We don’t think much about the Klan today, but it has not gone away.
Although the is no shortage of books about Klan history, here’s
a short synopsis:
https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/ku-klux-klan
After a period of
decline, white Protestant nativist groups revived the Klan in the early 20th
century, burning crosses and staging rallies, parades and marches denouncing
immigrants, Catholics, Jews, African Americans and organized labor. The civil rights movement of the 1960s also saw
a surge of Ku Klux Klan activity, including bombings of Black schools and
churches and violence against Black and white activists in the South.
The group
including many former Confederate veterans founded the first branch of the Ku
Klux Klan as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. The first two words of the
organization’s name supposedly derived from the Greek word “kyklos,” meaning
circle. In the summer of 1867, local branches of the Klan met in a general
organizing convention and established what they called an “Invisible Empire of
the South.” Leading Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was chosen as the
first leader, or “grand wizard,” of the Klan; he presided over a hierarchy of
grand dragons, grand titans and grand cyclopses.
The organization of the
Ku Klux Klan coincided with the beginning of the second phase of post-Civil War Reconstruction, put into place by the more
radical members of the Republican Party in Congress. After rejecting
President Andrew Johnson’s relatively lenient
Reconstruction policies, in place from 1865 to 1866, Congress passed the
Reconstruction Act over the presidential veto. Under its provisions, the South
was divided into five military districts, and each state was required to
approve the 14th Amendment, which granted “equal protection”
of the Constitution to former enslaved people and
enacted universal male suffrage.
At least 10 percent of
the Black legislators elected during the 1867-1868 constitutional conventions
became victims of violence during Reconstruction, including seven who were
killed. White Republicans (derided as “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”) and
Black institutions such as schools and churches—symbols of Black autonomy—were
also targets for Klan attacks.
By 1870, the Ku Klux
Klan had branches in nearly every southern state. Even at its height, the Klan
did not boast a well-organized structure or clear leadership. Local Klan
members–often wearing masks and dressed in the organization’s signature long
white robes and hoods–usually carried out their attacks at night, acting on
their own but in support of the common goals of defeating Radical
Reconstruction and restoring white supremacy in the South. Klan activity
flourished particularly in the regions of the South where Black people were a
minority or a small majority of the population, and was relatively limited in
others. Among the most notorious zones of Klan activity was South Carolina, where in January 1871 500 masked
men attacked the Union county jail and lynched eight Black prisoners.
Though Democratic
leaders would later attribute Ku Klux Klan violence to poorer southern white
people, the organization’s membership crossed class lines, from small farmers
and laborers to planters, lawyers, merchants, physicians and ministers. In the
regions where most Klan activity took place, local law enforcement officials
either belonged to the Klan or declined to take action against it, and even
those who arrested accused Klansmen found it difficult to find witnesses
willing to testify against them.
Other leading white
citizens in the South declined to speak out against the group’s actions, giving
them tacit approval. After 1870, Republican state governments in the South
turned to Congress for help, resulting in the passage of three Enforcement
Acts, the strongest of which was the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
For the first time, the
Ku Klux Klan Act designated certain crimes committed by individuals as federal
offenses, including conspiracies to deprive citizens of the right to hold
office, serve on juries and enjoy the equal protection of the law. The act
authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and arrest
accused individuals without charge, and to send federal forces to suppress Klan
violence.
This expansion of
federal authority–which Ulysses S. Grant promptly used in 1871 to
crush Klan activity in South Carolina and other areas of the South–outraged
Democrats and even alarmed many Republicans. From the early 1870s onward, white
supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South as support for
Reconstruction waned; by the end of 1876, the entire South was under Democratic
control once again. I
This second generation of the Klan was not only anti-Black but also took a stand against Roman Catholics, Jews, foreigners and organized labor. It was fueled by growing hostility to the surge in immigration that America experienced in the early 20th century along with fears of communist revolution akin to the Bolshevik triumph in Russia in 1917. The organization took as its symbol a burning cross and held rallies, parades and marches around the country. At its peak in the 1920s, Klan membership exceeded 4 million people nationwide.
(The Immigration Act of
1924 was the official response to the wave of immigrants form eastern and southern
Europe)
https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1924-immigration-act-johnson-reed-act/
The Great
Depression in the 1930s depleted the Klan’s membership ranks,
and the organization temporarily disbanded in 1944. The civil rights movement
of the 1960s saw a surge of local Klan activity across the South, including the
bombings, beatings and shootings of Black and white activists. These actions,
carried out in secret but apparently the work of local Klansmen, outraged the
nation and helped win support for the civil rights cause.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a speech publicly
condemning the Klan and announcing the arrest of four Klansmen in connection
with the murder of a white female civil rights worker in Alabama. The cases of Klan-related violence became more
isolated in the decades to come, though fragmented groups became aligned with
neo-Nazi or other right-wing extremist organizations from the 1970s
onward.
As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League estimated Klan
membership to be around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center said there were
6,000 members total.
Here’s why we still need to pay attention to the Klan today:
At the core of it all was unabashed white Christian nationalism, and the link below explains why Christian nationalism is still a problem today:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2022/08/christian-nationalism.html
The original Klan, started by
ex-Confederates chafing in a country where millions of people who had been held
as property were now citizens, directed its terror at Black Americans. The
reborn Klan expanded its range of hatred to the changing face of America:
immigrants, Jews and Catholics. They also tried to repress the social
liberation of women — in speakeasies thick with jazz, in film and in other
cultural expressions.
Substitute today’s opposition to drag shows for the Klan’s
campaign against changing morals and uncorseted flappers and you have another
haunt of history. Those who want to turn back the demographic clock in the
2020s, who long for an America belonging to one race and one religion, will
find a blueprint in the 1920s Klan.
Just as so many of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were found to be everyday folks with good jobs,
Klan membership in the 1920s was a cross section of White America. But make no
mistake, those people belonged to a masked, highly secretive hate group and
knew full well what they’d signed up for. They were not ignorant of their Klan
oath.
The hooded order of the 1920s moved quickly from basements in
the Midwest to the halls of Congress. At its peak, the Klan claimed four U.S.
senators as sworn members, and dozens under its control in the House of
Representatives. By 1925, the ultimate political design seemed to be within
reach: a Klan from sea to sea, north to south, anchored in the White House.
The most prominent member of the Klan today is David Duke. He is an American white
supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. From 1989 to 1992, he was a member of
the Louisiana
House of Representatives for the Republican Party. His politics and writings are largely devoted
to promoting conspiracy theories about Jews, such as Holocaust
denial and Jewish control of academia, the press, and the financial
system. In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League described Duke as "perhaps America’s
most well-known racist and anti-Semite". He was also one of the speakers
of the Charlottesville rally in August of 2017. This is the meeting, remember,
where “there were good people on both sides”
Spike Lee’s 2018 movie, “BlacKKKlansman” does an excellent job of tying together the old Klan and the new Klan. The closing sequence ties together cross burnings with the tiki torch carrying white nationalists at Charlottesville. The clip below is worth watching:
BlacKkKlansman (2018) - Crank Calling the Klan Scene (2/10)
| Movieclips - YouTube
The Klan is back. Don't let them win
Ku Klux Klan
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