entrenched longer, for political and ideological control of the city.[94]
For some states, historians have obtained membership rosters of some local units and matched the names against city directory and local records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big city newspapers were often hostile and ridiculed Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indiana showed the rural stereotype was false for that state:
Indiana's Klansmen represented a wide cross section of society: they were not disproportionately urban or rural, nor were they significantly more or less likely than other members of society to be from the working class, middle class, or professional ranks. Klansmen were Protestants, of course, but they cannot be described exclusively or even predominantly as fundamentalists. In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.[95]
The Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long. Membership in the Klan turned over rapidly as people found out that it was not the group they wanted. Millions joined, and at its peak in the 1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population. The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan's decline.
The burning cross
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/Ku_Klux_Klan_members_and_a_burning_cross%2C_Denver%2C_Colorado%2C_1921.jpg/220px-Ku_Klux_Klan_members_and_a_burning_cross%2C_Denver%2C_Colorado%2C_1921.jpg)
The second Klan embraced a burning Latin cross primarily as a symbol of intimidation.[96] No crosses had been used as a symbol by the first Klan. Additionally, the cross was henceforth a representation of the Klan's Christian message. Thus, its lighting during meetings was often accompanied by prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism.[97]
The practice of cross burning had been loosely based on ancient Scottish clans' burning a St. Andrew's cross (an X-shaped cross) as a beacon to muster forces for war. In The Clansman (see above), Dixon had falsely claimed that the first Klan had used fiery crosses when rallying to fight against Reconstruction. Griffith brought this image to the screen in The Birth of a Nation; he portrayed the burning cross as an upright Latin cross rather than the St. Andrew's cross. Simmons adopted the symbol wholesale from the movie, prominently displaying it at the 1915 Stone Mountain meeting. The symbol has been associated with the Klan ever since.[98]
Education
In 1921, in an attempt to gain a foothold in education, the Klan bought Lanier University, a struggling Baptist university in Atlanta. Nathan Bedford Forrest, grandson of the Confederate general by the same name, was appointed its business manager. The school was to teach "pure, 100 percent Americanism". Enrollment was dismal, and the school closed after the first year of Klan ownership.[99]
Women
By the 1920s, the KKK developed a women's auxiliary, with chapters in many areas. Its activities included participation in parades, cross lighting, lectures, rallies, and boycotts of local businesses owned by Catholics and Jews. The Women's Klan was active in promoting prohibition, stressing liquor's negative impact on wives and children. Its efforts in public schools included distributing Bibles and petitioning for the dismissal of Roman Catholic teachers. As a result of the Women's Klan's efforts, Texas would not hire Catholic teachers to work in its public schools. As scandals rocked the Klan leadership late in the 1920s, the organization's popularity among both men and women dropped off sharply.[100]
Political role
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/Klan-sheet-music.jpg/220px-Klan-sheet-music.jpg)
The members of the first Klan in the South were exclusively Democrats. The second Klan expanded with new chapters in the Midwest and West, where for a time, its members were courted by both Republicans and Democrats. The KKK state organizations endorsed candidates from either party that supported its goals; Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans to make common cause in the Midwest.
The Klan had numerous members in every part of the United States, but was particularly strong in the South and Midwest. At its peak, claimed Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas.[101] The Klan also moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it opposed Catholics.[102]
With expanded membership came election of Klan members to political office. In Indiana, members were chiefly American-born, white Protestants of many income and social levels. In the 1920s, Indiana had the most powerful Ku Klux Klan in the nation. It had a high number of members statewide (over 30% of its white male citizens[103]), and in 1924 elected the Klan member Edward Jackson as governor.[104]
Given success in state and local elections, the Klan issue contributed to the bitterly divisive 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. The leading candidates were William Gibbs McAdoo, a Protestant with a base in areas where the Klan was strong, and New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic with a base in the large cities. After weeks of stalemate, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise. Anti-Klan delegates proposed a resolution indirectly attacking the Klan; it was narrowly defeated.[105][106]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Children_with_Dr._Samuel_Green%2C_Ku_Klux_Klan_Grand_Dragon%2C_July_24%2C_1948.jpg/200px-Children_with_Dr._Samuel_Green%2C_Ku_Klux_Klan_Grand_Dragon%2C_July_24%2C_1948.jpg)
In some states, such as Alabama and California, KKK chapters had worked for political reform. In 1924, Klan members were elected to the city council in Anaheim, California. The city had been controlled by an entrenched commercial-civic elite that was mostly German American. Given their tradition of moderate social drinking, the German Americans did not strongly support prohibition laws—the mayor had been a saloon keeper. Led by the minister of the First Christian Church, the Klan represented a rising group of politically oriented non-ethnic Germans who denounced the elite as corrupt, undemocratic and self-serving. The historian Christopher Cocoltchos says the Klansmen tried to create a model, orderly community. The Klan had about 1200 members in Orange County, California. The economic and occupational profile of the pro and anti-Klan groups shows the two were similar and about equally prosperous. Klan members were Protestants, as were most of their opponents, but the latter also included many Catholic Germans. Individuals who joined the Klan had earlier demonstrated a much higher rate of voting and civic activism than did their opponents. Cocoltchos suggests that many of the individuals in Orange County joined the Klan out of that sense of civic activism. The Klan representatives easily won the local election in Anaheim in April 1924. They fired known city employees who were Catholic and replaced them with Klan appointees. The new city council tried to enforce prohibition. After its victory, the Klan chapter held large rallies and initiation ceremonies over the summer.[107]
The opposition organized, bribed a Klansman for the secret membership list, and exposed the Klansmen running in the state primaries; they defeated most of the candidates. Klan opponents in 1925 took back local government, and succeeded in a special election in recalling the Klansmen who had been elected in April 1924. The Klan in Anaheim quickly collapsed, its newspaper closed after losing a libel suit, and the minister who led the local Klavern moved to Kansas.[107]
In the South, Klan members were still Democratic, as it was a one-party region for whites. Klan chapters were closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government. Since disfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites around the start of the 20th century, the only political activity for whites took place within the Democratic Party.
In Alabama, Klan members advocated better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other political measures to benefit lower-class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a political force in the state, as leaders such as J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black tried to build political power against the Black Belt planters, who had long dominated the state.[108] In 1926, with Klan support, Bibb Graves won the Alabama governor's office. He was a former Klan chapter head. He pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. Because the Alabama state legislature refused to redistrict until 1972, and then under court order, the Klan was unable to break the planters' and rural areas' hold on legislative power. Scholars and biographers have recently examined Hugo Black's Klan role. Ball finds regarding the KKK that Black "sympathized with the group's economic, nativist, and anti-Catholic beliefs."[109] Newman says Black "disliked the Catholic Church as an institution" and gave over 100 anti-Catholic speeches in his 1926 election campaign to KKK meetings across Alabama.[110] Black was elected US senator in 1926 as a Democrat. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 appointed Black to the Supreme Court without knowing how active in the Klan he had been in the 1920s. He was confirmed by his fellow Senators before the full KKK connection was known; Justice Black said he left the Klan when he became a senator.[111]
Resistance and decline
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/D._C._Stephenson_Grand_Dragon_of_the_Klu_Klux_Klan_in_Indiana%2C_c_1922.jpg/170px-D._C._Stephenson_Grand_Dragon_of_the_Klu_Klux_Klan_in_Indiana%2C_c_1922.jpg)
Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan, gaining national attention. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed in the early 20th century in response to attacks against Jewish Americans and the Klan's campaign to outlaw private schools. Opposing groups worked to penetrate the Klan's secrecy. After one civic group began to publish Klan membership lists, there was a rapid decline in members. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People created public education campaigns in order to inform people about Klan activities and lobbied in Congress against Klan abuses. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership in most areas began to decline rapidly.[93]
Specific events contributed to the decline as well. In Indiana, the scandal surrounding the 1925 murder trial of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the KKK as upholders of law and order. By 1926 the Klan was "crippled and discredited."[104] D. C. Stephenson was the Grand Dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states. In 1923 he had led the states under his control to separate from the national KKK organization. In his 1925 trial, he was convicted for second degree murder for his part in the rape, and subsequent death of Madge Oberholtzer.[112] After Stephenson's conviction, the Klan declined dramatically in Indiana. The historian Leonard Moore says that a failure in leadership caused the Klan's collapse:
Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana's Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan's stated goals. They were uninterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement. For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power. These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership. More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan, or who pursued some of the interests of their Klan constituents, also accomplished little. Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience. When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan's behalf.[113]
By 1920 Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than 6,000. Small independent units continued to be active in the industrial city of Birmingham. In the late 1940s and 1950s, members launched a reign of terror by bombing the homes of upwardly mobile African Americans. Activism by such independent KKK groups increased as a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Ku_Klux_Klan_members_march_down_Pennsylvania_Avenue_in_Washington%2C_D.C._in_1928.jpg/220px-Ku_Klux_Klan_members_march_down_Pennsylvania_Avenue_in_Washington%2C_D.C._in_1928.jpg)
In Alabama, KKK vigilantes launched a wave of physical terror in 1927. They targeted both blacks and whites for violation of racial norms and for perceived moral lapses.[114] This led to a strong backlash, beginning in the media. Grover C. Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser from 1926, wrote a series of editorials and articles that attacked the Klan. (Today the paper says it "waged war on the resurgent [KKK]".)[115] Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for the crusade, the 1928 Editorial Writing Pulitzer, citing "his editorials against gangsterism, floggings and racial and religious intolerance."[116][117] Other newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan, referring to the organization as violent and "un-American". Sheriffs cracked down on activities. In the 1928 presidential election, the state voters overcame initial opposition to the Catholic candidate Al Smith, and voted the Democratic Party line as usual.
Although in decline, a measure of the Klan's influence was its march along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928.
Labor and anti-unionism
In southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs and opposed unions. During the 1930s and 1940s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which advocated industrial unions and accepted African-American members, unlike earlier unions. With access to dynamite and using the skills from their jobs in mining and steel, in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham used bombings in order to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks who moved into middle-class neighborhoods. "By mid-1949, there were so many charred house carcasses that the area [College Hills] was informally named Dynamite Hill."[118] Independent Klan groups remained active in Birmingham and violently opposed the Civil Rights Movement.[118]
In 1939, after years of the Great Depression, the Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the national organization to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician. They could not revive the declining membership. In 1944, the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott dissolved the organization that year. Local Klan groups closed over the following years.[119]
After World War II, the folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan; he provided internal data to media and law enforcement agencies. He also provided secret code words to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in episodes in which Superman took on the KKK. Kennedy stripped away the Klan's mystique and trivialized its rituals and code words, which may have contributed to the decline in Klan recruiting and membership.[120] In the 1950s, Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.[121]
The following table shows the change in the Klan's estimated membership over time.[122] (The years given in the table represent approximate time periods.)
Year | Membership | |
---|---|---|
1920 | 4,000,000 | [123] |
1924 | 6,000,000 | |
1930 | 30,000 |
Historiography of the second Klan
The historiography of the second Klan of the 1920s can be sharply divided into two opposing interpretations, one based on elite sources and the other based on the new social history.[124][125] [126]
Elitist interpretations
The KKK was a secret organization; apart from a few top leaders the members never revealed their membership and wore masks in public. Investigators in the 1920s used KKK publicity, court cases, exposés by disgruntled Klansman, newspaper reports, and speculation to write stories about what the Klan was doing. Almost all the major newspapers and magazines were hostile. Published accounts exaggerated the official viewpoint of the Klan leadership, and repeated the interpretations of hostile newspapers and the Klan's enemies. There was almost no evidence regarding the actual behavior or beliefs of individual Klansmen. The resulting popular and scholarly interpretation of the Klan from the 1920s into recent decades, based on those sources, says Pegram, emphasized the Southern roots, and violent vigilante-style actions of the Klan in its efforts to turn back the clock of modernity. Scholars compared it to fascism, which in the 1920s took over Italy.[127] Pegram says this original interpretation:
- Depicted the Klan movement as an irrational rebuke of modernity by undereducated, economically marginal bigots, religious zealots, and dupes willing to be manipulated by the Klan's cynical, mendacious leaders. It was, in this view, a movement of country parsons and small-town malcontents who were out of step with the dynamism of twentieth-century urban America."[128]
New social history interpretations
The "social history" revolution in historiography after the 1960s called for history from the bottom up, that would focus on the characteristics, beliefs, and behavior of the typical membership, and downplay claims from elite sources.[129][130] This approach was made possible by the discovery of membership lists and the minutes of local meetings from chapters scattered around the country. Historians apply the newest techniques of methodology to test the original interpretation. They discovered that the original interpretation was very largely mistaken about the membership and activities of the Klan. The membership was not anti-modern rural or rustic. It comprised fairly well educated middle-class joiners and community activists. Half the members lived in the fast-growing cities; Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Denver, and Portland, Oregon, were the Klan strongholds rather than the sleepy rural areas.[131]
Studies using the new social history find that in general, the membership was from the stable, successful middle classes, with few members drawn from the elite or the working classes. Pegram, reviewing the studies, concludes, "the popular Klan of the 19205, while diverse, was more of a civic exponent of white Protestant social values than a repressive hate group."[132]
Indiana and Alabama
In Indiana, traditional political historians focused on notorious leaders, especially D. C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan, whose conviction for murder in 1925 helped destroy the movement nationwide. By contrast new social historian Leonard Moore titled his monograph Citizen Klansmen, and contrasted the sordid and intolerant rhetoric of the group's leaders with that of its much better behaved membership. The Klan was indeed white Protestant, and was highly suspicious of Catholics, Jews and blacks who were accused of subverting the ideal Protestant moral standards. Violence was quite uncommon in the chapters. Threats and vocational actions were directed primarily against fellow white Protestants for transgressions of community moral standards, such as adultery, wife-beating, gambling and heavy drinking. Up to one third of Indiana's Protestant men joined the order making it, Moore argued, "a kind of interest group for average white Protestants who believed that their values should be dominant in their community and state.[133]
Moore goes on to say that they joined:
- because it stood for the most organized means of resisting the social and economic forces that had transformed community life, undermined traditional values, and made average citizens feel more isolated from one another and more powerless in their relationships with the major institutions that governed their lives.[134]
In Alabama, the young urban activists, such as Hugo Black, were reformers fighting against the old guard in state politics. The Klan in rural Alabama also had much more recourse to violence.[135]
Later Klans: 1950–1960s
The name "Ku Klux Klan" began to be used by several independent groups. Beginning in the 1950s, for instance, individual Klan groups in Birmingham, Alabama, began to resist social change and blacks' efforts to improve their lives by bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods. There were so many bombings in Birmingham of blacks' homes by Klan groups in the 1950s that the city's nickname was "Bombingham".[22]
During the tenure of Bull Connor as police commissioner in the city, Klan groups were closely allied with the police and operated with impunity. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham, Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police to quell the attack.[22] When local and state authorities failed to protect the Freedom Riders and activists, the federal government established effective intervention.
In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors' administrations.[22] In Birmingham and elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil rights activists. In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation and assassination directly against individuals. Continuing disfranchisement of blacks across the South meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all white.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/FBI_Poster_of_Missing_Civil_Rights_Workers.jpg/180px-FBI_Poster_of_Missing_Civil_Rights_Workers.jpg)
According to a report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of 40 black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some of the bombing victims were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who refused to bow to racist convention or were innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random violence.[136] Among the more notorious murders by Klan members:
- The 1951 Christmas Eve bombing of the home of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) activists Harry and Harriette Moore in Mims, Florida, resulting in their deaths.[137]
- The 1957 murder of Willie Edwards, Jr. Klansmen forced Edwards to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.[138]
- The 1963 assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In 1994, former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted.
- The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four African-American girls. The perpetrators were Klan members Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2001 and 2002. The fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died before he was indicted.
- The 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, in Mississippi. In June 2005, Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter.[139]
- The 1964 murder of two black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in Mississippi. In August 2007, based on the confession of Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards, James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted. Seale was sentenced to serve three life sentences. Seale was a former Mississippi policeman and sheriff's deputy.[140]
- The 1965 Alabama murder of Viola Liuzzo. She was a Southern-raised Detroit mother of five who was visiting the state in order to attend a civil rights march. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights Marchers.
- The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers was convicted of his murder and sentenced to life. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the other's indictment was dismissed.
- The 1967 multiple bombings in Jackson, Mississippi of the residence of a Methodist activist, Robert Kochtitzky, and those at the synagogue and at the residence of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum on Old Canton Road were executed by a Klan member named Thomas Albert Tarrants III who was convicted in 1968. Another Klan bombing was averted in Meridian the same year.[141]
Resistance
There was also resistance to the Klan. In 1953, newspaper publishers W. Horace Carter (Tabor City, NC), who had campaigned for three years, and Willard Cole (Whiteville, NC) shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service citing "their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities."[142] In a 1958 incident in North Carolina, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans who had associated with white people, and they threatened to return with more men. When the KKK held a nighttime rally nearby, they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.[143]
While the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had paid informants in the Klan, for instance in Birmingham in the early 1960s, its relations with local law enforcement agencies and the Klan were often ambiguous. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, appeared more concerned about Communist links to civil rights activists than about controlling Klan excesses against citizens. In 1964, the FBI's COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights groups.[22]
As 20th-century Supreme Court rulings extended federal enforcement of citizens' civil rights, the government revived the Force Acts and the Klan Act from Reconstruction days. Federal prosecutors used these laws as the basis for investigations and indictments in the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner;[144] and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo. They were also the basis for prosecution in 1991 in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic.
Contemporary Klan: 1970s–present
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6e/Kkk-march-violence.jpg/220px-Kkk-march-violence.jpg)
Once African Americans secured federal legislation to protect civil and voting rights, the KKK shifted its focus to opposing court-ordered busing to desegregate schools, affirmative action and more open immigration. In 1971, KKK members used bombs to destroy 10 school buses in Pontiac, Michigan.
Altercation with Communist Workers Party
On November 3, 1979, five communist protesters were killed by KKK and American Nazi Party members in the Greensboro massacre in Greensboro, North Carolina.[145] This incident took place during the Death to the Klan rally sponsored by the Communist Workers Party, in their efforts to organize predominantly black industrial workers in the area.[146]
Jerry Thompson infiltration
Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the KKK in 1979, reported that the FBI's COINTELPRO efforts were highly successful. Rival KKK factions accused each other's leaders of being FBI informants. Bill Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was revealed to have been working for the FBI.[147]
Thompson also related that KKK leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series of civil lawsuits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center for damages amounting to millions of dollars. These were filed after KKK members shot into a group of African Americans. Klansmen curtailed activities to conserve money for defense against the lawsuits. The KKK also used lawsuits as tools; they filed a libel suit to prevent publication of a paperback edition of Thompson's book.
Tennessee shooting
In 1980, three KKK members shot four elderly black women (Viola Ellison, Lela Evans, Opal Jackson and Katherine Johnson) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, following a KKK initiation rally. A fifth woman, Fannie Crumsey, was injured by flying glass in the incident. Attempted murder charges were filed against the three KKK members, two of whom—Bill Church and Larry Payne—were acquitted by an all-white jury, and the other of whom—Marshall Thrash—was sentenced by the same jury to nine months on lesser charges. He was released after three months.[148][149][150] In 1982, a jury awarded the five women $535,000 in a civil rights trial.[151]
Michael Donald lynching
After Michael Donald was lynched in 1981 in Alabama, the FBI investigated his death and two local KKK members were convicted of having a role, including Henry Francis Hays, who was sentenced to death. With the support of attorneys Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Donald's mother, Beulah Mae Donald, sued the KKK in civil court in Alabama. Her lawsuit against the United Klans of America was tried in February 1987. The all-white jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching of Donald and ordered the Klan to pay US$7 million. To pay the judgment, the KKK turned over all of its assets, including its national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa. After exhausting the appeals process, Hays was executed for Donald's death in Alabama on June 6, 1997. It was the first time since 1913 that a white man had been executed in Alabama for a crime against an African American.
Neo-Nazi alliances and Stormfront
In 1995, Don Black and Chloê Hardin, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke's ex-wife, began a small bulletin board system (BBS) called Stormfront. Today, Stormfront has become a prominent online forum for white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, hate speech, racism, and antisemitism.[152][153][154] Duke has an account on Stormfront which he uses to post articles from his own website, as well as polling forum members for opinions and questions, in particular during his internet broadcasts. Duke has worked with Don Black on numerous projects including Operation Red Dog in 1980.[155][156]
Current developments
The modern KKK is not one organization; rather it is composed of small independent chapters across the U.S.[157] The formation of independent chapters has made KKK groups more difficult to infiltrate, and researchers find it hard to estimate their numbers. Estimates are that about two-thirds of KKK members are concentrated in the Southern United States, with another third situated primarily in the lower Midwest.[158][159][160]
The Klan has expanded its recruitment efforts to white supremacists at the international level.[161] For some time the Klan's numbers are steadily dropping. This decline has been attributed to the Klan's lack of competence in the use of the Internet, their history of violence, a proliferation of competing hate groups, and a decline in the number of young racist activists who are willing to join groups at all.[162]
Recent membership campaigns have been based on issues such as people's anxieties about illegal immigration, urban crime, civil unions and same-sex marriage.[163] Akins argues that, "Klan literature and propaganda is rabidly homophobic and encourages violence against gays and lesbians....Since the late 1970s, the Klan has increasingly focused its ire on this previously ignored population.[164] Many KKK groups have formed strong alliances with other white supremacist groups, such as neo-Nazis. Some KKK groups have become increasingly "nazified", adopting the look and emblems of white power skinheads.[165]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK in defense of their First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, and marches, as well as their right to field political candidates.[166]
Current Klan organizations
A list is maintained by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL):[167]
- Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, prevalent in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and other areas of the Southern U.S.
- Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan[158]
- Imperial Klans of America[168]
- Knights of the White Camelia[169]
- Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, headed by national director and self-claimed pastor Thom Robb, and based in Zinc, Arkansas.[170] It claims to be the biggest Klan organization in America today.
Other countries
Aside from Canada, there have been various attempts to organise KKK chapters outside the United States. In Australia in the late 1990s, former One Nation founding member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country,[171][172] and in recent years the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First.[173] Recruitment activity has also been reported in the United Kingdom,[174][175] dating back to the 1960s when Robert Relf was involved in establishing a British KKK.[176]
In Germany a KKK-related group, the European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has organised and it gained notoriety in 2012 when it was widely reported in the German media that two police officers who held membership in the organisation would be allowed to keep their jobs.[177][178][179] A group was even established in Fiji in the early 1870s by white settlers, although it was put down by the British who, although not officially established as Fiji's colonial rulers, had played a leading role in establishing a new constitutional monarchy that was being threatened by the Fijian Klan.[180] In São Paulo, Brazil, the website of a group called Imperial Klans of Brazil was shut down in 2003, and the group's leader was arrested.[181]
Titles and vocabulary
Membership in the Klan is secret. Like many fraternal organizations, the Klan has signs which members can use to recognize one another. A member may use the acronym AYAK (Are you a Klansman?) in conversation to surreptitiously identify himself to another potential member. The response AKIA (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.[182]
Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words[183] beginning with "Kl" including:
- Klabee - treasurers
- Klavern - local organization
- Imperial Kleagle - recruiter
- Klecktoken - initiation fee
- Kligrapp - secretary
- Klonvocation - gathering
- Kloran - ritual book
- Kloreroe - delegate
- Imperial Kludd - chaplain
All of the above terminology was created by William Joseph Simmons, as part of his 1915 revival of the Klan.[184] The Reconstruction-era Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were "Wizard" for the overall leader of the Klan and "Night Hawk" for the official in charge of security.
The Imperial Kludd was the chaplain of the Imperial Klonvokation and he performed "such other duties as may be required by the Imperial Wizard."
The Imperial Kaliff was the second highest position after the Imperial Wizard.[185]
See also
- Anti-mask laws
- Black Legion (political movement)
- History of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey
- Ku Klux Klan in Canada
- Ku Klux Klan in Inglewood, California
- Ku Klux Klan in Maine
- Ku Klux Klan members in United States politics
- Ku Klux Klan recruitment
- Ku Klux Klan regalia and insignia
- Leaders of the Ku Klux Klan
- List of Ku Klux Klan organizations
- List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups
- List of white nationalist organizations
- Neo-Confederate
- Rosewood massacre
- Tulsa race riot
- White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
References
- ^ McVeigh, Rory. "Structural Incentives for Conservative Mobilization: Power Devaluation and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, 1915–1925". Social Forces, Vol. 77, No. 4 (June 1999), p. 1463.
- ^ a b "Ku Klux Klan". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved February 7, 2013.
- ^ Klanwatch Project (2011). Ku Klux Klan: a History of Racism and Violence (Pamphlet) (Sixth ed.). Montgomery, Alabama: Southern Poverty Law Center. p. 15. Retrieved December 16, 2014.
Whatever the actual date, it is clear that as an organized, cohesive body across the South, the Ku Klux Klan had ceased to exist by the end of 1869.
- ^ Rory McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (2009)
- ^ Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (2000) ch 3, 5, 13
- ^ Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center include it in their lists of hate groups. See also Brian Levin, "Cyberhate: A Legal and Historical Analysis of Extremists' Use of Computer Networks in America" in Perry, Barbara, editor. Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader. p. 112 p. Google Books.
- ^ See, e.g., Klanwatch Project (2011), illustrations, pp. 9-10
- ^ Elaine Frantz Parsons, "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan". Journal of American History 92.3 (2005): 811–36, in History Cooperative.
- ^ Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford University Press, 1998)
- ^ Michael Newton, The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida.
- ^ Perlmutter, Philip (January 1, 1999). Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America. M.E. Sharpe. p. 170. ISBN 978-0-7656-0406-4.
Kenneth T. Jackson, in his The Ku Klux Klan in the City 1915-1930, reminds us that "virtually every" Protestant denomination denounced the KKK, but that most KKK members were not "innately depraved or anxious to subvert American institutions," but rather saw their membership in keeping with "one-hundred percent Americanism" and Christianity morality.
{{cite book}}
:|access-date=
requires|url=
(help) - ^ a b "Ku Klux Klan – Extremism in America". Adl.org. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ "Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era". New Georgia Encyclopedia. October 3, 2002. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ Trelease, White Terror (1971), p. 18.
- ^ "Ku Klux Klan Act (1871): Major Acts of Congress". Enotes.com. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (2011), pp. 47-88.
- ^ Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (2011), p. 248.
- ^ Jackson 1992 ed., pp. 241–242.
- ^ Lay, Shawn. "Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century". The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Coker College.
- ^ Julian Sher, White Hoods: Canada's Ku Klux Klan (1983), pp. 52-53.
- ^ James M. Pitsula, Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan (2013)
- ^ a b c d e McWhorter 2001.
- ^ "About the Ku Klux Klan". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved February 19, 2010.
- ^ "About the Ku Klux Klan". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ "Inquiry Begun on Klan Ties Of 2 Icons at Virginia Tech". NY Times. November 16, 1997. p. 138. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ Lee, Jennifer (November 6, 2006). "Samuel Bowers, 82, Klan Leader Convicted in Fatal Bombing, Dies". NY Times. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ Brush, Pete (May 28, 2002). "Court Will Review Cross Burning Ban". CBS News. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ Dallas.FBI.gov "Domestic terrorism by the Klan remained a key concern", FBI, Dallas office
- ^ "Klan named terrorist organization in Charleston". Reuters. October 14, 1999. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ "Ban the Klan? Professor has court strategy". Associated Press. May 21, 2004. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ Horn 1939, p. 9. The founders were John C. Lester, John B. Kennedy, James R. Crowe, Frank O. McCord, Richard R. Reed, and J. Calvin Jones.
- ^ Fleming, Walter J., Ku Klux Klan: Its Origins, Growth and Disbandment, p. 27, 1905, Neale Publishing.
- ^ Horn 1939, p. 11, states that Reed proposed κύκλος (kyklos) and Kennedy added clan. Wade 1987, p. 33 says that Kennedy came up with both words, but Crowe suggested transforming κύκλος into kuklux.
- ^ W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, The Free Press, 1998, pp. 679–680.
- ^ W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, The Free Press, 1998, p. 671–675.
- ^ "Ku Klux Klan, Organization and Principles, 1868". State University of New York at Albany.
- ^ Wills, Brian Steel (1992). A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest. New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers. p. 336. ISBN 0-06-092445-4.
- ^ The Sun. "Civil War Threatened in Tennessee." September 3, 1868: 2; The Charleston Daily News. "A Talk with General Forrest." September 8, 1868: 1.
- ^ Cincinnati Commercial, August 28, 1868, quoted in Wade, 1987.
- ^ Horn 1939, p. 27.
- ^ Parsons 2005, p. 816.
- ^ a b Foner 1989, p. 425–426.
- ^ Foner 1989, p. 342.
- ^ "History of the Ku Klux Klan - Preach the Cross". preachthecross.net. Retrieved September 15, 2014.
- ^ W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, The Free Press, 1998, pp. 677–678.
- ^ Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, New York: Perennial Classics, 1989; reprinted 2002, p. 432.
- ^ W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, The Free Press, 1998, pp. 674–675.
- ^ W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, The Free Press, 1998, pp.680–681.
- ^ Bryant, Jonathan M. "Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era". The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Georgia Southern University.
- ^ Michael Newton, The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida, pp. 1–30. Newton quotes from the Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Enquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Vol. 13. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1872. Among historians of the Klan, this volume is also known as The KKK testimony.
- ^ Rhodes 1920, pp. 157–158.
- ^ a b Horn 1939, p. 375.
- ^ Wade 1987, p. 102.
- ^ Foner 1989, p. 435.
- ^ Wade 1987.
- ^ Ranney, Joseph A (January 1, 2006). In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 57–58. ISBN 0275989720.
- ^ Horn 1939, p. 373.
- ^ Wade 1987, p. 88.
- ^ a b Scaturro, Frank (October 26, 2006). "The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, 1869–1877". The College of St. Scholastica. Retrieved March 5, 2011.
- ^ p. 5, United States Circuit Court (4th Circuit). Proceedings in the Ku Klux Trials at Columbia, S.C. in the United States Circuit Court. Edited by Benn Pitman and Louis Freeland Post. Columbia, SC: Republican Printing Company, 1872.
- ^ The New York Times. "Kuklux Trials — Sentence of the Prisoners." December 29, 1871.
- ^ a b Wormser, Richard. "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow—The Enforcement Acts (1870–1871)". Public Broadcasting Service.
- ^ The New York Times. "N. B. Forrest." September 3, 1868.
- ^ "White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction by Allen W. Trelease (Louisiana State University Press: 1995)". Isbn.nu. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ Trelease 1995.
- ^ Quotes from Wade 1987.
- ^ Horn 1939, p. 360.
- ^ Horn 1939, p. 362.
- ^ Wade 1987, p. 85.
- ^ Wade, p. 102.
- ^ Wade 1987, p. 109, writes that by ca. 1871–1874, "For many, the lapse of the enforcement acts was justified since their reason for being—the Ku-Klux Klan—had been effectively smashed as a result of the dramatic showdown in South Carolina".
- ^ Wade 1987, p. 109–110.
- ^ "Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871". Civil Rights in the United States. 2 vols. Macmillan Reference USA, 2000. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Galenet.Galegroup.com.
- ^ Balkin, Jack M. (2002). "History Lesson" (PDF). Yale University.
- ^ Wade 1987, p. 144.
- ^ "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow: The Enforcement Acts, 1870–1871", Public Broadcast Service. Retrieved April 5, 2008.
- ^ "The Various Shady Lives of the Ku Klux Klan". Time magazine. April 9, 1965.
An itinerant Methodist preacher named William Joseph Simmons started up the Klan again in Atlanta in 1915. Simmons, an ascetic-looking man, was a fetishist on fraternal organizations. He was already a "colonel" in the Woodmen of the World, but he decided to build an organization all his own. He was an effective speaker, with an affinity for alliteration; he had preached on "Women, Weddings and Wives," "Red Heads, Dead Heads and No Heads," and the "Kinship of Kourtship and Kissing." On Thanksgiving Eve 1915, Simmons took 15 friends to the top of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, built an altar on which he placed an American flag, a Bible and an unsheathed sword, set fire to a crude wooden cross, muttered a few incantations about a "practical fraternity among men," and declared himself Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
- ^ Dray 2002, p. 198. Griffith quickly relayed the comment to the press, where it was widely reported.
- ^ Letter from J. M. Tumulty, secretary to President Wilson, to the Boston branch of the NAACP, quoted in John Milton Cooper, Jr. (2011). Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. Random House Digital, Inc. p. 273.
- ^ Chester L. Quarles, The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations: A History and Analysis, p. 219. The second Klan's constitution and preamble attributed debt to the original Klan's Prescripts.
- ^ Brian R. Farmer, American Conservatism: History, Theory and Practice (2005), p. 208.
- ^ Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (2008), p. 47.
- ^ McWhirter, Cameron (2011). Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC. p. 65. ISBN 978-0-8050-8906-6.
- ^ Jackson 1967, p. 241.
- ^ "Nation: The Various Shady Lives of The Ku Klux Klan". TIME. April 9, 1965. Retrieved December 24, 2009.
- ^ Maxine D. Rogers et al., Documented History of Rosewood, Florida in January 1923, pp. 4–6, accessed March 28, 2008; Clarence Lusane (2003), Hitler's Black Victims, p. 89.
- ^ Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: a history, p. 70.
- ^ Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011)
- ^ Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, pp. 119-56.
- ^ Prendergast 1987, pp. 25–52, 27.
- ^ Lender et al. 1982, p. 33.
- ^ Barr 1999, p. 370.
- ^ a b Jackson 1992.
- ^ Emily Parker, "'Night-Shirt Knights' in the City: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Worcester, Massachusetts", New England Journal of History, Fall 2009, Vol. 66 Issue 1, pp. 62–78.
- ^ Moore 1991.
- ^ Greenhouse, Linda (May 29, 2002). "Supreme Court Roundup; Free Speech or Hate Speech? Court Weighs Cross Burning". New York Times. Retrieved February 20, 2010.
- ^ Wade, Wyn Craig (1998). The fiery cross: the Ku Klux Klan in America. USA: Oxford University Press. p. 185. ISBN 978-0-19-512357-9. Retrieved May 3, 2011.
- ^ Cecil Adams (June 18, 1993). "Why does the Ku Klux Klan burn crosses?". The Straight Dope. Retrieved December 24, 2009.
- ^ "Forrest tells aims of Ku Klux College". New York Times. September 12, 1921. Retrieved August 6, 2011.
- ^ Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (University of California Press, 2008).
- ^ Marty Gitlin, The Ku Klux Klan: A Guide to an American Subculture (2009) p. 20.
- ^ Julian Sher, White Hoods: Canada's Ku Klux Klan (1983)
- ^ "Indiana History Chapter Seven". Northern Indiana Center for History. Archived from the original on April 11, 2008. Retrieved October 7, 2008.
- ^ a b "Ku Klux Klan in Indiana". Indiana State Library. November 2000. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- ^ Allen, Lee N. (1963). "The McAdoo Campaign for the Presidential Nomination in 1924". Journal of Southern History. 29 (2): 211–228. JSTOR 2205041.
- ^ Craig, Douglas B. (1992). After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, 1920–1934. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ch. 2–3. ISBN 0-8078-2058-X.
- ^ a b Christopher N. Cocoltchos, "The Invisible Empire and the Search for the Orderly Community: The Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim, California", in Shawn Lay, ed. The invisible empire in the West (2004), pp. 97-120.
- ^ Feldman 1999.
- ^ Howard Ball, Hugo L. Black: cold steel warrior (1996) p. 16
- ^ Roger K. Newman, Hugo Black: a biography (1997) pp 87, 104
- ^ Ball, Hugo L. Black: cold steel warrior (1996) p. 96
- ^ "D. C. Stephenson manuscript collection". Indiana Historical Society. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ Moore 1991, p. 186
- ^ Rogers et al., pp. 432–433.
- ^ "History of the Montgomery Advertiser". Montgomery Advertiser: a Gannett Company. Retrieved November 8, 2013.
- ^ Rogers et al., p. 433.
- ^ "Editorial Writing". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved November 8, 2013.
- ^ a b Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, New York: Touchstone Book, 2002, p. 75.
- ^ "Georgia Orders Action to Revoke Charter of Klan. Federal Lien Also Put on File to Collect Income Taxes Dating Back to 1921. Governor Warns of a Special Session if Needed to Enact 'De-Hooding' Measures Tells of Phone Threats Georgia Acts to Crush the Klan. Federal Tax Lien Also Is Filed". New York Times. May 31, 1946. Retrieved January 12, 2010.
Governor Ellis Arnall today ordered the State's legal department to bring action to revoke the Georgia charter of the Ku Klux Klan. ... 'It is my further information that on June 4, 1944, the Ku Klux Klan ...
- ^ von Busack, Richard. "Superman Versus the KKK". MetroActive.
- ^ Kennedy 1990.
- ^ "The Ku Klux Klan, a brief biography". The African American Registry. Retrieved July 19, 2012. and Lay, Shawn. "Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century". The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Coker College.
- ^ "The Various Shady Lives of The Ku Klux Klan". TIME. April 9, 1965. Retrieved December 24, 2009.
- ^ Craig Fox, "Changing interpretations of the 1920s Klan: A selected historiography" in Fox, Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (2012), Introduction online
- ^ Thomas R. Pegram (2011). One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Ivan R. Dee. pp. 221–28.
- ^ Jesse Walker, "Hooded Progressivism: The secret reformist history of the Ku Klux Klan," Reason.com December 2, 2005 online
- ^ The best scholarly study in this approach is David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1965 (1965), with excellent national and state coverage.
- ^ Pegram. One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. p. 222.
- ^ Pegram, One Hundred Percent American p 225
- ^ Leonard J. Moore, "Good Old-Fashioned New Social History and the Twentieth-Century American Right." Reviews in American History (1996) 24#4 pp: 555-573 online.
- ^ Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (1967)
- ^ Pegram, One Hundred Percent American p.225
- ^ Leonard J. Moore (1997). Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928. U. North Carolina Press. p. 188.
- ^ Moore, Citizen Klansmen p 188
- ^ Glenn Feldman, Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949 (1999)
- ^ Egerton 1994, p. 562–563.
- ^ "Who Was Harry T. Moore?" — The Palm Beach Post, August 16, 1999.
- ^ Cox, Major W. (March 2, 1999). "Justice Still Absent in Bridge Death". Montgomery Advertiser.[dead link]
- ^ Axtman, Kris (June 23, 2005). "Mississippi verdict greeted by a generation gap". The Christian Science Monitor.
- ^ "Reputed Klansman, Ex-Cop, and Sheriff's Deputy Indicted For The 1964 Murders of Two Young African-American Men in Mississippi; U.S. v. James Ford Seale". January 24, 2007. Retrieved March 23, 2008.
- ^ Nelson, Jack. (1993). Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews. New York: Simon and Schuster. pp. 208-211. ISBN 0671692232.
- ^ "Public Service". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved November 8, 2013.
- ^ Ingalls 1979; Graham, Nicholas (January 2005). "January 1958 – The Lumbees face the Klan". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- ^ Simon, Dennis M. "The Civil Rights Movement, 1964–1968". Southern Methodist University.
- ^ "Remembering the 1979 Greensboro Massacre: 25 Years Later Survivors Form Country's First Truth and Reconciliation Commission". Democracy Now. November 18, 2004. Retrieved August 15, 2009.
- ^ Mark Hand (November 18, 2004). "The Greensboro Massacre". Press Action.
- ^ Thompson 1982.
- ^ The White Separatist Movement in the United States: "White Power, White Pride!", by Betty A. Dobratz & Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile. November 2000. ISBN 978-0-8018-6537-4. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ "Women's Appeal for Justice in Chattanooga – US Department of Justice" (PDF). Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ "The Victoria Advocate: Bonds for Klan Upheld". News.google.com. April 22, 1980. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ UPI (February 28, 1982). "New York Times: History Around the Nation; Jury Award to 5 Blacks Hailed as Blow to Klan". Nytimes.com. Tennessee; Chattanooga (Tenn). Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- ^ "RedState, White Supremacy, and Responsibility", Daily Kos, December 5, 2005.
- ^ Bill O'Reilly, "Circling the Wagons in Georgia", Fox News Channel, May 8, 2003.
- ^ "WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center: Case No. DTV2001-0023", World Intellectual Property Organization, January 13, 2002.
- ^ Captmike works undercover with the US Government to stop the invasion of the Island Nation of Dominica, manana.com.
- ^ Operation Red Dog: Canadian neo-nazis were central to the planned invasion of Dominica in 1981,[dead link] canadiancontent.ca.
- ^ "About the Ku Klux Klan – Extremism in America". Anti-Defamation League. According to the report, the KKK's estimated size then was "No more than a few thousand, organized into slightly more than 100 units."
- ^ a b "Church of the American Knights of the KKK". Anti-Defamation League. October 22, 1999. Retrieved July 28, 2010.
- ^ "Active U.S. Hate Groups". Intelligence Report. Southern Poverty Law Center.
- ^ "About the Ku Klux Klan – Extremism in America". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved July 28, 2010.
- ^ "Ku Klux Klan warns race war if Obama wins". Sify News. November 3, 2008. Retrieved July 28, 2010.
- ^ Palmer, Brian (March 8, 2012). "Ku Klux Kontraction: How did the KKK lose nearly one-third of its chapters in one year?". Slate Magazine. Retrieved March 25, 2012.
- ^ Knickerbocker, Brad (February 9, 2007). "Anti-Immigrant Sentiments Fuel Ku Klux Klan Resurgence". The Christian Science Monitor.
- ^ Akins, J. Keith (January 2006). "The Ku Klux Klan: America's Forgotten Terrorists". Law Enforcement Executive Forum. p. 137.
{{cite web}}
: Missing or empty|url=
(help) - ^ "Ku Klux Klan – Affiliations – Extremism in America". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved July 28, 2010.
- ^ See, e.g., "A.C.L.U. Lawsuit Backs Klan In Seeking Permit for Cross". The New York Times. December 16, 1993. (accessed August 2009); "ACLU Defends KKK, Wins". Channel3000. January 4, 1999. Retrieved July 28, 2010. The ACLU professes a mission to defend the constitutional rights of all groups, whether left, center, or right.
- ^ "Ku Klux Klan – Extremism in America – Active Groups (by state)". adl.org. Anti-Defamation League. 2011. Archived from the original on March 15, 2011. Retrieved March 15, 2011.
- ^ "No. 2 Klan group on trial in Ky. teen's beating". Associated Press. November 11, 2008. Retrieved November 22, 2008.
- ^ "White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan – Home page". wckkkk.org. White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. 2011. Archived from the original on March 15, 2011. Retrieved March 15, 2011.
- ^ "Arkansas Klan Group Loses Legal Battle with North Carolina Newspaper". Anti-Defamation League. July 9, 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2008.
- ^ "Ku Klux Klan sets up Australian branch". BBC News. June 2, 1999. Retrieved July 19, 2012.
- ^ Ansley, Greg (June 5, 1999). "Dark mystique of the KKK". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved July 19, 2012.
{{cite news}}
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(help) - ^ Jensen, Erik (July 10, 2009). "We have infiltrated party: KKK". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved July 19, 2012.
{{cite news}}
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(help) - ^ Hosken, Andy (June 10, 1999). "KKK plans 'infiltration' of the UK". BBC News. Retrieved July 19, 2012.
- ^ Parry, Ryan (October 19, 2011). "We expose vile racist biker as British leader of the Ku Klux Klan". Daily Mail. Retrieved July 19, 2012.
{{cite news}}
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(help) - ^ Peter Barberis, John McHugh, Mike Tyldesley, Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations, 2002, p. 184
- ^ German Police Kept Jobs Despite KKK Involvement, Der Spiegel
- ^ Ku Klux Klan: German Police Officers Allowed to Stay on Job Despite Links with European Branch of White Supremacists, International Business Times
- ^ 'KKK cops' scandal uncovered amid German neo-Nazi terror probe, Russia Today
- ^ Kim Gravelle, Fiji's Times: A History of Fiji, Suva: The Fiji Times, 1988, pp. 120-124
- ^ Jovem ligado à Ku Klux Klan é detido em São Paulo
- ^ "A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos and Tattoos". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved July 19, 2012.
- ^ Axelrod 1997, p. 160.
- ^ Wade 1987, p. 142. "'It was rather difficult, sometimes, to make the two letters fit in,' he recalled later, 'but I did it somehow.'"
- ^ Chester L. Quarles (1999). The Ku Klux Klan and related American racialist and antisemitic organizations. McFarland Publishing. ISBN 0-7864-0647-X.
Imperial Kludd: Is the Chaplain of the Imperial Klonvokation and shall perform such other duties as may be required by the Imperial Wizard ...
Further reading
- Axelrod, Alan (1997). The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders. New York: Facts On File.
- Baker, Kelly J. Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011) ISBN 978-0700617920.
- Barr, Andrew (1999). Drink: A Social History of America. New York: Carroll & Graf.
- Chalmers, David M. (1987). Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Durahm, N.C.: Duke University Press. p. 512. ISBN 978-0-8223-0730-3.
- Chalmers, David M. (2003). Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement. ISBN 0-7425-2310-1.
- Cunningham, David. Klansville, USA: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan (Oxford University Press, 2013). 360pp.
- Dray, Philip (2002). At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House.
- Egerton, John (1994). Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Alfred and Knopf Inc.
- Feldman, Glenn (1999). Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
- Fleming, Walter J. Ku Klux Klan: Its Origins, Growth and Disbandment (1905)
- Foner, Eric (1989). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Perennial (HarperCollins).
- Fox, Craig. Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (Michigan State University Press, 2011), 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-87013-995-6.
- Franklin, John Hope (1992). Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988. Louisiana State University Press.
- Fryer, Roland G., Jr; Levitt, Steven D. (September 2007), Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan, National Bureau of Economic Research, retrieved January 22, 2015
{{citation}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - Horn, Stanley F. (1939). Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871. Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation.
- Ingalls, Robert P. (1979). Hoods: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
- Jackson, Kenneth T. (1967). The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (1992 ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
- Kennedy, Stetson (1990). The Klan Unmasked. University Press of Florida.
- McVeigh, Rory. The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (2009), on 1920s.
- Lender, Mark E.; Martin, James K. (1982). Drinking in America. New York: Free Press.
- Lewis, George. ""An Amorphous Code": The Ku Klux Klan and Un-Americanism, 1915–1965." Journal of American Studies (2013) 47#4 pp: 971-992.
- McWhorter, Diane (2001). Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster.
- Moore, Leonard J. (1991). Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
- Newton, Michael; Newton, Judy Ann (1991). The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia. New York & London: Garland Publishing.
- Parsons, Elaine Frantz (2005). "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan". The Journal of American History. 92 (3): 811–836. doi:10.2307/3659969.
- Pegram, Thomas R. One hundred percent American: the rebirth and decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011)
- Pitsula, James M. Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan (University of British Columbia Press, 2013)
- Prendergast, Michael L. (1987). "A History of Alcohol Problem Prevention Efforts in the United States". In Holder, Harold D. (ed.). Control Issues in Alcohol Abuse Prevention: Strategies for States and Communities. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press.
- Rhodes, James Ford (1920). History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. Vol. 7. Winner of the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for history.
- Rogers, William; Ward, Robert; Atkins, Leah; Flynt, Wayne (1994). Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
- Steinberg, Alfred (1962). The man from Missouri; the life and times of Harry S. Truman. New York: Putnam. OCLC 466366.
- Taylor, Joe G. (1974). Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–1877. Baton Rouge.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Thompson, Jerry (1982). My Life in the Klan. New York: Putnam. ISBN 0-399-12695-3.
- Trelease, Allen W. (1995). White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. Louisiana State University Press.
- Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Historiography
- Eagles, Charles W. "Urban‐Rural Conflict in the 1920s: A Historiographical Assessment." Historian (1986) 49#1 pp: 26-48.
- Horowitz, David A. "The Normality of Extremism: The Ku Klux Klan Revisited." Society (1998) 35#6 pp: 71-77.
- Lay, Shawn, ed. "The invisible empire in the west: Toward a new historical appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s" (University of Illinois Press, 2004)
- Lewis, Michael, and Jacqueline Serbu. "Kommemorating the Ku Klux Klan." Sociological Quarterly (1999) 40#1: 139-158. Deals with the memory of the KKK in Pulaski, Tennessee. Online
- Moore, Leonard J. "Historical Interpretations of the 1920's Klan: The Traditional View and the Populist Revision" Journal of Social History (1990) 24#2 pp 341–357.
- Sneed, Edgar P. "A Historiography of Reconstruction in Texas: Some Myths and Problems." Southwestern Historical Quarterly (1969): 435-448. in JSTOR
Further reading
- Blee, Kathleen M. (1992). Women of the Klan. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07876-4.
- Brooks, Michael E. The Ku Klux Klan in Wood County, Ohio. Charleston: The History Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1626193345.
- Cunningham, David. Klansville, USA: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- "White supremacist groups flourishing". Gainesville Press. Associated Press. February 6, 2007.
- Nelson, Jack (1993). Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-69223-2.
- Chalmers, David M. (2003). Backfire: how the Ku Klux Klan helped the civil rights movement. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-7425-2310-1.
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png)
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- Prescript of the * * first edition of the Klans 1867 prescript
- Revised and Amended Prescript of the Order of the * * * first edition of the Klans 1868 prescript
- Civil Rights Greensboro
- The Ku Klux Klan in Washington State, from the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, examines the influence of the second KKK in the State during the 1920s.
- "Ku Klux Klan", Southern Poverty Law Center
- "KKK", Anti-Defamation League
- "Inside Today's KKK", multimedia, Life magazine, April 13, 2009
- Interview with Stanley F. Horn, author of Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871 (1939), Forest History Society, Inc., May 1978
- Booknotes interview with Jack Nelson on Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews, February 7, 1993
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