Post by No_He_Can_NotThe KKK is a good Christian organization of real Americans that are
fighting against the crime infested amoral uncivilized dark skinned
races of sub humans. The minorities act like they do on their own
accord. No one is forcing them to be scum. If you can get rid of the
scum then you would have left a few hundred thousand good people. The
KKK is as American as apple pie and should get funding from the
government.
<speechless>
Do you really believe that or are you just trolling for reactions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kkk
Ku Klux Klan
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Ku Klux Klan Klan-in-gainesville.jpg
Ku Klux Klan rally, 1923.
In Existence
1st Klan 1865–1870s
2nd Klan 1915–1944
3rd Klan1 since 1946
Members
1st Klan 550,000
2nd Klan 6,000,000[1] (1924 peak)
Properties
Origin United States of America
Political ideology White supremacy
White nationalism
Political position Far right
Religion Protestant Christian
1The 3rd Klan is decentralized, with approx. 179 chapters.
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), informally known as The Klan, is the name of several
past and present hate group organizations in the United States whose
avowed purpose was to protect the rights of and further the interests of
white Americans by violence and intimidation. The first such
organizations originated in the Southern states and eventually grew to
national scope. They developed iconic white costumes consisting of robes,
masks, and conical hats. The KKK has a record of using terrorism,[2]
violence, and lynching to murder and oppress African Americans, Jews and
other minorities and to intimidate and oppose Roman Catholics and labor
unions.
The first Klan was founded in 1865 by Tennessee veterans of the
Confederate Army. Groups spread throughout the South. Its purpose was to
restore white supremacy in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The
Klan resisted Reconstruction by assaulting, murdering and intimidating
freedmen and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871 the federal government
passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes.
Prosecution and enforcement suppressed Klan activity. In 1874 and later,
however, 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 Republican voting and running Republicans
out of office. These contributed to white Democrats regaining political
power in the southern states.
In 1915, the second Klan was founded. It grew rapidly in a period of
postwar social tensions, where industrialization in the North attracted
numerous waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and the
Great Migration of Southern blacks and whites. In reaction, the second
KKK preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and anti-
Semitism. Some local groups took part in lynchings, attacks on private
houses, and carried out other violent activities. The Klan committed the
most numerous murders and acts of violence in the South, which had a
tradition of lawlessness.[3]
The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and
state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization included
about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million
men.[4] Internal divisions and external opposition brought about a sharp
decline in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. The
Klan's popularity fell further during the Great Depression and World War
II.[5]
The name Ku Klux Klan has since been used by many independent 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.[6] Several members
of KKK-affiliated 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, and the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar
Evers, and three civil rights workers in Mississippi. Today, researchers
estimate that there may be more than 150 Klan chapters with 5,000–8,000
members nationwide. The U.S. government classifies them as hate groups,
with operations in separated small local units.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 First Klan 1865–1874
o 1.1 Creation
o 1.2 Activities
o 1.3 Resistance
o 1.4 The Klan declines and is superseded by other hate groups
* 2 The second Klan: 1915–1944
o 2.1 Refounding in 1915
+ 2.1.1 The Birth of a Nation
+ 2.1.2 Leo Frank
o 2.2 Social factors
o 2.3 Activities
+ 2.3.1 Temperance
+ 2.3.2 Blaine Amendments
+ 2.3.3 Labor and anti-unionism
o 2.4 Urbanization
o 2.5 The burning cross
o 2.6 Political influence
o 2.7 Resistance and decline
* 3 Later Klans, 1950 through 1960s
* 4 Since the 1970s
* 5 Vocabulary
* 6 See also
* 7 Footnotes
* 8 Bibliography
o 8.1 Further reading
* 9 External links
First Klan 1865–1874
Creation
A cartoon threatening the KKK will lynch carpetbaggers, in the
Independent Monitor, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1868.
Six middle-class Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created
the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, in the immediate
aftermath of the American Civil War.[7] They made up the name by
combining the Greek kyklos (κυκλος, circle) with clan.[8] The Ku Klux
Klan was one among a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using
violence, including the Southern Cross in New Orleans (1865), and the
Knights of the White Camellia (1867) in Louisiana.[9]
Historians generally see the KKK as part of the postwar 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 in order 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.[10]
More recently, historian Bob Brewer has suggested that the Knights of the
Golden Circle (KGC) were a precursor to the KKK.[11] Most recruits to the
KGC were in the Southwest, in Texas and New Mexico, where they formed
private militias to carry out raids in actions that people hoped would
extend slave territory after the Mexican War. While some sympathizers and
recruits to the KGC were found during the Civil War in the states
bordering the Ohio River, the organization was considered dissolved
before the end of the war.
A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic Party as
continuations of the Confederacy
In 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. They elected Brian A. Scates to
be the Leader and President of this organization. Since most of the
Klan's members were veterans, they were used to the hierarchical
structure of the organization, but in fact the Klan never operated under
this structure. 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."[12] 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, although
in practice only a minority of whites were disenfranchised.
Gordon supposedly told former slave trader and Confederate General Nathan
Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, about the Klan. Forrest allegedly
responded, "That's a good thing; that's a damn good thing. We can use
that to keep the niggers in their place."[13] A few weeks later, Forrest
was selected as Grand Wizard, the Klan's national leader, although he
always denied his leadership.
Nathan Bedford Forrest
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.
He argued that many southerners believed that blacks were voting for the
Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues.
[14] One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League is nothing more
than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."[15]
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. Historian Elaine Frantz
Parsons commented on the make up of 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.[16]
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.[17]
Search Wikisource Wikisource has original text related to this
article:
Interview with Nathan Bedford Forrest
To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement,
voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks.[17] The Ku Klux
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."[18]
Activities
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." With this method both
the high and the low could be attacked.[19] 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."[20]
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 people had many roles.
Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of
blacks. "Armed guerilla 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 Canby reported that in North and South
Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and
548 cases of aggravated assault.[21]
Klan violence worked to suppress black voting. As the following examples
indicate, over 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.[22]
In the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,
222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock. By the November presidential
election, however, Klan intimidation led to suppression of the Republican
vote and only one person voted for Ulysses S. Grant.[23]
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 beatings and murders of freedmen and their white
allies by Klansmen.[24]
Milder encounters also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the
Congressional inquiry[25]
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.
Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi,
September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family.
Search Wikisource Wikisource has original text related to this
article:
Why the Ku Klux
By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning
to decrease.[26] Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way
to avoid prosecution for free-lance 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.[27] 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."[26]
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.[28]
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.[29] Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan
legislation.
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 Ku Klux Klan Act. This added to the
enmity that southern white Democrats bore toward him.[30] 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.[31]
Benjamin Franklin Butler wrote the 1871 Klan Act.
Search Wikisource Wikisource has original text related to this
article:
Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871
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 to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under
the constitution. Under the Klan Act, Federal troops were used for
enforcement, and Klansmen were prosecuted in Federal court. 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.[32]
In the crackdown, hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned. In
South Carolina, habeas corpus was suspended in nine counties.
The Klan declines and is superseded by other hate groups
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. It had created a sensation by the dramatic
nature of its masked forays and because of its many murders.
One Klan official complained that his, "so-called 'Chief'-ship was purely
nominal, I having not the least authority over the reckless young country
boys who were most active in 'night-riding,' whipping, etc., all of which
was outside of the intent and constitution of the Klan..."[citation
needed]
In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist
organization".[33] 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.[34] 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 ordered the Klan to disband in
1869, stating that it was "being perverted from its original honorable
and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the
public peace".[35] Historian Stanley Horn writes "generally speaking, the
Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual
disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment".[36] A reporter in
Georgia wrote in January 1870, "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".[37]
Gov. William Holden of North Carolina.
While people used the Klan as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and
local governments seldom acted against them. African Americans were kept
off juries. In lynching cases, all-white juries almost never indicted Ku
Klux Klan members. When there was a rare indictment, juries were unlikely
to vote for a conviction. In part, jury members feared reprisals from
local Klansmen.
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.[32]
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.[38]
The Klan was destroyed in South Carolina[39] and decimated throughout the
rest of the South, where it had already been in decline. Attorney General
Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions.[40]
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 voters.[41]
In 1874, organized white paramilitary groups formed in the Deep South to
replace the faltering Klan: 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 voters,
tried to disrupt organizing and suppress 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 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. [42]
In 1882, long after the Klan was destroyed, 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.[43]
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.[44] By
1872, the Klan was broken as an organization.[45] Nonetheless, the goals
that the Klan had failed to achieve itself, such as suppressing suffrage
for Southern blacks and driving a wedge between poor whites and blacks,
were largely accomplished by the 1890s by militant Southern whites.
Lynchings of African Americans, far from being ended by the Klan's
disintegration, instead peaked in 1892 with 161 deaths.[46]
The second Klan: 1915–1944
Refounding in 1915
Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation. It has been widely noted for
reviving the Ku Klux Klan.
An illustration from The Clansman: "Take dat f'um yo equal—"
Three closely linked events occurred in 1915:
* The film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and
glorifying the first Klan.
* Leo Frank, a Jewish man whose controversial death sentence for the
rape and murder of a young white girl named Mary Phagan had been
commuted, was lynched near Atlanta against a backdrop of media frenzy.
* The second Ku Klux Klan was founded at Stone Mountain, Georgia,
supplementing its original anti-black ideology with a new anti-immigrant,
anti-Catholic, Prohibitionist and anti-Semitic agenda. The bulk of the
founders were from an Atlanta-area organization calling itself the
Knights of Mary Phagan that had organized around Leo Frank's trial. The
new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the Klan presented
in The Birth of a Nation.
The Birth of a Nation
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.. Dixon said his purpose
was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history
that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!" The
film created a nationwide Klan craze. At the official premier in Atlanta,
members of the Klan rode up and down the street in front of the theater.
[47]
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 Scotland, as portrayed in
the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott. The film's influence and
popularity were enhanced by a widely reported endorsement by historian
and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.
President Wilson
The Birth of a Nation included extensive quotations from Woodrow Wilson's
History of the American People, as if to give it a stronger basis. After
seeing the film in a special White House screening, Wilson allegedly
said, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is
that it is all so terribly true."[48] Given Wilson's views on race and
the Klan, his statement was taken as supportive of the film. In later
correspondence with Griffith, Wilson confirmed his enthusiasm. Wilson's
remarks immediately became controversial. Wilson tried to remain aloof,
but finally, on April 30, he issued a non-denial denial.[49] Historian
Arthur Link quotes Wilson's aide, Joseph Tumulty: "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."[50]
Leo Frank
Another event that influenced the Klan was sensational coverage of the
trial, conviction and lynching of a Jewish factory manager from Atlanta
named Leo Frank. In lurid newspaper accounts, Frank was accused of the
rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a girl employed at his factory.
The lynching of Leo Frank
After a trial in Georgia in which a mob daily surrounded the courtroom,
Frank was convicted. Because of the presence of the armed mob, the judge
asked Frank and his counsel to stay away when the verdict was announced.
Frank's appeals failed. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
dissented from other justices and condemned the mob's intimidation of the
jury as the court's failing to provide due process to the defendant.
After the governor commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment, a mob
calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from prison and
lynched him.
The Frank trial was used skillfully by Georgia politician and publisher
Thomas E. Watson, the editor for The Jeffersonian magazine. He was a
leader in recreating the Klan and was later elected to the U.S. Senate.
The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a meeting led by William J.
Simmons on top of Stone Mountain. A few aging members of the original
Klan attended, along with members of the self-named Knights of Mary
Phagan.
Simmons stated that he had been inspired by the original Klan's
Prescripts, written in 1867 by Confederate veteran George Gordon in an
attempt to create a national organization. These were never adopted by
the Klan, however.[51] The Prescript stated the Klan's purposes in
idealistic terms, hiding the fact that its members committed acts of
vigilante violence and murder from behind masks.
Social factors
The second Klan arose during the nadir of American race relations, in
response to urbanization and industrialization. Massive immigration from
the largely Catholic countries of eastern and southern Europe led to
friction with America's longer-established Protestant worshipers. The
Great Migration of African Americans to the North stoked racism by whites
in Northern industrial cities; thus the second Klan would achieve its
greatest political power not in any Southern state, but in Indiana. The
migration of African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern
cities further increased tensions. The Klan grew most rapidly in cities
which had high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit,
Memphis, Dayton, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston.[52] Stanley Horn, a
Southern historian sympathetic to the first Klan, was careful in an oral
interview to distinguish it from the later "spurious Ku Klux organization
which was in ill-repute — and, of course, had no connection whatsoever
with the Klan of Reconstruction days".[53]
William Joseph Simmons founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915.
In an era without Social Security or widely available life insurance, it
was common for men to join fraternal organizations such as the Elks or
the Woodmen of the World in order to provide for their families in case
they died or were unable to work. The founder of the new Klan, William J.
Simmons, was a member of twelve different fraternal organizations. He
recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, and
consciously modeled the Klan after those organizations.[54]
Klan organizers signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation
fees and bought KKK costumes. 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 minister. He then left
town with the money. The local units operated like many fraternal
organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.
The Klan's growth was also affected by mobilization for World War I and
postwar tensions, especially in the cities where strangers came up
against each other more often. Southern whites resented the arming of
black soldiers. Black veterans did not want to go back to second class
status, and some were lynched, still in uniform, on returning from
overseas.[55]
Activities
In reaction to social changes, the Klan adopted anti-Jewish, anti-
Catholic, anti-Communist and anti-immigrant slants.
Klan groups lynched and murdered Black soldiers returning from World War
I while they were still in military uniforms. The Klan warned Blacks that
they must respect the rights of the white race "in whose country they are
permitted to reside".[56] The number of lynchings escalated, and from
1918 to 1927, 416 African Americans were killed, mostly in the South.[57]
When two black men attempted to vote in November 1920 in Ocoee, Florida,
the Klan attacked the black community. In the ensuing violence, six black
residents and two whites were killed, and twenty five black homes, two
churches, and a fraternal lodge were destroyed.[57]
Branford Clarke illustration in The Ku Klux Klan In Prophecy by Bishop
Alma White published by the Pillar of Fire Church in 1925 at Zarephath, NJ
Although Klan members were concentrated in the South, Midwest and west,
there were some members in New England, too. Klan members torched an
African American school in Scituate, Rhode Island.[58]
In the 1920s and 1930s, a violent and zealous faction of the Klan called
the Black Legion was active in the Midwestern U.S. under Virgil Effinger.
Temperance
Lender et al. state that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by
the temperance movement. In Arkansas and elsewhere, the Klan opposed
bootleggers, and in 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in
Union County. The national Klan office was finally 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.[59][verification needed] One historian contends that the
KKK’s "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond
between Klansmen throughout the nation".[60] Membership in the Klan and
other prohibition groups overlapped, and they often coordinated
activities. For example, Edward Young Clarke, a top leader of the Klan,
raised funds for both the Klan and the Anti-Saloon League.[61] Clarke was
indicted in 1923 for violations of the Mann Act.[62]
Stone Mountain, site of the founding of the second Klan in 1915.
"The End" Referring to the end of Catholic influence in the US. Klansmen:
Guardians of Liberty 1926
Blaine Amendments
In 1921, the Klan arrived in Oregon from central California and
established the state's first klavern in Medford. In a state with one of
the country's highest percentages of white residents, the Klan attracted
up to 14,000 members and established 58 klaverns by the end of 1922.
Given the small population of non-white minorities outside Portland, the
Oregon Klan directed attention almost exclusively against Catholics, who
numbered about 8% of the population. In 1922, the Masonic Grand Lodge of
Oregon sponsored a bill to require all school-age children to attend
public schools. With support of the Klan and Democratic Governor Walter
M. Pierce, endorsed by the Klan, the Compulsory Education Law was passed
with a majority of votes. Its primary purpose was to shut down Catholic
schools in Oregon, but it also affected other private and military
schools. A number of states passed Blaine Amendments, which forbid direct
government aid to religious schools.
Photograph on Page 4, February 1923 edition of The Good Citizen
Labor and anti-unionism
The social unrest of the postwar period included labor strikes in
response to low wages and poor working conditions in many industrial
cities, often led by immigrants, who also organized unions. Klan members
worried about labor organizers and the socialist leanings of some of the
immigrants, which added to the tensions. They also resented upwardly
mobile ethnic Catholics.[63] At the same time, in cities Klan members
were themselves working in industrial environments and often struggled
with working conditions.
In southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control
of access to the better-paying industrial jobs but opposed unions. During
the 1930s and 1940s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress
of Industrial Organizations(CIO), which advocated industrial unions and
was open to African-American members. With access to dynamite and skills
from their jobs in mining and steel, in the late 1940s some Klan members
in Birmingham began using bombings 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." Independent Klan groups remained active in
Birmingham and were deeply engaged in violent opposition to the Civil
Rights Movement.[64]
Urbanization
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.[65]
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.[66]
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
Cross burning is said to have been introduced by William J. Simmons, the
founder of the second Klan in 1915.
The second Klan adopted a burning Christian cross as its symbol, using it
as a rallying point and a means of intimidation against their targets. No
such crosses had been used by the first Klan.
The practice of cross burning had been loosely based on ancient Scottish
clans' practice of burning a St. Andrew's cross (an X-shaped cross) as a
beacon to muster their forces for war. In The Clansman (see above), Dixon
had falsely claimed that the first Klan had used fiery crosses when
rallying its men to fight against Reconstruction. Griffith brought this
image to the screen in The Birth of a Nation, adding to the confusion by
mistakenly portraying the burning cross as an upright Latin cross rather
than the St. Andrew's cross that the Highland clans had actually used.
Simmons adopted the burning Latin cross wholesale from the movie,
prominently displaying it at the 1915 Stone Mountain meeting, and the
incendiary symbol has been indelibly associated with the Ku Klux Klan
ever since.[67]
Political influence
Sheet music to "We Are All Loyal Klansmen", 1923
The Good Citizen July 1926 Published by Pillar of Fire Church
Branford Clarke illustration in Heroes of the Fiery Cross 1928
The Klan had major political influence in several states and was
influential mostly in the center of the country. The Klan spread from the
South into the Midwest and Northern states, and into Canada where there
was a large movement against Catholic immigrants. [68] At its peak, Klan
membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white
male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas.
[citation needed] Most of the Klan's membership resided in Midwestern
states.
In another well-known example from the same year, the Klan decided to
turn Anaheim, California, into a model Klan city. It secretly took over
the City Council, but the city conducted a special recall election and
Klan members were voted out.[69]
Klan delegates played a significant role at the path-setting 1924
Democratic National Convention in New York City, often called the
"Klanbake Convention". The convention initially pitted Klan-backed
candidate William Gibbs McAdoo against Catholic New York Governor Al
Smith. After days of stalemates and rioting, both candidates withdrew in
favor of a compromise. Klan delegates defeated a Democratic Party
platform plank that would have condemned their organization.
In some states, such as Alabama, the KKK worked for political and social
reform.[70] The state's Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of
better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road
construction, and other "progressive" political measures. In many ways
these reforms benefited lower class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a
political force in the state, as leaders like J. Thomas Heflin, David
Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black manipulated the KKK membership against the
power of Black Belt planters who had long dominated the state.
Black was elected senator in 1926 and later became a Supreme Court
Justice. In 1926, with Klan support, a former Klan chapter head named
Bibb Graves won the Alabama governor's office. 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, however, even the Klan was unable to break the
planters' and rural areas' hold on power.
Unlike its predecessor, which had been an exclusively partisan Democratic
organization, the second Klan was courted by both Republicans and
Democrats in the Midwest, and endorsed candidates from either party that
supported its goals; Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and the
Republicans to make common cause in the North. In the South, however, the
Republican party was powerless; thus, the southern Klan remained
Democratic, closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other
functionaries of local government.
Resistance and decline
Nazi propaganda poster from 1944, showing a Ku Klux Klan hood and a
lynching noose
Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as
Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan. In response to
blunt attacks against Jewish Americans and the Klan's campaign to
illegalize private schools, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed
after the lynching of Leo Frank. When one civic group began to publish
Klan membership lists, the number of members quickly declined. The
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People carried on
public education campaigns in order to inform people about Klan
activities and lobbied against Klan abuses in Congress. After its peak in
1925, Klan membership began to decline rapidly in most areas of the
Midwest.[65]
In Alabama, KKK vigilantes, thinking that they had governmental
protection, launched a wave of physical terror in 1927, targeting both
blacks and whites who had violated racial norms and for perceived moral
lapses.[71] The state's conservative elite counterattacked. Grover C.
Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, began publishing a series
of editorials and articles that attacked the Klan for its "racial and
religious intolerance". Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for his crusade.[72]
Other newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan, referring to
the organization as violent and "un-American". Sheriffs cracked down. In
the 1928 presidential election, the state voted for the Democratic
candidate Al Smith, although he was Catholic. Klan membership in Alabama
dropped to less than six thousand by 1930. Small independent units
continued to be active in Birmingham, where in the late 1940s, members
launched a reign of terror by bombing the homes of upwardly mobile
African Americans. KKK activism increased as a reaction against the civil
rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan. His conviction for
murdering a young white schoolteacher in 1925 devastated the Indiana Klan.
D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states, was
convicted in 1925 for second degree murder resulting from his part in the
rape and subsequent death [73] of Madge Oberholtzer. After Stephenson's
conviction in a sensational trial, the Klan declined dramatically in
Indiana. Historian Leonard Moore concluded 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 disinterested 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.:[74]
Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James
Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta
obstetrician, but they were unable to staunch the exodus of members. In
1944, the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan,
and Colescott was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944.
Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
in 1928.
Thanks, in part to the Klan terror directed at them five million blacks
left the South for northern, midwestern and western cities from1940-1970
though they found that some of the most politically powerful Klan
chapters were in Indiana. The Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in Indiana
politics and society after World War I. It was made up of native-born,
white Protestants of many income and social levels. Nationally, in the
1920s, Indiana was said to have the most powerful Ku Klux Klan. Though it
counted a high number of members statewide, its importance peaked with
the 1924 election of Edward Jackson for governor. A short time later, the
scandal surrounding the murder trial of Indianana Klan official D.C.
Stephenson destroyed the image of the Ku Klux Klan as upholders of law
and order. By 1926 the Ku Klux Klan was "crippled and discredited." [75]
After World War II, folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the
Klan and provided information 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's intention to strip away the Klan's mystique and trivialize the
Klan's rituals and code words may have contributed to the decline in Klan
recruiting and membership.[76] In the 1950s, Kennedy wrote a bestselling
book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.[77]
The following table shows the change in the Klan's estimated membership
over time.[78] (The years given in the table represent approximate time
periods.)
Year Membership
1920 4,000,000[79]
1924 6,000,000
1930 30,000
1980 5,000
2008 6,000
Later Klans, 1950 through 1960s
Soviet propaganda poster ("Freedom, American style") (1950, by Nikolay
Dolgorukov and Boris Efimov). It shows the Ku Klux Klan lynching blacks.
The name "Ku Klux Klan" began to be used by several independent groups.
Beginning in the 1950s, individual Klan groups began to resist the Civil
Rights Movement by bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods and the
houses of activists, as well as by physical violence, intimidation and
assassination. In Birmingham, Alabama, during the tenure of Bull Connor,
Klan groups were closely allied with the police and operated with
impunity. There were so many bombings of homes by Klan groups that the
city's nickname was "Bombingham". In states such as Alabama and
Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors'
administrations.[6]
Many murders went unreported and unprosecuted. Continuing
disfranchisement of blacks meant that most could not serve on juries,
which were all white. According to a report from the Southern Regional
Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty 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 of them were either
people who refused to bow to racist convention or were innocent
bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random violence.[80]
Among the more notorious murders by Klan members:
* The 1951 Christmas Eve bombing of the home of NAACP activists Harry
and Harriette Moore in Mims, Florida, resulting in their deaths.[81]
* The 1957 murder of Willie Edwards, Jr. Klansmen forced Edwards to
jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.[82]
* 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 Blanton 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.[83]
* 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.[citation needed] Seale was a former Mississippi
policeman and sheriff's deputy.[84]
Violence at a Klan march in Mobile, Alabama, 1977
* 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.
There was also resistance to Klan violence. In a 1958 North Carolina
incident, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native
Americans who had associated with white people and threatened to return
with more men. When they held a nighttime rally nearby, they found
themselves surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was
exchanged, and the Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of
Hayes Pond.[85] In 1953, newspaper publisher W. Horace Carter received a
Pulitzer prize for reporting on the activities of the Klan.
When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, the police
commissioner Bull Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the
riders before sending in the police.[6] When local and state authorities
failed to protect them, the federal government established more effective
intervention.
While the FBI had paid informants in the Klan, for instance in
Birmingham, Alabama 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. In 1964, the
FBI's COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt civil
rights groups.[6]
As 20th-century Supreme Court rulings extended federal enforcement of
citizens' civil rights, the long-neglected Force Act and Klan Act from
Reconstruction days were revived and used by federal prosecutors as the
basis for investigations and indictments in the 1964 murders of Chaney,
Goodman, and Schwerner;[86] and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo.[87] They
were also the basis for prosecution in 1991 in Bray v. Alexandria Women's
Health Clinic.
Since the 1970s
"Sympathetic? In a way...[the KKK] are harassed to a certain extent and I
think they should be allowed to have freedom of expression"
—Ian Macdonald, former Canadian trade commissioner[88][89]
Once African Americans secured federal legislation to protect civil and
voting rights, the Klan shifted its focus to opposing court-ordered
busing to desegregate schools, affirmative action, and more open
immigration. For instance, in 1971, Klansmen used bombs to destroy ten
school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. Klansman David Duke was active in
South Boston during the school busing crisis of 1974. Duke was leader of
the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from 1974 until he resigned from the Klan
in 1978.
On November 3, 1979 the Greensboro massacre occurred in Greensboro, North
Carolina where five marchers were killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan
and the American Nazi Party while staging a protest, while no Klan or neo-
Nazis were injured or killed.[90] This was the culmination of attempts by
the Communist Workers Party to organize industrial workers, predominantly
black, in the area.[91]
Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the Klan in 1979,
reported that the FBI's COINTELPRO efforts were highly successful. Rival
Klan 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.[92] During Thompson's brief
membership, his truck was shot at, he was yelled at by black children,
and a Klan rally he attended turned into a riot when black soldiers on an
adjacent military base taunted the Klansmen. Attempts by the Klan to
march were often met with counter protests and sometimes with violence.
In 1980 three Ku Klux Klansmen 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.) None of the five
victims died. Attempted murder charges were filed against the three
Klansmen, 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.[93][94][95] In 1982 a jury awarded the five women $535,000
in a civil rights trial.[96]
After Michael Donald was lynched in 1981 in Alabama, the FBI investigated
his death. Two local Klansmen were convicted of having a role including
Henry Hays who was sentenced to death. With the support of attorneys
Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin at the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC), Michael's mother, Beulah Mae Donald, sued the Ku Klux Klan 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 Michael Donald and ordered the Klan to pay $7 million
USD. To pay the judgment, the Klan turned over all of its assets,
including its national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa.[97]
After exhausting the appeals process, Henry Hayes 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.[98] Thompson, the journalist who claimed he had
infiltrated the Klan, related that Klan 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 in the
millions of dollars. These were filed after Klansmen shot into a group of
African Americans. Klansmen curtailed activities to conserve money for
defense against the lawsuits. The Klan itself used lawsuits as tools.
They filed a libel suit to prevent publication of a paperback edition of
Thompson's book.
The present-day Ku Klux Klan is not one organization. Rather it is made
up of small independent chapters across the United States.[99] The
formation of independent chapters has made the KKK groups more difficult
to infiltrate and researchers find it hard to estimate its numbers. KKK
members have stepped up recruitment in recent years but the organization
continues to grow slowly, with membership estimated at 5,000–8,000 across
179 chapters. These latest drives have seized upon issues such as
people's anxieties about illegal immigration, urban crime and same-sex
marriage. [100]
The only known former member of the Klan to hold a federal office
currently in the United States is Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West
Virginia, who said he "deeply regrets" having joined the Klan more than
half a century ago, when he was about 24 years old. Byrd joined as a
young man in the 1940s, recruiting 150 friends and acquaintances from his
small West Virginia town. He later said he was a Klan member for about a
year, but contemporary newspapers carried stories about a letter of his
recommending a friend as Klaneagle in 1946.[101] In 2005, when he
published a memoir and was asked again about his life, Byrd said, "I know
now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a
thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I
can't erase what happened."[101]
Some of the larger KKK organizations in operation include:
* Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, prevalent in Texas, Oklahoma,
Arkansas, Louisiana and other areas of the Southeastern U.S.
* Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan[102]
* Imperial Klans of America[103]
* Knights of the White Kamelia
* Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, headed by national director and self-
claimed pastor Thom Robb, and based in Zinc, Arkansas.[104] It claims to
be the biggest Klan organization in America today. Spokesmen refer to it
as a "sixth era Klan", and it continues to be a racist group.
Numerous smaller groups use the Klan name. Estimates are that about two-
thirds of KKK members are concentrated in the South, with another third
situated primarily in the lower Midwest.[102][105][106]
On November 14, 2008, an all-white jury of seven men and seven women
awarded $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive
damages to plaintiff Jordan Gruver, represented by the Southern Poverty
Law Center against the Imperial Klans of America.[107] The ruling found
that five IKA members had savagely beaten Gruver, then 16 years old, at a
Kentucky county fair in July 2006.[108]
Many Klan groups have formed strong alliances with other white
supremacist groups like Neo-Nazis. Some Klan groups have become
increasingly "Nazified" adopting the look and emblems of Nazi skinheads.
[109]
Although there are numerous KKK groups, the media and popular discourse
generally refer to the Klan for expediency. The 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, and their
right to field political candidates.[110]
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.[111]
Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words[112]
beginning with "KL" including:
* Klabee: treasurers
* Klavern: local organization
* Kleagle: recruiter
* Klecktoken: initiation fee
* Kligrapp: secretary
* Klonvocation: gathering
* Kloran: ritual book
* Kloreroe: delegate
* Kludd: chaplain
All of the above terminology was created by William Simmons, as part of
his 1915 revival of the Klan.[citation needed] The Reconstruction-era
Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were "Wizard"
for the overall leader of the Klan, "Night Hawk" for the official in
charge of security, and a few others, mostly for regional officers of the
organization.[citation needed]
See also
Gangs portal
* History of the United States (1865–1918)#Social Discontent
* Jim Crow laws
* Knights of the Golden Circle
* Leaders of the Ku Klux Klan
* Notable alleged Ku Klux Klan members in national politics
* Silent Brotherhood
* Timeline of racial tension in Omaha, Nebraska
* White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
* Heroes of the Fiery Cross
* The Good Citizen
--
Regards, Curly