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Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan (/ˌk klʌks ˈklæn, ˌkj-/),[c] commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans,[43] and Catholics, as well as immigrants, leftists, homosexuals,[44][45] Muslims,[46] atheists,[27][28][29][30] and abortion providers.[47][48][49]

Ku Klux Klan
The Duke Flag, used by some in the Third Klan and named after former Klan leader David Duke. The Blood Drop Cross is shown in the centre.[1]
In existence
  • First Klan: 1865–1872
  • Second Klan: 1915–1944
  • Third Klan: 1946/1950–present
Members
  • First Klan: Unknown
  • Second Klan: c. 3 million – 6 million[2]
    (peaked in 1924–1925)
  • Third Klan: c. 5,000–8,000[3]
Political ideologies After 1915: After 1950:
Political positionFar-right
Espoused religion

The Klan has existed in three distinct eras. Each has advocated extremist reactionary positions such as white nationalism, anti-immigration and—especially in later iterations—Nordicism,[50][51] antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, Prohibition, right-wing populism, anti-communism, homophobia,[52][53][54][55][56] anti-atheism,[27][28][29][30] Islamophobia, and anti-progressivism. The first Klan founded by Confederate veterans[57] used terrorism—both physical assault and murder—against politically active Black people and their allies in the Southern United States in the late 1860s. The second iteration of the Klan originated in the 1910s, and was the first to use cross burnings and hooded robes. During the First Red Scare, the Klan integrated anti-communism into its doctrine.[58] [59] The third Klan used murders and bombings from the late 1940s to the early 1960s to achieve its aims. All three movements have called for the "purification" of American society, and are all considered far-right extremist organizations.[60][61][62][63] In each era, membership was secret and estimates of the total were highly exaggerated by both friends and enemies.

The first Klan was established in the wake of the American Civil War and was a defining organization of the Reconstruction era. Organized in numerous chapters across the Southern United States, federal law enforcement suppressed it around 1871. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South, especially by using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders. Each chapter was autonomous and highly secretive about membership and plans. Members made their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks and conical hats, designed to be terrifying and to hide their identities.[64][65]

The second Klan started in 1915 as a small group in Georgia. It grew after 1920 and flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, including urban areas of the Midwest and West. Taking inspiration from D. W. Griffith's 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, which mythologized the founding of the first Klan, it employed marketing techniques and a popular fraternal organization structure. Rooted in local Protestant communities, it sought to maintain white supremacy, often took a pro-Prohibition and pro-compulsory public education[66][67][68] stance, and it opposed Jews, while also stressing its opposition to the alleged political power of the pope and the Catholic Church. This second Klan flourished both in the south and northern states; it was funded by initiation fees and selling its members a standard white costume. The chapters did not have dues. It used K-words which were similar to those used by the first Klan, while adding cross burnings and mass parades to intimidate others. It rapidly declined in the latter half of the 1920s.

The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after 1950, in the form of localized and isolated groups that use the KKK name. They have focused on opposition to the civil rights movement, often using violence and murder to suppress activists. This manifestation is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.[69] As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League puts total KKK membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6,000 members total.[70]

The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent references to a false mythologized perception of America's "Anglo-Saxon" blood, hearkening back to 19th-century nativism.[71] Although members of the KKK swear to uphold Christian morality, Christian denominations widely denounce them.[72]

Overview

First KKK

 
Depiction of Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina in 1870, based on a photograph taken under the supervision of a federal officer who seized Klan costumes

The first Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865,[73] by six former officers of the Confederate army:[74] Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones, and James Crowe.[75] It started as a fraternal social club inspired at least in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta. It borrowed parts of the initiation ceremony from that group, with the same purpose: "ludicrous initiations, the baffling of public curiosity, and the amusement for members were the only objects of the Klan", according to Albert Stevens in 1907.[76] The manual of rituals was printed by Laps D. McCord of Pulaski.[77] The origins of the hood are uncertain; it may have been appropriated from the Spanish capirote hood,[78] or it may be traced to the uniform of Southern Mardi Gras celebrations.[79]

According to The Cyclopædia of Fraternities (1907), "Beginning in April, 1867, there was a gradual transformation. ... The members had conjured up a veritable Frankenstein. They had played with an engine of power and mystery, though organized on entirely innocent lines, and found themselves overcome by a belief that something must lie behind it all—that there was, after all, a serious purpose, a work for the Klan to do."[76]

Although there was little organizational structure above the local level, similar groups rose across the South and adopted the same name and methods.[clarification needed][80] Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement promoting resistance and white supremacy during the Reconstruction Era. For example, Confederate veteran John W. Morton founded a chapter in Nashville, Tennessee.[81] As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder. "They targeted white Northern leaders, Southern sympathizers and politically active Blacks."[82] In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes.[83]

The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives. It seriously weakened the Black political leadership through its use of assassinations and threats of violence, and it drove some people out of politics. On the other hand, it caused a sharp backlash, with passage of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of "restoring order, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling Blacks to exercise their rights as citizens".[84] Historian George C. Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded by the Democratic Party leaders of the South. He says:

The Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses; its lack of central organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists. More fundamentally, it declined because it failed to achieve its central objective – the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South.[85]

After the Klan was suppressed, similar insurgent paramilitary groups arose that were explicitly directed at suppressing Republican voting and turning Republicans out of office: the White League, which started in Louisiana in 1874; and the Red Shirts, which started in Mississippi and developed chapters in the Carolinas. For instance, the Red Shirts are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina. They were described as acting as the military arm of the Democratic Party and are attributed with helping white Democrats regain control of state legislatures throughout the South.[86]

Second KKK

 
KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s

In 1915, the second Klan was founded atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William Joseph Simmons. While Simmons relied on documents from the original Klan and memories of some surviving elders, the revived Klan was based significantly on the wildly popular film The Birth of a Nation. The earlier Klan had not worn the white costumes and had not burned crosses; these aspects were introduced in the book on which the film was based. When the film was shown in Atlanta in December of that year, Simmons and his new klansmen paraded to the theater in robes and pointed hoods – many on robed horses – just like in the film. These mass parades became another hallmark of the new Klan that had not existed in the original Reconstruction-era organization.[87]

Beginning in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of using full-time, paid recruiters and it appealed to new members as a fraternal organization, of which many examples were flourishing at the time. The national headquarters made its profit through a monopoly on costume sales, while the organizers were paid through initiation fees. It grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions pitting urban versus rural America, it spread to every state and was prominent in many cities. 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.[7] Its appeal was directed exclusively toward white Protestants; it opposed Jews, Black people, Catholics, and newly arriving Southern and Eastern European immigrants such as Italians, Russians, and Lithuanians, many of whom were Jewish or Catholic.[88] Some local groups threatened violence against rum runners and those they deemed "notorious sinners"; the violent episodes generally took place in the South.[89] The Red Knights were a militant group organized in opposition to the Klan and responded violently to Klan provocations on several occasions.[90]

 
The "Ku Klux Number" of Judge, August 16, 1924

The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. During the resurgence of the second Klan in the 1920s, its publicity was handled by the Southern Publicity Association. Within the first six months of the Association's national recruitment campaign, Klan membership had increased by 85,000.[91] At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization's membership ranged from three to eight million members.[92]

In 1923, Simmons was ousted as leader of the KKK by Hiram Wesley Evans. From September 1923 there were two Ku Klux Klan organizations: the one founded by Simmons and led by Evans with its strength primarily in the southern United States, and a breakaway group led by Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson based in Indiana with its membership primarily in the midwestern United States.[93]

Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders – especially Stephenson's conviction for the abduction, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer – and external opposition brought about a collapse in the membership of both groups. The main group's membership had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.[94] Klan organizers also operated in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan in 1926–1928, where Klansmen denounced immigrants from Eastern Europe as a threat to Canada's "Anglo-Saxon" heritage.[95][96]

Third KKK

The "Ku Klux Klan" name was used by 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.[97] Several members of Klan groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and of children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963.

The United States government still considers the Klan to be a "subversive terrorist organization".[98][99][100][101] 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 for conspiring to blow up a natural gas processing plant.[102] In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina, passed a resolution declaring the Klan a terrorist organization.[103]

The existence of modern Klan groups has been in a state of consistent decline due to a variety of factors from the American public's negative distaste of the group's image, platform, and history, infiltration and prosecution by law enforcement, civil lawsuit forfeitures, and the radical right-wing's perception of the Klan as outdated and unfashionable. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that just between 2016 and 2019 the number of Klan groups in America dropped from 130 to just 51.[104] A 2016 report by the Anti-Defamation League claims an estimate of just over 30 active Klan groups existing in the United States.[105] Estimates of total collective membership range from about 3,000[105] to 8,000.[106] In addition to its active membership, the Klan has an "unknown number of associates and supporters".[105]

History

Origin of the name

The name was probably formed by combining the Greek kyklos (κύκλος, which means circle) with clan.[107][108] The word had previously been used for other fraternal organizations in the South such as Kuklos Adelphon.

First Klan: 1865–1871

Creation and naming

 
A cartoon threatening that the KKK will lynch scalawags (left) and carpetbaggers (right) on March 4, 1869, the day President Grant takes office. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, September 1, 1868.[d]

Six Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, shortly after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction of the South.[109][110] 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.[111]

Historians generally classify 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 Black people and their allies as intimidation. They burned houses and attacked and killed Black people, leaving their bodies on the roads.[112] While racism was a core belief of the Klan, anti-Semitism was not. Many prominent southern Jews identified wholly with southern culture, resulting in examples of Jewish participation in the Klan.[113]

 
This Frank Bellew cartoon links the Democratic Party with secession and the Confederate cause.[114]

At an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting to a national headquarters. Since most of the Klan's members were veterans, they were used to such military hierarchy, but the Klan never operated under this centralized structure. Local chapters and bands were highly independent.

Former Confederate brigadier general George Gordon developed the Prescript, which espoused 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".[115] 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 was elected the first grand wizard, and claimed to be the Klan's national leader.[74][116] In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments, people such as Tennessee governor William Gannaway Brownlow, and other "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags".[117] He argued that many Southerners believed that Black people were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues.[118] One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."[119]

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 personal feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore general white dominance in the disrupted postwar society. The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership:

Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of anti-Black 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.[120]

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.[121] To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of Black people.[121] 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."[122]

Activities

 
Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family[123]

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 by voice and mannerisms. "The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night."[124] The KKK night riders "sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious Blacks. Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously."[125]

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 Black people.

"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."[126]

 
George W. Ashburn was assassinated for his pro-Black sentiments.

Klan violence worked to suppress Black voting, and campaign seasons were deadly. More than 2,000 people were killed, wounded, or 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 President 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.[127]

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.[128]

Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county[which?] in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties.[which?] Florida Freedmen's Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen's beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies.[129]

 
Garb and weapons of the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois, as posed for Joseph A. Dacus of the Missouri Republican, in August 1875

Milder encounters, including some against white teachers, also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry:

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 in 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.[130]

By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease.[131] 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.[132] 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."[131]

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 Black people formed their own defense in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and patrolled the streets to protect their homes.[133]

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 a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors.[134] Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.[135]

In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican senator John Scott convened a congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities, accumulating 12 volumes. 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.[136] 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 occurred in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse, from which a Black state representative escaped by fleeing to the woods.[137] The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus.[138]

In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation. The Ku Klux Klan Act and the Enforcement Act of 1870 were used by the federal government to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution. The Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve after the 1871 Klan Act, so President Grant issued a suspension of habeas corpus and stationed federal troops in nine South Carolina counties by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. The Klansmen were apprehended and prosecuted in federal court. Judges Hugh Lennox Bond and George S. Bryan presided over the trial of KKK members in Columbia, South Carolina, during December 1871.[139] The defendants were given from three months to five years of incarceration with fines.[140] More Black people served on juries in federal court than on local or state juries, so they had a chance to participate in the process.[138][141] Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned during the crackdown.

End of the first Klan

Klan leader Nathan Bedford 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. However, the Klan had no membership rosters, no chapters, and no local officers, so it was difficult for observers to judge its membership.[142] 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"[143] and 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.[143] Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan's costume to hide their identities when carrying out independent acts of violence. Forrest called for the Klan to disband in 1869, arguing that it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace".[144] Historian Stanley Horn 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".[145] A Georgia-based reporter wrote in 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".[146]

 
Gov. William Holden of North Carolina

In many states, officials were reluctant to use Black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised.[141] Republican governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, adding to his unpopularity. This and extensive violence and fraud at the polls caused the Republicans to lose their majority in the state legislature. Disaffection with Holden's actions contributed to white Democratic legislators impeaching him and removing him from office, but their reasons for doing so were numerous.[147]

Klan operations ended in South Carolina[132] and gradually withered away throughout the rest of the South. Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions.[148]

Foner argues that:

By 1872, the federal government's evident willingness to bring its legal and coercive authority to bear had broken the Klan's back and produced a dramatic decline in violence throughout the South. So ended the Reconstruction career of the Ku Klux Klan.[149]

New groups of insurgents emerged in the mid-1870s, local paramilitary organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs, that intimidated and murdered Black political leaders.[150] The White League and Red Shirts were distinguished by their willingness to cultivate publicity, working directly to overturn Republican officeholders and regain control of politics.

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 include the right to regulate against private conspiracies. It recommended that persons who had been victimized should seek relief in state courts, which were entirely unsympathetic to such appeals.[151]

Klan costumes, also called "regalia", disappeared from use by the early 1870s,[152] after Grand Wizard Forrest called for their destruction as part of disbanding the Klan. The Klan was broken as an organization by 1872.[153] In 1915, William Joseph Simmons held a meeting to revive the Klan in Georgia; he attracted two aging former members, and all other members were new.[154]

Second Klan: 1915–1944

Refounding in 1915

In 1915 the film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan and its endeavors. The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, with fifteen "charter members".[155] Its growth was based on a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, Prohibitionist and anti-Semitic agenda, which reflected contemporary social tensions, particularly recent immigration. The new organization and chapters adopted regalia featured in The Birth of a Nation; membership was kept secret by wearing masks in public.

The Birth of a Nation
 
Frontispiece to the first edition of Dixon's The Clansman, by Arthur I. Keller
 
"The Fiery Cross of old Scotland's hills!" Illustration from the first edition of The Clansman, by Arthur I. Keller. Note figures in background.
 
Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation, which has been widely credited with inspiring the 20th-century revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

Director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan. The film was based on the book and play The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon Jr. Much of the modern Klan's iconography is derived from it, including the standardized white costume and the burning cross. 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 false claim of endorsement by President Woodrow Wilson. Dixon was an old friend of Wilson's and, before its release, there was a private showing of the film at the White House. A publicist claimed that Wilson said, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Wilson strongly disliked the film and felt he had been tricked by Dixon. The White House issued a denial of the "lightning" quote, saying that he was entirely unaware of the nature of the film and at no time had expressed his approbation of it.[156]

Goals

 
Three Ku Klux Klan members at a 1922 parade
 
In this 1926 cartoon, the Ku Klux Klan chases the Catholic Church, personified by St. Patrick, from the shores of America. Among the "snakes" are various supposed negative attributes of the Church, including superstition, the union of church and state, control of public schools, and intolerance.

The first and third Klans were primarily Southeastern groups aimed against Black people. The second Klan, in contrast, broadened the scope of the organization to appeal to people in the Midwestern and Western states who considered Catholics, Jews, and foreign-born minorities to be anti-American.[73]

The Second Klan saw threats from every direction. According to historian Brian R. Farmer, "two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers".[157] Much of the Klan's energy went into guarding the home, and historian Kathleen Blee says that its members wanted to protect "the interests of white womanhood".[158] Joseph Simmons published the pamphlet ABC of the Invisible Empire in Atlanta in 1917; in it, he 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".[159] Such moral-sounding purpose underlay its appeal as a fraternal organization, recruiting members with a promise of aid for settling into the new urban societies of rapidly growing cities such as Dallas and Detroit.[160] During the 1930s, particularly after James A. Colescott of Indiana took over as imperial wizard, opposition to Communism became another primary aim of the Klan.[73]

Organization

New Klan founder William J. Simmons joined 12 different fraternal organizations and recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, consciously modeling the Klan after fraternal organizations.[161] 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 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.

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. The group produced publications for national circulation from its headquarters in Atlanta: Searchlight (1919–1924), Imperial Night-Hawk (1923–1924), and The Kourier.[162][163][164]

Perceived moral threats

The second Klan grew primarily in response to issues of declining morality typified by divorce, adultery, defiance of Prohibition, and criminal gangs in the news every day.[41] It was also a response to the growing power of Catholics and American Jews and the accompanying proliferation of non-Protestant cultural values. The Klan had a nationwide reach by the mid-1920s, with its densest per capita membership in Indiana. It became most prominent in cities with high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, as rural Protestants flocked to jobs in Detroit and Dayton in the Midwest, and Atlanta, Dallas, Memphis, and Houston in the South. Close to half of Michigan's 80,000 Klansmen lived in Detroit.[165]

Members of the KKK swore to uphold American values and Christian morality, and some Protestant ministers became involved at the local level. However, no Protestant denomination officially endorsed the KKK;[166] indeed, the Klan was repeatedly denounced by the major Protestant magazines, as well as by all major secular newspapers. Historian Robert Moats Miller reports that "not a single endorsement of the Klan was found by the present writer in the Methodist press, while many of the attacks on the Klan were quite savage. ...The Southern Baptist press condoned the aims but condemned the methods of the Klan." National denominational organizations never endorsed the Klan, but they rarely condemned it by name. Many nationally and regionally prominent churchmen did condemn it by name, and none endorsed it.[167]

The second Klan was less violent than either the first or third Klan were. However, the second Klan, especially in the Southeast, was not an entirely non-violent organization. The most violent Klan was in Dallas, Texas. In April 1921, shortly after they began gaining popularity in the area, the Klan kidnapped Alex Johnson, a Black man who had been accused of having sex with a white woman. They burned the letters "KKK" into his forehead and gave him a severe beating by a riverbed. The police chief and district attorney refused to prosecute, explicitly and publicly stating they believed that Johnson deserved this treatment. Encouraged by the approval of this whipping, the Dallas KKK whipped 68 people by the riverbed in 1922 alone. Although Johnson had been Black, most of the Dallas KKK's whipping victims were white men who were accused of offenses against their wives such as adultery, wife beating, abandoning their wives, refusing to pay child support or gambling. Far from trying to hide its vigilante activity, the Dallas KKK loved to publicize it. The Dallas KKK often invited local newspaper reporters to attend their whippings so they could write a story about it in the next day's newspaper.[168][169][170]

The Alabama KKK was less chivalrous than the Dallas KKK was and whipped both white and Black women who were accused of fornication or adultery. Although many people in Alabama were outraged by the whippings of white women, no Klansmen were ever convicted for the violence.[171][172]

Rapid growth

In 1920, Simmons handed the day-to-day activities of the national office over to two professional publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke.[173] The new leadership invigorated the Klan and it grew rapidly. It appealed to new members based on current social tensions, and stressed responses to fears raised by defiance of Prohibition and new sexual freedoms. It emphasized anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant and later anti-Communist positions. 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 to a 1924 peak of 1.5 million to 4 million, which was between 4–15% of the eligible population.[174]

By the 1920s, most of its members lived in the Midwest and West. Nearly one in five of the eligible Indiana population were members.[174] It had a national base by 1925. In the South, where the great majority of whites were Democrats, the Klansmen were Democrats. In the rest of the country, the membership comprised both Republicans and Democrats, as well as independents. Klan leaders tried to infiltrate political parties; as Cummings notes, "it was non-partisan in the sense that it pressed its nativist issues to both parties".[175] Sociologist Rory McVeigh has explained the Klan's strategy in appealing to members of both parties:

Klan leaders hope to have all major candidates competing to win the movement's endorsement. ... The Klan's leadership wanted to keep their options open and repeatedly announced that the movement was not aligned with any political party. This non-alliance strategy was also valuable as a recruiting tool. The Klan drew its members from Democratic as well as Republican voters. If the movement had aligned itself with a single political party, it would have substantially narrowed its pool of potential recruits.[176]

Religion was a major selling point. Kelly J. 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. But no nationally prominent religious leader said he was a Klan member.[41]

Economists Fryer and Levitt argue that the rapid growth of the Klan in the 1920s was partly the result of an innovative, multi-level marketing campaign. They also argue that the Klan leadership focused more intently on monetizing the organization during this period than fulfilling the political goals of the organization. Local leaders profited from expanding their membership.[174]

Prohibition

Historians agree that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over Prohibition.[177] The historian Prendergast says that the KKK's "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation".[178] The Klan opposed bootleggers, sometimes with violence. In 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas. Membership in the Klan and in other Prohibition groups overlapped, and they sometimes coordinated activities.[179]

Urbanization

 
"The End" Referring to the end of Catholic influence in the US. Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty 1926

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 the North, West, 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 feared the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were mostly Catholic or Jewish; 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 Midwest. The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.[160]

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 Americans, 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.[180]

In 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 that 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.[181]

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 which they had wanted. Millions joined and at its peak in the 1920s the organization claimed numbers that amounted to 15% of the nation's eligible population. The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan's decline.

Costumes and the burning cross

 
Cross burning was introduced by William J. Simmons, the founder of the second Klan in 1915.

The distinctive white costume permitted large-scale public activities, especially parades and cross-burning ceremonies, while keeping the membership rolls a secret. Sales of the costumes provided the main financing for the national organization, while initiation fees funded local and state organizers.

The second Klan embraced the burning Latin cross as a dramatic display of symbolism, with a tone of intimidation.[182] No crosses had been used as a symbol by the first Klan, but it became a symbol of the Klan's quasi-Christian message. Its lighting during meetings was often accompanied by prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism.[183] In his novel The Clansman, Thomas Dixon Jr. borrows the idea that the first Klan had used fiery crosses from 'the call to arms' of the Scottish Clans,[184] and film director D.W. Griffith used this image in The Birth of a Nation; Simmons adopted the symbol wholesale from the movie, and the symbol and action have been associated with the Klan ever since.[185]

Women

By the 1920s, the KKK developed a women's auxiliary, with chapters in many areas. Its activities included participation in parades, cross lightings, 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 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 sexual and financial scandals rocked the Klan leadership late in the 1920s, the organization's popularity among both men and women dropped off sharply.[91]

Political role

 
Sheet music to "We Are All Loyal Klansmen", 1923

The second Klan expanded with new chapters in cities in the Midwest and West, and reached both Republicans and Democrats, as well as men without a party affiliation. The goal of Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans to make common cause in the North.[186]

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.[187] The Klan also moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it opposed Catholics.[188]

In Indiana, members were American-born, white Protestants and covered a wide range of incomes and social levels. The Indiana Klan was perhaps the most prominent Ku Klux Klan in the nation. It claimed more than 30% of white male Hoosiers as members.[189] In 1924 it supported Republican Edward Jackson in his successful campaign for governor.[190]

Catholic and liberal Democrats—who were strongest in northeastern cities—decided to make the Klan an issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. Their delegates proposed a resolution indirectly attacking the Klan; it was defeated by one vote out of 1,100.[191] The leading presidential candidates were William Gibbs McAdoo, a Protestant with a base in the South and West where the Klan was strong, and New York governor Al Smith, a Catholic with a base in the large cities. After weeks of stalemate and bitter argumentation, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise candidate.[192][193]

 
Two children wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods stand on either side of Samuel Green, a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, at Stone Mountain, Georgia, on July 24, 1948.

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 1,200 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 city employees who were known to be 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.[194] 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.[194]

In the South, Klan members were still Democratic, as it was essentially a one-party region for whites. Klan chapters were closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government. Due to disenfranchisement 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 wealthy planters, who had long dominated the state.[195] 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".[196] Newman says Black "disliked the Catholic Church as an institution" and gave over 100 anti-Catholic speeches to KKK meetings across Alabama in his 1926 election campaign.[197] Black was elected US senator in 1926 as a Democrat. In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt 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.[198]

Resistance and decline

 
D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan. His conviction in 1925 for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a white schoolteacher, led to the decline of the Indiana Klan.

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 on Jewish Americans, including the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta, and to the Klan's campaign to prohibit private schools (which was chiefly aimed at Catholic parochial schools). Opposing groups worked to penetrate the Klan's secrecy. After one civic group in Indiana began to publish Klan membership lists, there was a rapid decline in the number of Klan members. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched 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.[160] Specific events contributed to the Klan's 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".[190] D. C. Stephenson was the grand dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states. In 1923 he had led the states under his control in order to break away from the national KKK organization. At his 1925 trial, he was convicted of second-degree murder for his part in the rape, and subsequent death, of Madge Oberholtzer.[199] 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.[200]

 
Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1928

In Alabama, KKK vigilantes launched a wave of physical terror in 1927. They targeted both Black and white people for violations of racial norms and for perceived moral lapses.[201] 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]".)[202] Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for the crusade, the 1928 Editorial Writing Pulitzer, citing "his editorials against gangsterism, floggings and racial and religious intolerance".[203][204] 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 their 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 still evident when it staged its march along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1928. By 1930, Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than 6,000. Small independent units continued to be active in the industrial city of Birmingham.

KKK units were active through the 1930s in parts of Georgia, with a group of "night riders" in Atlanta enforcing their moral views by flogging people who violated them, whites as well as Black people. In March 1940, they were implicated in the beating murders of a young white couple taken from their car on a lovers lane, and flogged a white barber to death for drinking, both in East Point, a suburb of Atlanta. More than 20 others were "brutally flogged". As the police began to investigate, they found the records of the KKK had disappeared from their East Point office. The cases were reported by the Chicago Tribune[205] and the NAACP in its Crisis magazine,[206] as well as local papers.

In 1940, three lynchings of Black men by whites (no KKK affiliation is known) took place in the South: Elbert Williams was the first NAACP member known to be killed for civil rights activities: he was murdered in Brownsville, Tennessee, for working to register Black people to vote, and several other activists were run out of town; Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, for a minor social infraction; and 16-year-old Austin Callaway, a suspect in the assault of a white woman, was taken from jail in the middle of the night and killed by six white men in LaGrange, Georgia.[206] In January 2017, the police chief and mayor of LaGrange apologized for their offices' failures to protect Callaway, at a reconciliation service marking his death.[207][208]

Labor and anti-unionism

In major 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 to destroy houses in order to intimidate upwardly mobile Black 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."[209]

Activism by these independent KKK groups in Birmingham increased as a reaction to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Independent Klan groups violently opposed the civil rights movement.[209] KKK members were implicated in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on a Sunday in September 1963, which killed four African-American girls and injured 22 other people. Members of the Communist Workers' Party came to North Carolina to organize textile workers and pushed back against racial discrimination there, taunting the KKK, resulting in the 1979 Greensboro massacre.[210][211]

Development of Christian Identity Theology

According to Professor Jon Schamber, Rev. Philip E. J. Monson branched off from the teachings of British Israelism and began to develop Christian Identity Theology in the 1910s.[212] During the 1920s, Monson published Satan's Seat: The Enemy of Our Race in which he adopted Russel Kelso Carter's theory that Jews and non-whites were descended from the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Monson connected the work of the corrupt race to the activities of the Catholic Church and the Pope. Monson's ideas were popular among some KKK members in the 1950s.[212]

National changes

Estimated membership statistics
Year Membership References
1925 4,000,000–6,000,000* [213][214]
1930 30,000 [213]
1965 40,000 [215]
1968 14,000 [216]
1970 2,000–3,500 [217][216]
1974 1,500 [216][214]
1975 6,500 [214]
1979 10,000 [214]
1991 6,000–10,000 [214]
2009 5,000–8,000 [218]
2016 3,000 [105]

In 1939, after experiencing several years of decline due to the Great Depression, the Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the national organization to James A. Colescott, an Indiana veterinary physician, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician. They could not revive the Klan's declining membership. In 1944, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott dissolved the organization that year. Local Klan groups closed down over the following years.[219]

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.[220] In the 1950s Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.[221]

Historiography of the second Klan

The historiography of the second Klan of the 1920s has changed over time. Early histories were based on mainstream sources of the time, but since the late 20th century, other histories have been written drawing from records and analysis of members of the chapters in social histories.[222][223]

Anti-modern interpretations
 
Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington, D.C., September 13, 1926

The KKK was a secret organization; apart from a few top leaders, most members never identified as such and wore masks in public. Investigators in the 1920s used KKK publicity, court cases, exposés by disgruntled Klansmen, newspaper reports, and speculation to write stories about what the Klan was doing. Almost all the major national newspapers and magazines were hostile to its activities. The historian Thomas R. Pegram says that 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 in that time regarding the behavior or beliefs of individual Klansmen. According to Pegram, the resulting popular and scholarly interpretation of the Klan from the 1920s into the mid-20th century emphasized its Southern roots and the violent vigilante-style actions of the Klan in its efforts to turn back the clock of modernity. Scholars compared it to fascism in Europe.[224] Amann states that, "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental. ...[The KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system."[225]

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.[226]

New social history interpretations

The "social history" revolution in historiography from the 1960s explored history from the bottom up. In terms of the Klan, it developed evidence based on the characteristics, beliefs, and behavior of the typical membership, and downplayed accounts by elite sources.[227][228] Historians discovered membership lists and the minutes of local meetings from KKK chapters scattered around the country. They discovered that the original interpretation was largely mistaken about the membership and activities of the Klan; the membership was not anti-modern, rural or rustic and consisted of fairly well educated middle-class joiners and community activists. Half the members lived in the fast-growing industrial cities of the period: Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Denver, and Portland, Oregon, were Klan strongholds during the 1920s.[229]

Studies find that in general, the KKK membership in these cities 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 1920s, while diverse, was more of a civic exponent of white Protestant social values than a repressive hate group."[230]

Kelly J. Baker argues that religion was critical—the KKK based its hatred on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans: "Members embraced Protestant Christianity and a crusade to save America from domestic as well as foreign threats."[231] Member were primarily Baptists, Methodists, and members of the Disciples of Christ, while men of "more elite or liberal" Protestant denominations such as Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists and Lutherans, were less likely to join.[232]

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 the 1925 kidnap, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer helped destroy the Ku Klux Klan movement nationwide. In his history of 1967, Kenneth Jackson already described the Klan of the 1920s as associated with cities and urbanization, with chapters often acting as a kind of fraternal organization to aid people coming from other areas.[160]

Social historian Leonard Moore titled his monograph Citizen Klansmen (1997) and contrasted the intolerant rhetoric of the group's leaders with the actions of most of the membership. The Klan was white Protestant, established Americans who were fearful of change represented by new immigrants and Black migrants to the North. They were highly suspicious of Catholics, Jews and Black people, who they believed subverted ideal, Protestant moral standards. Violence was uncommon in most chapters. In Indiana, KKK members directed more threats and economic blacklisting 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."[233]

Moore says 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.[234]

Northern Indiana's industrial cities had attracted a large Catholic population of European immigrants and their descendants. They established the University of Notre Dame, a major Catholic college near South Bend. In May 1924, when the KKK scheduled a regional meeting in the city, Notre Dame students blocked the Klansmen and stole some KKK regalia. On the next day, the Klansmen counterattacked. Finally, the college president and the football coach Knute Rockne kept the students on campus to avert further violence.[235][236]

In Alabama, some young, white, urban activists joined the KKK to fight the old guard establishment. Hugo Black was a member before becoming nationally famous; he focused on anti-Catholicism. However, in rural Alabama the Klan continued to operate to enforce Jim Crow laws; its members resorted more often to violence against Black people for infringements of the social order of white supremacy.[195]

Racial terrorism was used in smaller towns to suppress Black political activity. Elbert Williams of Brownsville, Tennessee, was lynched in 1940 for trying to organize Black residents to register and vote; also that year, Jesse Thornton of Luverne, Alabama, was lynched for failing to address a police officer as "Mister".[237]

Later Klans: 1950s–present

In 1944, the second KKK was disbanded by Imperial Wizard James A. Colescott after the IRS levied a large tax liability against the organization.[238] In 1946, Samuel Green reestablished the KKK at a ceremony on Stone Mountain.[239] His group primarily operated in Georgia. Green was succeeded by Samuel Roper as Imperial Wizard in 1949, and Roper was succeeded by Eldon Edwards in 1950.[240] Based in Atlanta, Edwards worked to rebuild the organization by uniting the different factions of the KKK from other parts of the United States, but the strength of the organization was short-lived and the group fractured as it competed with other klan organizations. In 1959, Roy Davis was elected to follow Edwards as national leader.[241] Edwards had previously appointed Davis Grand Dragon of Texas in an effort to unite their two klan organizations. Davis was already leading the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Davis held rallies Florida and other southern states during 1961 and 1962 recruiting members. Davis had been a close associate of William J. Simmons and been active in the KKK since it first reformed in 1915.[242][243][244]

Congress launched an investigation into the KKK in the early 1964, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Davis, based in Dallas, resigned as Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights shortly after the Original Knights received a Congressional subpoena. The Original Knights became increasingly fractured in the immediate aftermath as many members were forced to testify before Congress.[245] The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan formed in 1964 after splitting from the Original Knights.[246] According to an FBI report published in May 1965, the KKK was divided into 14 different organizations at the time with a total membership of approximately 9,000.[246] The FBI reported that Roy Davis's Original Knights was the largest faction and had about 1,500 members. Robert Shelton of Alabama was leading a faction of 400–600 members.[246] Congressional investigators found that by the end of 1965 most members of Original Knights organization joined Shelton's United Klans and the Original Knights of the KKK disbanded. Shelton's United Klan continued to absorb members from the competing factions and remained the largest Klan group unto the 1970s, peaking with an estimated 30,000 members and another 250,000 non-member supporters during the late 1960s.[245][247]

1950s–1960s: post-war opposition to civil rights

After the decline of the national organization, small independent groups adopted the name "Ku Klux Klan", along with variations. They had no formal relationships with each other, and most had no connection to the second KKK, except for the fact that they copied its terminology and costumes. Beginning in the 1950s, for instance, individual Klan groups in Birmingham, Alabama, began to resist social change and Black people's efforts to improve their lives by bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods. The white men worked in mining and steel industries, with access to these materials. There were so many bombings of Black people's homes in Birmingham by Klan groups in the 1950s that the city was nicknamed "Bombingham".[97]

During the tenure of Bull Connor as police commissioner in Birmingham, Klan groups were closely allied with the police and operated with impunity. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham in 1961, Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police to quell the attack.[97] When local and state authorities failed to protect the Freedom Riders and activists, the federal government began to establish intervention and protection. In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors' administrations.[97] 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 Black people across the South meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all-white and demonstrably biased verdicts and sentences.[97]

 
Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were three civil rights workers abducted and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

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.[248]

Among the more notorious murders by Klan members in the 1950s and 1960s:

Resistance

There was considerable resistance among African Americans and white allies to the Klan. In 1953, newspaper publishers W. Horace Carter (Tabor City, North Carolina), who had campaigned for three years, and Willard Cole (Whiteville, North Carolina) 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".[255] In a 1958 incident in North Carolina, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans for associating with white people, and threatened more actions. When the KKK held a nighttime rally nearby, they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbee. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.[256][257]

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.[97]

As 20th-century Supreme Court rulings extended federal enforcement of citizens' civil rights, the government revived the Enforcement 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;[258] and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo. They were also the basis for prosecution in 1991 in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic.

In 1965, the House Un-American Activities Committee started an investigation on the Klan, putting in the public spotlight its front organizations, finances, methods and divisions.[259]

1970s–present

 
Violence at a Klan march in Mobile, Alabama, 1977

After federal legislation was passed prohibiting legal segregation and authorizing enforcement of protection of voting rights, KKK groups began to oppose court-ordered busing to desegregate schools, affirmative action, and the more open immigration authorized in the 1960s. In 1971, KKK members used bombs to destroy 10 school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. By 1975, there were known KKK groups on most college campuses in Louisiana as well as at Vanderbilt University, the University of Georgia, the University of Mississippi, the University of Akron, and the University of Southern California.[260]

Massacre of Communist Workers' Party protesters

On November 3, 1979, five communist protesters were killed by KKK and American Nazi Party members in Greensboro, North Carolina, in what is known as the Greensboro massacre.[261] The Communist Workers' Party had sponsored a rally against the Klan in an effort to organize predominantly Black industrial workers in the area.[210] Klan members drove up with arms in their car trunks, and attacked marchers.

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. William Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was revealed to have been working for the FBI.[262]

Thompson also related that KKK leaders showed great concern about a series of civil lawsuits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming damages amounting to millions of dollars. These were filed after KKK members shot into a group of African Americans. Klansmen curtailed their activities in order to conserve money for defense against the lawsuits. The KKK also used lawsuits as tools; they filed a libel suit in order to prevent the publication of a paperback edition of Thompson's book, but were unsuccessful.

Chattanooga, 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. The third defendant, Marshall Thrash, was sentenced by the same jury to nine months on lesser charges. He was released after three months.[263][264][265] In 1982, a jury awarded the five women $535,000 in a civil trial.[266]

Michael Donald lynching

After Michael Donald was lynched in 1981 in Alabama, the FBI investigated his death. The US attorney prosecuted the case. Two local KKK members were convicted for his murder, including Henry Francis Hays who was sentenced to death. After exhausting the appeals process, Hays was executed by electric chair for Donald's death in Alabama on June 6, 1997.[267] It was the first time since 1913 that a white man had been executed in Alabama for a crime against an African American.[268]

With the support of attorneys Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and state senator Michael A. Figures, 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.[269] The all-white jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching of Donald and ordered the Klan to pay US$7 million, but the KKK did not have sufficient funds to pay the fine. They had to sell off their national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa.[269][268]

Neo-Nazi alliances and Stormfront

In 1995, Don Black and Chloê Hardin, the ex-wife of the KKK grand wizard David Duke, began a small bulletin board system (BBS) called Stormfront, which has become a prominent online forum for white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, hate speech, racism, and antisemitism in the early 21st century.[270][271][272]

Duke has an account on Stormfront which he uses to post articles from his own website. He also polls 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.[273][274]

Current developments

The modern KKK is not one organization; rather it is composed of small independent chapters across the United States.[275] According to a 1999 ADL report, the KKK's estimated size then was "No more than a few thousand, organized into slightly more than 100 units".[276] In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors extremist groups, estimated that there were "at least 29 separate, rival Klan groups currently active in the United States, and they compete with one another for members, dues, news media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan".[277] The formation of independent chapters has made KKK groups more difficult to infiltrate, and researchers find it hard to estimate their numbers. Analysts believe that about two-thirds of KKK members are concentrated in the Southern United States, with another third situated primarily in the lower Midwest.[276][278][279]

For some time, the Klan's numbers have been 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.[280]

A 2016 analysis by the SPLC found that hate groups in general were on the rise in the United States.[281] The ADL published a report in 2016 that concluded: "Despite a persistent ability to attract media attention, organized Ku Klux Klan groups are actually continuing a long-term trend of decline. They remain a collection of mostly small, disjointed groups that continually change in name and leadership."[105]

In 2015, however, the number of KKK chapters nationwide grew from 72 to 190. The SPLC released a similar report stating that "there were significant increases in Klan as well as Black separatist groups".[281]

Recent KKK membership campaigns have stimulated people's anxieties about illegal immigration, urban crime, civil unions, and same-sex marriage.[282] In 2006, J. Keith Akins argued 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."[283] The Klan has produced Islamophobic propaganda and distributed anti-Islamic flyers.[284]

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.[285]

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.[286] The imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights, Frank Ancona, was fatally shot in Missouri in February 2017, several days after disappearing. The coroner declared his death a homicide. Ancona's wife and stepson were charged with first-degree murder in connection with the killing. The prosecutor in the case believes that the killing "happened because of a marital dispute" and was not connected to Ancona's Klan participation.[277] Ancona's group "was not considered the largest or the most influential iteration of the Klan, but he was skilled at attracting the spotlight".[277]

The February 14, 2019, edition of the Linden, Alabama, weekly newspaper The Democrat-Reporter carried an editorial titled "Klan needs to ride again" written by Goodloe Sutton—the newspaper's owner, publisher and editor—which urged the Klan to return to staging their night rides, because proposals were being made to raise taxes in the state. In an interview, Sutton suggested that Washington, D.C., could be "clean[ed] out" by way of lynchings. "We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them," Sutton said. He also specified that he was only referring to hanging "socialist-communists", and compared the Klan to the NAACP. The editorial and Sutton's subsequent comments provoked calls for his resignation from Alabama politicians and the Alabama Press Association, which later censured Sutton and suspended the newspaper's membership. In addition the University of Southern Mississippi's School of Communication removed Sutton—who is an alumnus of that school from its Mass Communication and Journalism Hall of Fame, and "strongly condemned" his remarks. Sutton was also stripped of a distinguished community journalism award he had been presented in 2009 by Auburn University's Journalism Advisory Council.[287] Sutton expressed no regret and said that the editorial was intended to be "ironic", but that "Not many people understand irony today."[288]

Current Klan organizations

A list is maintained by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL):[289]

Outside the United States

Aside from the Ku Klux Klan in Canada, there have been various attempts to organize KKK chapters outside the United States in places in Asia, Europe and Oceania, although most of them ultimately came to naught.[297]

Africa

In South Africa, during Apartheid, there were attempts, in the 1960s, to establish a branch at Rhodes University, with the help of Terry Venables. Some far-right activists took some of the lore such as by writing "Ku Klux Klan Africa" on the ANC Cape Town offices or wearing their dresses.[298]

In the 1970s, Rhodesia had a Ku Klux Klan, led by Len Idensohn, attacking Ian Smith for his relative moderation.[299][300]

America

In Mexico, the KKK endorsed and funded the Calles government during the 1920s Cristero War with the intention of destroying Catholicism there.[301] On 1924 vigilantes claimed to have organized themselves into a Klan against "criminals", publishing a program of "social epuration".[302]

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.[303]

The Klan has also been established in the Canal Zone.[297]

Klan was present in Cuba, under the name of Ku Klux Klan Kubano, directed against both West Indian migrant workers and Afro-Cuban and using the fear of the 1912 Negro Rebellion.[297][304]

Asia

During the Vietnam War, klaverns were established on some US military bases, often tolerated by military authorities.[305][306] In the 1920s, the Klan briefly existed in Shanghai.[297][307]

Europe

Recruitment activity has also been reported in the United Kingdom. In the 1960s, "klaverns" were established in the Midlands, the following decade saw visits by leading Klansmen, and the 1990s saw recruitment drives in London, Scotland and the Midlands and huge internal turnoil and splintering: for example a leader, Allan Beshella, had to resign after 1972 conviction for child sex abuse was revealed.[308][309] On 2018, Klan-clad far-right activists marched in front of a Northern Irish mosque.[310]

In Germany, a KKK-related group, Ritter des Feurigen Kreuzes ("Knights of the Fiery Cross"), was established in 1925 by returning naturalized German-born US citizens in Berlin who managed to gather around 300 persons of middle-class occupations such as merchants and clerks. It soon saw the original founders being removed by internal conflicts, and mocking newspapers about the affair. After the Nazis took over Germany, the group disbanded and its members joined the Nazis.[311][297][312] On 1991, Dennis Mahon, then of Oklahoma's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, reportedly helped to organize Klan groups.[309] Another German KKK-related group, the European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has organized and it gained notoriety in 2012 when the German media reported that two police officers who held membership in the organization would be allowed to keep their jobs.[313][314] In 2019, the German authorities conducted raids against a possibly dangerous group called National Socialist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Deutschland.[315][316][317]

In the 1920s, the Klan was rumoured to exist in Lithuania and Czechoslovakia.[297]

Oceania

In Australia in the late 1990s, former One Nation member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country,[318][319] and circa 2012 the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First.[320]

A Ku Klux Klan group was established in Fiji in 1874 by white American and British settlers wanting to enact White supremacy, although its operations were quickly put to an end by the British who, although not officially yet established as the major authority of Fiji, had played a leading role in establishing a new constitutional monarchy, the Kingdom of Fiji, that was being threatened by the activities of the Fijian Klan, which owned fortresses and artillery. By March, it had become the "British Subjects' Mutual Protection Society", which included Francis Herbert Dufty.[321][322][323][324]

In the 1920s, the Klan had been rumoured to exist in New Zealand.[297]

Titles and vocabulary

Membership in the Klan is secret. Like many fraternal organizations, the Klan has signs that members can use to recognize one another. In conversation, a member may use the acronym AYAK (Are you a Klansman?) to surreptitiously identify themselves to another potential member. The response AKIA (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.[325]

Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words[326][259] beginning with "Kl", including:

  • Klabee – treasurers
  • Klavern – local organization
  • Imperial Kleagle – recruiter
  • Klecktoken – initiation fee
  • Kligrapp – secretary
  • Klonvokation – 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.[327] 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.[328]

Symbols

The Ku Klux Klan has utilized a variety of symbols over its history.

Blood Drop Cross

The Primary symbol used by the clan for the past century has been the Mystic Insignia of a Klansman, commonly known as the Blood Drop Cross, a white cross on a red disk with what appears to be a blood drop in the middle. It was first used in the early 1900s, with the symbol in the center originally appearing as a red and white Ying Yang which in the subsequent years, lost the white part and was reinterpreted as a "blood drop".[329]

Triangular Klan symbol

The Triangular Ku Klux Klan symbol is made of what looks like a triangle inside a triangle, similar to a Sierpiński triangle, but in fact represents three letter Ks interlocked and facing inward, referencing the name of the group. A variation on this symbol has the K's facing outwards instead of inwards. It is an old Klan symbol that has also been resurrected in the modern day hate symbol.[330]

Burning cross

Although predating the Klan, in modern times the symbol of the burning cross has become almost solely associated with the Ku Klux Klan and has become one of the most potent hate symbols in the United States.[331] Burning crosses didn't become associated with the clan until Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, and its film adaptation, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation inspired members of the second Klan to take up the practice.[332] In the modern day the symbol of the burning cross is so associated with racial intimidation that it is used by many non-Klan racist elements and has spread to locations outside the United States.[331]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ The Ku Klux Klan opposed the civil rights and Black rights movements, and often killed Black people that either committed crimes, or simply exercised their rights of voting, owning guns or land, etc.[4]
  2. ^ The Ku Klux Klan has been described as nativist[7] as well as being anti-feminist, anti-progressivist, anti-abortion[8] and anti-LGBT.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]
  3. ^ Commonly mispronounced /ˌkl-/.
  4. ^ An analyzes of this cartoon can be found in Hubbs 2015

Citations

  1. ^ "Historical Flags of Our Ancestors – Flags of Extremism – Part 1 (a-m)". www.loeser.us. Retrieved December 2, 2022.
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ . Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on July 23, 2013. Retrieved February 7, 2013.
  4. ^ Blow, Charles M. (January 7, 2016). "Gun Control and White Terror". The New York Times. Retrieved March 3, 2022.
  5. ^ Al-Khattar, Aref M. (2003). Religion and terrorism: an interfaith perspective. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. pp. 21, 30, 55.
  6. ^ Michael, Robert, and Philip Rosen. Dictionary of antisemitism from the earliest times to the present. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1997, p. 267.[ISBN missing]
  7. ^ a b Pegram 2011, pp. 47–88.
  8. ^ Dibranco, Alex (February 3, 2020). "The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement's Links to White Supremacists". The Nation. In 1985, the KKK began creating wanted posters listing personal information for abortion providers (doxing before the Internet age) ... Groups like the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan trafficked in rhetoric that mirrored that of the anti-abortion movement—with an anti-Semitic twist: 'More than ten million white babies have been murdered through Jewish-engineered legalized abortion since 1973 here in America and more than a million per year are being slaughtered this way.'
  9. ^ . Archived from the original on June 30, 2021. Police in Virginia are investigating a series of violently antisemitic and homophobic flyers targeting a local school board that were distributed by a white supremacist group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Flyers denouncing the school board in Fairfax, Va., as 'Jew-inspired, communist, queer-loving sex fiends violating the words of the Holy Bible' were discovered on Wednesday
  10. ^ . United Press International. August 24, 1991. Archived from the original on July 4, 2021.
  11. ^ . Independent. February 13, 2015. Archived from the original on July 4, 2021.
  12. ^ "Ku Klux Klan distributes anti-transgender fliers in at least 1 Alabama neighborhood". May 24, 2016.
  13. ^ "KKK Allegedly Threatens Gay Political Candidate in Florida". NBC News.
  14. ^ "Ku Klux Klan plans rally to support anti-gay counseling student". LGBTQ Nation.
  15. ^ "KKK to Floridians: End AIDS by 'bashing gays'". LGBTQ Nation.
  16. ^ "Ku Klux Klan Rallies In Ellijay, GA – Condemns Homosexuals, Illegal Immigrants, Black Americans and Others". September 13, 2010.
  17. ^ "KKK members protest LGBTQ pride march in Florence". June 13, 2017.
  18. ^ . LGBTQ Nation. October 5, 2010. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved October 5, 2010.
  19. ^ . CBS News. Archived from the original on July 28, 2022. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
  20. ^ . Tampa Bay Times. July 13, 1992. Archived from the original on July 28, 2022. 50 Klansmen, skinheads and supporters proclaimed gays and lesbians should receive the death penalty.
  21. ^ "Anti-Semitic and racist KKK fliers dropped in Philadelphia suburb". The Times of Israel.
  22. ^ "KKK drops antisemitic fliers in Florida to recruit members". October 18, 2017.
  23. ^ "KKK Flyers Threatening Blacks And Jews Found In Florida". The Forward. October 10, 2017.
  24. ^ "Antisemitic, racist KKK fliers dropped in Cherry Hill, NJ". Jewish Ledger. October 16, 2018.
  25. ^ . Archived from the original on June 12, 2021.
  26. ^ . Jewish Telegraph Agency. Archived from the original on July 28, 2022.
  27. ^ a b c Laats, Adam (2012). "Red Schoolhouse, Burning Cross: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Educational Reform". History of Education Quarterly. 52 (3): 323–350. doi:10.1111/j.1748-5959.2012.00402.x. ISSN 0018-2680. JSTOR 23251451. S2CID 142780437.
  28. ^ a b c "Kingdom". Time. January 17, 1927. ISSN 0040-781X. Retrieved December 25, 2022.
  29. ^ a b c "Ku Klux Klan Ledgers | History Colorado". www.historycolorado.org. Retrieved December 25, 2022.
  30. ^ a b c "Principles and Purposes of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan". 1920.
  31. ^ Kristin Dimick. . Archived from the original on May 14, 2022.
  32. ^ Philip N. Racine (1973). . The Georgia Historical Quarterly. Georgia Historical Society. 57 (1): 63–75. JSTOR 40579872. Archived from the original on July 28, 2022.
  33. ^ Christine K. Erickson. (MA thesis). University of Montana. Archived from the original on July 28, 2022.
  34. ^ "Ku Klux Klan Fliers Promoting Islamophobia Found In Washington State Neighborhood". March 2, 2015.
  35. ^ "Alabama KKK actively recruiting to 'fight the spread of Islam'". December 10, 2015.
  36. ^ . The Washington Post. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved June 5, 2018.
  37. ^ . Times of Israel. Archived from the original on July 24, 2022. Retrieved August 22, 2016.
  38. ^ . Newsweek. September 2, 2021. Archived from the original on July 24, 2022. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  39. ^ . Local 10. March 19, 2019. Archived from the original on July 24, 2022. Retrieved March 19, 2019. Gerald Wallace said he liked KKK's stance on Muslims, in newly released video
  40. ^ . The Mirror. June 19, 2020. Archived from the original on July 24, 2022. Retrieved June 19, 2020.
  41. ^ a b c Baker 2011.
  42. ^ Barkun, pp. 60–85.
  43. ^ Abernathy, Jesse (October 25, 2012). "Indian family cites KKK threat in South Dakota". indianz.com. Retrieved November 27, 2022.
  44. ^ . Washington Blade. November 24, 2015. Archived from the original on August 1, 2022. The Ku Klux Klan has distributed fliers against a proposed ordinance that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
  45. ^ Andrea Castillo (June 4, 2015). . The Fresno Bee. Archived from the original on June 17, 2021. Two dozen Klansmen showed up in white robes. A Bee article quoted their spokesman, Jim Cheney, saying, "We can't hang them or tar and feather them anymore, but we can do other things." Members of the group continued making appearances at the festival through 1998.
  46. ^ Jaime Ritter (December 9, 2015). . CBS42. Archived from the original on August 1, 2022. The Alabama chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says that the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is recruiting in Alabama to "fight the spread of Islam in our country."
  47. ^ . Los Angeles Times. August 21, 1994. Archived from the original on August 3, 2022. Ku Klux Klansmen plan to demonstrate at abortion clinics in Pensacola within the next month, a spokesman for the group said Saturday. The group plans to picket against abortion and the use of federal marshals to guard the clinics.
  48. ^ Moira Donegan (January 24, 2022). . The Guardian. Archived from the original on August 3, 2022. In 1985, the KKK began circulating "Wanted" posters featuring the photos and personal information of abortion providers. The posters were picked up by the anti-choice terrorist group Operation Rescue in the early 90s.
  49. ^ Baudouin 1997, p. 23: "Bigots began to howl more loudly than in years, and a new Klan leader began to beat the drums of anti-Black, anti-union, anti-Jew, anti-Catholic and anti-Communist hatred. This man was Samuel Green, an Atlanta doctor.".
  50. ^ Petersen, William. Against the Stream: Reflections of an Unconventional Demographer. Transaction Publishers. p. 89. ISBN 978-1412816663. Retrieved May 8, 2016.
  51. ^ Pratt Guterl, Matthew (2009). The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940. Harvard University Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0674038059.
  52. ^ John Skipper (December 28, 2005). . Courier Lee News Service. Archived from the original on August 3, 2022.
  53. ^ Nicole Hensley (February 18, 2015). . New York Daily News. Archived from the original on August 3, 2022. Mississippi's top Ku Klux Klan leader is rallying his klansmen to protest Alabama's overturned gay marriage ban, but to leave their hoods at home. Brent Waller, imperial wizard for the state's United Dixie White Knights, took to Stormfront, an online white supremacist forum, to "salute" Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore's refusal to "bow to the yoke of Federal tyranny," he wrote.
  54. ^ Sara Isaac (June 26, 1988). "Klansmen Picket Gay Rights Rally". Orlando Sentinel. "Every American has a right to worship and believe as he sees fit. . . . But they homosexuals are discrediting the U.S. Constitution. They're taking advantage of their rights," said one Klansman, who refused to be identified. "They should be dealt with accordingly," he said. The counterdemonstration was organized by the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Shelton, Conn. Klansmen wore the rubber gloves to symbolize their belief that AIDS is primarily a homosexual disease that God created to wipe out the country's homosexual population.
  55. ^ "Anti-gay KKK newsletters left at Miss. homes". 11 Alive. June 20, 2016.
  56. ^ Polly Ross Hughes (October 27, 2005). . Houston Chronicle. Archived from the original on July 28, 2022.
  57. ^ "Klu Klux Klan Established".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  58. ^ "KKK in Washington State - Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project". depts.washington.edu. Retrieved January 26, 2023.
  59. ^ Rothman, Joshua D. (December 4, 2016). "When Bigotry Paraded Through the Streets". The Atlantic. Retrieved January 26, 2023.
  60. ^ McVeigh 2009.
  61. ^ Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (2000), ch. 3, 5, 13.
  62. ^ Chalmers 2003, p. 163.
  63. ^ Quarles 1999, p. 100.
  64. ^ See, e.g., Klanwatch Project (2011), illustrations, pp. 9–10.
  65. ^ Parsons 2005, pp. 811–836.
  66. ^ Dimick, Kristin. The Ku Klux Klan and the Anti-Catholic School Bills of Washington and Oregon. Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Retrieved March 3, 2022.
  67. ^ Toy, Eckard. Ku Klux Klan. Oregon Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 4, 2022.
  68. ^ Mandel, Nicole L. (April 26, 2012). The Quiet Bigotry of Oregon's Compulsory Public Education Act. Portland State University. Retrieved March 4, 2022.
  69. ^ Both the Anti-Defamation League October 3, 2012, at the Wayback Machine and the Southern Poverty Law Center February 19, 2010, at the Wayback Machine 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 (ed.), Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader, Routledge, 2003, p. 112.
  70. ^ "At 150, KKK sees opportunities in US political trends". from the original on July 1, 2016. Retrieved July 2, 2016.
  71. ^ Newton 2001.
  72. ^ Perlmutter, Philip (1999). Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America. M. E. Sharpe. p. 170. ISBN 978-0765604064. 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 believed their membership in keeping with 'one-hundred percent Americanism' and Christian morality.
  73. ^ a b c The present-day Ku Klux Klan movement: Report by the Committee on Un-American activities. Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office. 1967.
  74. ^ a b . Anti-Defamation League. Archived from the original on February 12, 2011. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
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  76. ^ a b Stevens 1907.
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  78. ^ Michael K. Jerryson (2020), Religious Violence Today: Faith and Conflict in the Modern World, p. 217
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  80. ^ Trelease 1995, p. 18.
  81. ^ "John W. Morton Passes Away in Shelby". The Tennessean. November 21, 1914. pp. 1–2. from the original on October 8, 2016. Retrieved September 25, 2016 – via Newspapers.com. To Captain Morton came the peculiar distinction of having organized that branch of the Ku Klux Klan which operated in Nashville and the adjacent territory, but a more signal honor was his when he performed the ceremonies which initiated Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest into the mysterious ranks of the Ku Klux Klan.
  82. ^ J. Michael Martinez (2007). Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 24. ISBN 978-0742572614.
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  86. ^ Rable 1984.
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klux, klan, klansman, redirect, here, other, uses, clansman, disambiguation, disambiguation, commonly, shortened, klan, american, white, supremacist, right, wing, terrorist, hate, group, whose, primary, targets, african, americans, jews, latinos, asian, americ. KKK and Klansman redirect here For other uses see Clansman disambiguation and KKK disambiguation The Ku Klux Klan ˌ k uː k l ʌ k s ˈ k l ae n ˌ k j uː c commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan is an American white supremacist right wing terrorist and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans Jews Latinos Asian Americans Native Americans 43 and Catholics as well as immigrants leftists homosexuals 44 45 Muslims 46 atheists 27 28 29 30 and abortion providers 47 48 49 Ku Klux KlanThe Duke Flag used by some in the Third Klan and named after former Klan leader David Duke The Blood Drop Cross is shown in the centre 1 In existenceFirst Klan 1865 1872Second Klan 1915 1944Third Klan 1946 1950 presentMembersFirst Klan UnknownSecond Klan c 3 million 6 million 2 peaked in 1924 1925 Third Klan c 5 000 8 000 3 Political ideologiesWhite supremacy White nationalism Vigilantism Segregationism a Christian terrorism 5 6 Neo Confederatism After 1915 Nordicism Right wing populism Social conservatism b Antisemitism 21 22 23 24 25 26 Anti immigration Anti communism Anti atheism 27 28 29 30 Anti Catholicism 31 32 33 After 1950 Anti miscegenation Anti trade unionism Neo Fascism Neo Nazism Anti globalization Islamophobia 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 Political positionFar rightEspoused religionProtestantism second Klan 41 Christian Identity second and third Klans 42 The Klan has existed in three distinct eras Each has advocated extremist reactionary positions such as white nationalism anti immigration and especially in later iterations Nordicism 50 51 antisemitism anti Catholicism Prohibition right wing populism anti communism homophobia 52 53 54 55 56 anti atheism 27 28 29 30 Islamophobia and anti progressivism The first Klan founded by Confederate veterans 57 used terrorism both physical assault and murder against politically active Black people and their allies in the Southern United States in the late 1860s The second iteration of the Klan originated in the 1910s and was the first to use cross burnings and hooded robes During the First Red Scare the Klan integrated anti communism into its doctrine 58 59 The third Klan used murders and bombings from the late 1940s to the early 1960s to achieve its aims All three movements have called for the purification of American society and are all considered far right extremist organizations 60 61 62 63 In each era membership was secret and estimates of the total were highly exaggerated by both friends and enemies The first Klan was established in the wake of the American Civil War and was a defining organization of the Reconstruction era Organized in numerous chapters across the Southern United States federal law enforcement suppressed it around 1871 It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South especially by using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African American leaders Each chapter was autonomous and highly secretive about membership and plans Members made their own often colorful costumes robes masks and conical hats designed to be terrifying and to hide their identities 64 65 The second Klan started in 1915 as a small group in Georgia It grew after 1920 and flourished nationwide in the early and mid 1920s including urban areas of the Midwest and West Taking inspiration from D W Griffith s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation which mythologized the founding of the first Klan it employed marketing techniques and a popular fraternal organization structure Rooted in local Protestant communities it sought to maintain white supremacy often took a pro Prohibition and pro compulsory public education 66 67 68 stance and it opposed Jews while also stressing its opposition to the alleged political power of the pope and the Catholic Church This second Klan flourished both in the south and northern states it was funded by initiation fees and selling its members a standard white costume The chapters did not have dues It used K words which were similar to those used by the first Klan while adding cross burnings and mass parades to intimidate others It rapidly declined in the latter half of the 1920s The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after 1950 in the form of localized and isolated groups that use the KKK name They have focused on opposition to the civil rights movement often using violence and murder to suppress activists This manifestation is classified as a hate group by the Anti Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center 69 As of 2016 update the Anti Defamation League puts total KKK membership nationwide at around 3 000 while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6 000 members total 70 The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent references to a false mythologized perception of America s Anglo Saxon blood hearkening back to 19th century nativism 71 Although members of the KKK swear to uphold Christian morality Christian denominations widely denounce them 72 Contents 1 Overview 1 1 First KKK 1 2 Second KKK 1 3 Third KKK 2 History 2 1 Origin of the name 2 2 First Klan 1865 1871 2 2 1 Creation and naming 2 2 2 Activities 2 2 3 Resistance 2 2 4 End of the first Klan 2 3 Second Klan 1915 1944 2 3 1 Refounding in 1915 2 3 1 1 The Birth of a Nation 2 3 2 Goals 2 3 3 Organization 2 3 4 Perceived moral threats 2 3 5 Rapid growth 2 3 6 Prohibition 2 3 7 Urbanization 2 3 8 Costumes and the burning cross 2 3 9 Women 2 3 10 Political role 2 3 11 Resistance and decline 2 3 12 Labor and anti unionism 2 3 13 Development of Christian Identity Theology 2 4 National changes 2 4 1 Historiography of the second Klan 2 4 1 1 Anti modern interpretations 2 4 1 2 New social history interpretations 2 4 1 3 Indiana and Alabama 2 5 Later Klans 1950s present 2 5 1 1950s 1960s post war opposition to civil rights 2 5 2 Resistance 2 5 3 1970s present 2 5 3 1 Massacre of Communist Workers Party protesters 2 5 3 2 Jerry Thompson infiltration 2 5 3 3 Chattanooga Tennessee shooting 2 5 3 4 Michael Donald lynching 2 5 3 5 Neo Nazi alliances and Stormfront 2 5 3 6 Current developments 2 5 3 7 Current Klan organizations 3 Outside the United States 3 1 Africa 3 2 America 3 3 Asia 3 4 Europe 3 5 Oceania 4 Titles and vocabulary 5 Symbols 5 1 Blood Drop Cross 5 2 Triangular Klan symbol 5 3 Burning cross 6 See also 7 References 7 1 Notes 7 2 Citations 7 3 Bibliography 8 Further reading 9 External links 9 1 Official websites 9 2 Other linksOverviewFirst KKK See also Nathan Bedford Forrest Ku Klux Klan membership Depiction of Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina in 1870 based on a photograph taken under the supervision of a federal officer who seized Klan costumes The first Klan was founded in Pulaski Tennessee on December 24 1865 73 by six former officers of the Confederate army 74 Frank McCord Richard Reed John Lester John Kennedy J Calvin Jones and James Crowe 75 It started as a fraternal social club inspired at least in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta It borrowed parts of the initiation ceremony from that group with the same purpose ludicrous initiations the baffling of public curiosity and the amusement for members were the only objects of the Klan according to Albert Stevens in 1907 76 The manual of rituals was printed by Laps D McCord of Pulaski 77 The origins of the hood are uncertain it may have been appropriated from the Spanish capirote hood 78 or it may be traced to the uniform of Southern Mardi Gras celebrations 79 According to The Cyclopaedia of Fraternities 1907 Beginning in April 1867 there was a gradual transformation The members had conjured up a veritable Frankenstein They had played with an engine of power and mystery though organized on entirely innocent lines and found themselves overcome by a belief that something must lie behind it all that there was after all a serious purpose a work for the Klan to do 76 Although there was little organizational structure above the local level similar groups rose across the South and adopted the same name and methods clarification needed 80 Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement promoting resistance and white supremacy during the Reconstruction Era For example Confederate veteran John W Morton founded a chapter in Nashville Tennessee 81 As a secret vigilante group the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence including murder They targeted white Northern leaders Southern sympathizers and politically active Blacks 82 In 1870 and 1871 the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts which were intended to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes 83 The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives It seriously weakened the Black political leadership through its use of assassinations and threats of violence and it drove some people out of politics On the other hand it caused a sharp backlash with passage of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of restoring order reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans and enabling Blacks to exercise their rights as citizens 84 Historian George C Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded by the Democratic Party leaders of the South He says The Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses its lack of central organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists More fundamentally it declined because it failed to achieve its central objective the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South 85 After the Klan was suppressed similar insurgent paramilitary groups arose that were explicitly directed at suppressing Republican voting and turning Republicans out of office the White League which started in Louisiana in 1874 and the Red Shirts which started in Mississippi and developed chapters in the Carolinas For instance the Red Shirts are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina They were described as acting as the military arm of the Democratic Party and are attributed with helping white Democrats regain control of state legislatures throughout the South 86 Second KKK See also Ku Klux Klan in Canada and Indiana Klan KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s In 1915 the second Klan was founded atop Stone Mountain Georgia by William Joseph Simmons While Simmons relied on documents from the original Klan and memories of some surviving elders the revived Klan was based significantly on the wildly popular film The Birth of a Nation The earlier Klan had not worn the white costumes and had not burned crosses these aspects were introduced in the book on which the film was based When the film was shown in Atlanta in December of that year Simmons and his new klansmen paraded to the theater in robes and pointed hoods many on robed horses just like in the film These mass parades became another hallmark of the new Klan that had not existed in the original Reconstruction era organization 87 Beginning in 1921 it adopted a modern business system of using full time paid recruiters and it appealed to new members as a fraternal organization of which many examples were flourishing at the time The national headquarters made its profit through a monopoly on costume sales while the organizers were paid through initiation fees It grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity Reflecting the social tensions pitting urban versus rural America it spread to every state and was prominent in many cities 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 7 Its appeal was directed exclusively toward white Protestants it opposed Jews Black people Catholics and newly arriving Southern and Eastern European immigrants such as Italians Russians and Lithuanians many of whom were Jewish or Catholic 88 Some local groups threatened violence against rum runners and those they deemed notorious sinners the violent episodes generally took place in the South 89 The Red Knights were a militant group organized in opposition to the Klan and responded violently to Klan provocations on several occasions 90 The Ku Klux Number of Judge August 16 1924 The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization with a national and state structure During the resurgence of the second Klan in the 1920s its publicity was handled by the Southern Publicity Association Within the first six months of the Association s national recruitment campaign Klan membership had increased by 85 000 91 At its peak in the mid 1920s the organization s membership ranged from three to eight million members 92 In 1923 Simmons was ousted as leader of the KKK by Hiram Wesley Evans From September 1923 there were two Ku Klux Klan organizations the one founded by Simmons and led by Evans with its strength primarily in the southern United States and a breakaway group led by Grand Dragon D C Stephenson based in Indiana with its membership primarily in the midwestern United States 93 Internal divisions criminal behavior by leaders especially Stephenson s conviction for the abduction rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer and external opposition brought about a collapse in the membership of both groups The main group s membership had dropped to about 30 000 by 1930 It finally faded away in the 1940s 94 Klan organizers also operated in Canada especially in Saskatchewan in 1926 1928 where Klansmen denounced immigrants from Eastern Europe as a threat to Canada s Anglo Saxon heritage 95 96 Third KKK The Ku Klux Klan name was used by 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 97 Several members of Klan groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and of children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 The United States government still considers the Klan to be a subversive terrorist organization 98 99 100 101 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 for conspiring to blow up a natural gas processing plant 102 In 1999 the city council of Charleston South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the Klan a terrorist organization 103 The existence of modern Klan groups has been in a state of consistent decline due to a variety of factors from the American public s negative distaste of the group s image platform and history infiltration and prosecution by law enforcement civil lawsuit forfeitures and the radical right wing s perception of the Klan as outdated and unfashionable The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that just between 2016 and 2019 the number of Klan groups in America dropped from 130 to just 51 104 A 2016 report by the Anti Defamation League claims an estimate of just over 30 active Klan groups existing in the United States 105 Estimates of total collective membership range from about 3 000 105 to 8 000 106 In addition to its active membership the Klan has an unknown number of associates and supporters 105 HistoryOrigin of the name The name was probably formed by combining the Greek kyklos kyklos which means circle with clan 107 108 The word had previously been used for other fraternal organizations in the South such as Kuklos Adelphon First Klan 1865 1871 See also Nathan Bedford Forrest Ku Klux Klan membership Creation and naming A cartoon threatening that the KKK will lynch scalawags left and carpetbaggers right on March 4 1869 the day President Grant takes office Tuscaloosa Alabama Independent Monitor September 1 1868 d Six Confederate veterans from Pulaski Tennessee created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24 1865 shortly after the Civil War during the Reconstruction of the South 109 110 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 111 Historians generally classify 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 Black people and their allies as intimidation They burned houses and attacked and killed Black people leaving their bodies on the roads 112 While racism was a core belief of the Klan anti Semitism was not Many prominent southern Jews identified wholly with southern culture resulting in examples of Jewish participation in the Klan 113 This Frank Bellew cartoon links the Democratic Party with secession and the Confederate cause 114 At an 1867 meeting in Nashville Tennessee Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting to a national headquarters Since most of the Klan s members were veterans they were used to such military hierarchy but the Klan never operated under this centralized structure Local chapters and bands were highly independent Nathan Bedford Forrest Former Confederate brigadier general George Gordon developed the Prescript which espoused 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 115 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 was elected the first grand wizard and claimed to be the Klan s national leader 74 116 In an 1868 newspaper interview Forrest stated that the Klan s primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues Republican state governments people such as Tennessee governor William Gannaway Brownlow and other carpetbaggers and scalawags 117 He argued that many Southerners believed that Black people were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues 118 One Alabama newspaper editor declared The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan 119 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 personal feuds and local grudges as they worked to restore general white dominance in the disrupted postwar society The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of anti Black 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 120 Wikisource has original text related to this article Interview with Nathan Bedford Forrest 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 121 To that end they worked to curb the education economic advancement voting rights and right to keep and bear arms of Black people 121 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 122 Activities Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County Mississippi September 1871 for the attempted murder of an entire family 123 Wikisource has original text related to this article Why the Ku Klux 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 by voice and mannerisms The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly and by day they accomplish secretly masked and at night 124 The KKK night riders sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so as they claimed to frighten superstitious Blacks Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously 125 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 Black people 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 126 George W Ashburn was assassinated for his pro Black sentiments Klan violence worked to suppress Black voting and campaign seasons were deadly More than 2 000 people were killed wounded or 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 President 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 127 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 128 Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county which in Florida and hundreds more in other counties which Florida Freedmen s Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen s beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies 129 Garb and weapons of the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois as posed for Joseph A Dacus of the Missouri Republican in August 1875 Milder encounters including some against white teachers also occurred In Mississippi according to the Congressional inquiry 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 in 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 130 By 1868 two years after the Klan s creation its activity was beginning to decrease 131 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 132 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 131 Resistance Wikisource has original text related to this article Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 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 Black people formed their own defense in Bennettsville South Carolina and patrolled the streets to protect their homes 133 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 a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors 134 Many southern states began to pass anti Klan legislation 135 Benjamin Franklin Butler wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1871 In January 1871 Pennsylvania Republican senator John Scott convened a congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities accumulating 12 volumes 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 136 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 occurred in a Meridian Mississippi courthouse from which a Black state representative escaped by fleeing to the woods 137 The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus 138 In 1871 President Ulysses S Grant signed Butler s legislation The Ku Klux Klan Act and the Enforcement Act of 1870 were used by the federal government to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution The Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve after the 1871 Klan Act so President Grant issued a suspension of habeas corpus and stationed federal troops in nine South Carolina counties by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 The Klansmen were apprehended and prosecuted in federal court Judges Hugh Lennox Bond and George S Bryan presided over the trial of KKK members in Columbia South Carolina during December 1871 139 The defendants were given from three months to five years of incarceration with fines 140 More Black people served on juries in federal court than on local or state juries so they had a chance to participate in the process 138 141 Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned during the crackdown End of the first Klan Klan leader Nathan Bedford 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 However the Klan had no membership rosters no chapters and no local officers so it was difficult for observers to judge its membership 142 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 143 and 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 143 Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan s costume to hide their identities when carrying out independent acts of violence Forrest called for the Klan to disband in 1869 arguing that it was being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace 144 Historian Stanley Horn 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 145 A Georgia based reporter wrote in 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 146 Gov William Holden of North Carolina In many states officials were reluctant to use Black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised 141 Republican governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870 adding to his unpopularity This and extensive violence and fraud at the polls caused the Republicans to lose their majority in the state legislature Disaffection with Holden s actions contributed to white Democratic legislators impeaching him and removing him from office but their reasons for doing so were numerous 147 Klan operations ended in South Carolina 132 and gradually withered away throughout the rest of the South Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions 148 Foner argues that By 1872 the federal government s evident willingness to bring its legal and coercive authority to bear had broken the Klan s back and produced a dramatic decline in violence throughout the South So ended the Reconstruction career of the Ku Klux Klan 149 New groups of insurgents emerged in the mid 1870s local paramilitary organizations such as the White League Red Shirts saber clubs and rifle clubs that intimidated and murdered Black political leaders 150 The White League and Red Shirts were distinguished by their willingness to cultivate publicity working directly to overturn Republican officeholders and regain control of politics 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 include the right to regulate against private conspiracies It recommended that persons who had been victimized should seek relief in state courts which were entirely unsympathetic to such appeals 151 Klan costumes also called regalia disappeared from use by the early 1870s 152 after Grand Wizard Forrest called for their destruction as part of disbanding the Klan The Klan was broken as an organization by 1872 153 In 1915 William Joseph Simmons held a meeting to revive the Klan in Georgia he attracted two aging former members and all other members were new 154 Second Klan 1915 1944 Refounding in 1915 In 1915 the film The Birth of a Nation was released mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan and its endeavors The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain near Atlanta with fifteen charter members 155 Its growth was based on a new anti immigrant anti Catholic Prohibitionist and anti Semitic agenda which reflected contemporary social tensions particularly recent immigration The new organization and chapters adopted regalia featured in The Birth of a Nation membership was kept secret by wearing masks in public The Birth of a Nation Frontispiece to the first edition of Dixon s The Clansman by Arthur I Keller The Fiery Cross of old Scotland s hills Illustration from the first edition of The Clansman by Arthur I Keller Note figures in background Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation which has been widely credited with inspiring the 20th century revival of the Ku Klux Klan Director D W Griffith s The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan The film was based on the book and play The Clansman A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan as well as the book The Leopard s Spots both by Thomas Dixon Jr Much of the modern Klan s iconography is derived from it including the standardized white costume and the burning cross 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 false claim of endorsement by President Woodrow Wilson Dixon was an old friend of Wilson s and before its release there was a private showing of the film at the White House A publicist claimed that Wilson said It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true Wilson strongly disliked the film and felt he had been tricked by Dixon The White House issued a denial of the lightning quote saying that he was entirely unaware of the nature of the film and at no time had expressed his approbation of it 156 Goals Three Ku Klux Klan members at a 1922 parade In this 1926 cartoon the Ku Klux Klan chases the Catholic Church personified by St Patrick from the shores of America Among the snakes are various supposed negative attributes of the Church including superstition the union of church and state control of public schools and intolerance The first and third Klans were primarily Southeastern groups aimed against Black people The second Klan in contrast broadened the scope of the organization to appeal to people in the Midwestern and Western states who considered Catholics Jews and foreign born minorities to be anti American 73 The Second Klan saw threats from every direction According to historian Brian R Farmer two thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers 157 Much of the Klan s energy went into guarding the home and historian Kathleen Blee says that its members wanted to protect the interests of white womanhood 158 Joseph Simmons published the pamphlet ABC of the Invisible Empire in Atlanta in 1917 in it he 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 159 Such moral sounding purpose underlay its appeal as a fraternal organization recruiting members with a promise of aid for settling into the new urban societies of rapidly growing cities such as Dallas and Detroit 160 During the 1930s particularly after James A Colescott of Indiana took over as imperial wizard opposition to Communism became another primary aim of the Klan 73 Organization New Klan founder William J Simmons joined 12 different fraternal organizations and recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges consciously modeling the Klan after fraternal organizations 161 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 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 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 The group produced publications for national circulation from its headquarters in Atlanta Searchlight 1919 1924 Imperial Night Hawk 1923 1924 and The Kourier 162 163 164 Perceived moral threats The second Klan grew primarily in response to issues of declining morality typified by divorce adultery defiance of Prohibition and criminal gangs in the news every day 41 It was also a response to the growing power of Catholics and American Jews and the accompanying proliferation of non Protestant cultural values The Klan had a nationwide reach by the mid 1920s with its densest per capita membership in Indiana It became most prominent in cities with high growth rates between 1910 and 1930 as rural Protestants flocked to jobs in Detroit and Dayton in the Midwest and Atlanta Dallas Memphis and Houston in the South Close to half of Michigan s 80 000 Klansmen lived in Detroit 165 Members of the KKK swore to uphold American values and Christian morality and some Protestant ministers became involved at the local level However no Protestant denomination officially endorsed the KKK 166 indeed the Klan was repeatedly denounced by the major Protestant magazines as well as by all major secular newspapers Historian Robert Moats Miller reports that not a single endorsement of the Klan was found by the present writer in the Methodist press while many of the attacks on the Klan were quite savage The Southern Baptist press condoned the aims but condemned the methods of the Klan National denominational organizations never endorsed the Klan but they rarely condemned it by name Many nationally and regionally prominent churchmen did condemn it by name and none endorsed it 167 The second Klan was less violent than either the first or third Klan were However the second Klan especially in the Southeast was not an entirely non violent organization The most violent Klan was in Dallas Texas In April 1921 shortly after they began gaining popularity in the area the Klan kidnapped Alex Johnson a Black man who had been accused of having sex with a white woman They burned the letters KKK into his forehead and gave him a severe beating by a riverbed The police chief and district attorney refused to prosecute explicitly and publicly stating they believed that Johnson deserved this treatment Encouraged by the approval of this whipping the Dallas KKK whipped 68 people by the riverbed in 1922 alone Although Johnson had been Black most of the Dallas KKK s whipping victims were white men who were accused of offenses against their wives such as adultery wife beating abandoning their wives refusing to pay child support or gambling Far from trying to hide its vigilante activity the Dallas KKK loved to publicize it The Dallas KKK often invited local newspaper reporters to attend their whippings so they could write a story about it in the next day s newspaper 168 169 170 The Alabama KKK was less chivalrous than the Dallas KKK was and whipped both white and Black women who were accused of fornication or adultery Although many people in Alabama were outraged by the whippings of white women no Klansmen were ever convicted for the violence 171 172 Rapid growth In 1920 Simmons handed the day to day activities of the national office over to two professional publicists Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke 173 The new leadership invigorated the Klan and it grew rapidly It appealed to new members based on current social tensions and stressed responses to fears raised by defiance of Prohibition and new sexual freedoms It emphasized anti Jewish anti Catholic anti immigrant and later anti Communist positions 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 to a 1924 peak of 1 5 million to 4 million which was between 4 15 of the eligible population 174 By the 1920s most of its members lived in the Midwest and West Nearly one in five of the eligible Indiana population were members 174 It had a national base by 1925 In the South where the great majority of whites were Democrats the Klansmen were Democrats In the rest of the country the membership comprised both Republicans and Democrats as well as independents Klan leaders tried to infiltrate political parties as Cummings notes it was non partisan in the sense that it pressed its nativist issues to both parties 175 Sociologist Rory McVeigh has explained the Klan s strategy in appealing to members of both parties Klan leaders hope to have all major candidates competing to win the movement s endorsement The Klan s leadership wanted to keep their options open and repeatedly announced that the movement was not aligned with any political party This non alliance strategy was also valuable as a recruiting tool The Klan drew its members from Democratic as well as Republican voters If the movement had aligned itself with a single political party it would have substantially narrowed its pool of potential recruits 176 Religion was a major selling point Kelly J 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 But no nationally prominent religious leader said he was a Klan member 41 Economists Fryer and Levitt argue that the rapid growth of the Klan in the 1920s was partly the result of an innovative multi level marketing campaign They also argue that the Klan leadership focused more intently on monetizing the organization during this period than fulfilling the political goals of the organization Local leaders profited from expanding their membership 174 Prohibition Historians agree that the Klan s resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over Prohibition 177 The historian Prendergast says that the KKK s support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation 178 The Klan opposed bootleggers sometimes with violence In 1922 two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County Arkansas Membership in the Klan and in other Prohibition groups overlapped and they sometimes coordinated activities 179 Urbanization The End Referring to the end of Catholic influence in the US Klansmen Guardians of Liberty 1926 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 the North West 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 feared the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who were mostly Catholic or Jewish 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 Midwest The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston 160 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 Americans 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 180 In 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 that 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 181 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 which they had wanted Millions joined and at its peak in the 1920s the organization claimed numbers that amounted to 15 of the nation s eligible population The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan s decline Costumes and the burning cross Cross burning was introduced by William J Simmons the founder of the second Klan in 1915 The distinctive white costume permitted large scale public activities especially parades and cross burning ceremonies while keeping the membership rolls a secret Sales of the costumes provided the main financing for the national organization while initiation fees funded local and state organizers The second Klan embraced the burning Latin cross as a dramatic display of symbolism with a tone of intimidation 182 No crosses had been used as a symbol by the first Klan but it became a symbol of the Klan s quasi Christian message Its lighting during meetings was often accompanied by prayer the singing of hymns and other overtly religious symbolism 183 In his novel The Clansman Thomas Dixon Jr borrows the idea that the first Klan had used fiery crosses from the call to arms of the Scottish Clans 184 and film director D W Griffith used this image in The Birth of a Nation Simmons adopted the symbol wholesale from the movie and the symbol and action have been associated with the Klan ever since 185 Women By the 1920s the KKK developed a women s auxiliary with chapters in many areas Its activities included participation in parades cross lightings 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 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 sexual and financial scandals rocked the Klan leadership late in the 1920s the organization s popularity among both men and women dropped off sharply 91 Political role Sheet music to We Are All Loyal Klansmen 1923 The second Klan expanded with new chapters in cities in the Midwest and West and reached both Republicans and Democrats as well as men without a party affiliation The goal of Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans to make common cause in the North 186 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 187 The Klan also moved north into Canada especially Saskatchewan where it opposed Catholics 188 In Indiana members were American born white Protestants and covered a wide range of incomes and social levels The Indiana Klan was perhaps the most prominent Ku Klux Klan in the nation It claimed more than 30 of white male Hoosiers as members 189 In 1924 it supported Republican Edward Jackson in his successful campaign for governor 190 Catholic and liberal Democrats who were strongest in northeastern cities decided to make the Klan an issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City Their delegates proposed a resolution indirectly attacking the Klan it was defeated by one vote out of 1 100 191 The leading presidential candidates were William Gibbs McAdoo a Protestant with a base in the South and West where the Klan was strong and New York governor Al Smith a Catholic with a base in the large cities After weeks of stalemate and bitter argumentation both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise candidate 192 193 Two children wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods stand on either side of Samuel Green a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon at Stone Mountain Georgia on July 24 1948 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 1 200 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 city employees who were known to be 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 194 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 194 In the South Klan members were still Democratic as it was essentially a one party region for whites Klan chapters were closely allied with Democratic police sheriffs and other functionaries of local government Due to disenfranchisement 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 wealthy planters who had long dominated the state 195 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 196 Newman says Black disliked the Catholic Church as an institution and gave over 100 anti Catholic speeches to KKK meetings across Alabama in his 1926 election campaign 197 Black was elected US senator in 1926 as a Democrat In 1937 President Franklin D Roosevelt 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 198 Resistance and decline D C Stephenson Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan His conviction in 1925 for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer a white schoolteacher led to the decline of the Indiana Klan 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 on Jewish Americans including the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta and to the Klan s campaign to prohibit private schools which was chiefly aimed at Catholic parochial schools Opposing groups worked to penetrate the Klan s secrecy After one civic group in Indiana began to publish Klan membership lists there was a rapid decline in the number of Klan members The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP launched 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 160 Specific events contributed to the Klan s 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 190 D C Stephenson was the grand dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states In 1923 he had led the states under his control in order to break away from the national KKK organization At his 1925 trial he was convicted of second degree murder for his part in the rape and subsequent death of Madge Oberholtzer 199 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 200 Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D C in 1928 In Alabama KKK vigilantes launched a wave of physical terror in 1927 They targeted both Black and white people for violations of racial norms and for perceived moral lapses 201 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 202 Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for the crusade the 1928 Editorial Writing Pulitzer citing his editorials against gangsterism floggings and racial and religious intolerance 203 204 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 their 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 still evident when it staged its march along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D C in 1928 By 1930 Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than 6 000 Small independent units continued to be active in the industrial city of Birmingham KKK units were active through the 1930s in parts of Georgia with a group of night riders in Atlanta enforcing their moral views by flogging people who violated them whites as well as Black people In March 1940 they were implicated in the beating murders of a young white couple taken from their car on a lovers lane and flogged a white barber to death for drinking both in East Point a suburb of Atlanta More than 20 others were brutally flogged As the police began to investigate they found the records of the KKK had disappeared from their East Point office The cases were reported by the Chicago Tribune 205 and the NAACP in its Crisis magazine 206 as well as local papers In 1940 three lynchings of Black men by whites no KKK affiliation is known took place in the South Elbert Williams was the first NAACP member known to be killed for civil rights activities he was murdered in Brownsville Tennessee for working to register Black people to vote and several other activists were run out of town Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne Alabama for a minor social infraction and 16 year old Austin Callaway a suspect in the assault of a white woman was taken from jail in the middle of the night and killed by six white men in LaGrange Georgia 206 In January 2017 the police chief and mayor of LaGrange apologized for their offices failures to protect Callaway at a reconciliation service marking his death 207 208 Labor and anti unionism In major 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 to destroy houses in order to intimidate upwardly mobile Black 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 209 Activism by these independent KKK groups in Birmingham increased as a reaction to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s Independent Klan groups violently opposed the civil rights movement 209 KKK members were implicated in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on a Sunday in September 1963 which killed four African American girls and injured 22 other people Members of the Communist Workers Party came to North Carolina to organize textile workers and pushed back against racial discrimination there taunting the KKK resulting in the 1979 Greensboro massacre 210 211 Development of Christian Identity Theology See also Serpent seed and Christian Identity According to Professor Jon Schamber Rev Philip E J Monson branched off from the teachings of British Israelism and began to develop Christian Identity Theology in the 1910s 212 During the 1920s Monson published Satan s Seat The Enemy of Our Race in which he adopted Russel Kelso Carter s theory that Jews and non whites were descended from the serpent in the Garden of Eden Monson connected the work of the corrupt race to the activities of the Catholic Church and the Pope Monson s ideas were popular among some KKK members in the 1950s 212 National changes Estimated membership statistics Year Membership References1925 4 000 000 6 000 000 213 214 1930 30 000 213 1965 40 000 215 1968 14 000 216 1970 2 000 3 500 217 216 1974 1 500 216 214 1975 6 500 214 1979 10 000 214 1991 6 000 10 000 214 2009 5 000 8 000 218 2016 3 000 105 In 1939 after experiencing several years of decline due to the Great Depression the Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the national organization to James A Colescott an Indiana veterinary physician and Samuel Green an Atlanta obstetrician They could not revive the Klan s declining membership In 1944 the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien for 685 000 in back taxes against the Klan and Colescott dissolved the organization that year Local Klan groups closed down over the following years 219 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 220 In the 1950s Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences which further damaged the Klan 221 Historiography of the second Klan The historiography of the second Klan of the 1920s has changed over time Early histories were based on mainstream sources of the time but since the late 20th century other histories have been written drawing from records and analysis of members of the chapters in social histories 222 223 Anti modern interpretations Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington D C September 13 1926 The KKK was a secret organization apart from a few top leaders most members never identified as such and wore masks in public Investigators in the 1920s used KKK publicity court cases exposes by disgruntled Klansmen newspaper reports and speculation to write stories about what the Klan was doing Almost all the major national newspapers and magazines were hostile to its activities The historian Thomas R Pegram says that 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 in that time regarding the behavior or beliefs of individual Klansmen According to Pegram the resulting popular and scholarly interpretation of the Klan from the 1920s into the mid 20th century emphasized its Southern roots and the violent vigilante style actions of the Klan in its efforts to turn back the clock of modernity Scholars compared it to fascism in Europe 224 Amann states that Undeniably the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism chauvinism racism a mystique of violence an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism yet their differences were fundamental The KKK never envisioned a change of political or economic system 225 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 226 New social history interpretations The social history revolution in historiography from the 1960s explored history from the bottom up In terms of the Klan it developed evidence based on the characteristics beliefs and behavior of the typical membership and downplayed accounts by elite sources 227 228 Historians discovered membership lists and the minutes of local meetings from KKK chapters scattered around the country They discovered that the original interpretation was largely mistaken about the membership and activities of the Klan the membership was not anti modern rural or rustic and consisted of fairly well educated middle class joiners and community activists Half the members lived in the fast growing industrial cities of the period Chicago Detroit Philadelphia Indianapolis Denver and Portland Oregon were Klan strongholds during the 1920s 229 Studies find that in general the KKK membership in these cities 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 1920s while diverse was more of a civic exponent of white Protestant social values than a repressive hate group 230 Kelly J Baker argues that religion was critical the KKK based its hatred on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans Members embraced Protestant Christianity and a crusade to save America from domestic as well as foreign threats 231 Member were primarily Baptists Methodists and members of the Disciples of Christ while men of more elite or liberal Protestant denominations such as Unitarians Episcopalians Congregationalists and Lutherans were less likely to join 232 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 the 1925 kidnap rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer helped destroy the Ku Klux Klan movement nationwide In his history of 1967 Kenneth Jackson already described the Klan of the 1920s as associated with cities and urbanization with chapters often acting as a kind of fraternal organization to aid people coming from other areas 160 Social historian Leonard Moore titled his monograph Citizen Klansmen 1997 and contrasted the intolerant rhetoric of the group s leaders with the actions of most of the membership The Klan was white Protestant established Americans who were fearful of change represented by new immigrants and Black migrants to the North They were highly suspicious of Catholics Jews and Black people who they believed subverted ideal Protestant moral standards Violence was uncommon in most chapters In Indiana KKK members directed more threats and economic blacklisting 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 233 Moore says 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 234 Northern Indiana s industrial cities had attracted a large Catholic population of European immigrants and their descendants They established the University of Notre Dame a major Catholic college near South Bend In May 1924 when the KKK scheduled a regional meeting in the city Notre Dame students blocked the Klansmen and stole some KKK regalia On the next day the Klansmen counterattacked Finally the college president and the football coach Knute Rockne kept the students on campus to avert further violence 235 236 In Alabama some young white urban activists joined the KKK to fight the old guard establishment Hugo Black was a member before becoming nationally famous he focused on anti Catholicism However in rural Alabama the Klan continued to operate to enforce Jim Crow laws its members resorted more often to violence against Black people for infringements of the social order of white supremacy 195 Racial terrorism was used in smaller towns to suppress Black political activity Elbert Williams of Brownsville Tennessee was lynched in 1940 for trying to organize Black residents to register and vote also that year Jesse Thornton of Luverne Alabama was lynched for failing to address a police officer as Mister 237 Later Klans 1950s present In 1944 the second KKK was disbanded by Imperial Wizard James A Colescott after the IRS levied a large tax liability against the organization 238 In 1946 Samuel Green reestablished the KKK at a ceremony on Stone Mountain 239 His group primarily operated in Georgia Green was succeeded by Samuel Roper as Imperial Wizard in 1949 and Roper was succeeded by Eldon Edwards in 1950 240 Based in Atlanta Edwards worked to rebuild the organization by uniting the different factions of the KKK from other parts of the United States but the strength of the organization was short lived and the group fractured as it competed with other klan organizations In 1959 Roy Davis was elected to follow Edwards as national leader 241 Edwards had previously appointed Davis Grand Dragon of Texas in an effort to unite their two klan organizations Davis was already leading the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas Arkansas Louisiana and Mississippi Davis held rallies Florida and other southern states during 1961 and 1962 recruiting members Davis had been a close associate of William J Simmons and been active in the KKK since it first reformed in 1915 242 243 244 Congress launched an investigation into the KKK in the early 1964 following the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas Davis based in Dallas resigned as Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights shortly after the Original Knights received a Congressional subpoena The Original Knights became increasingly fractured in the immediate aftermath as many members were forced to testify before Congress 245 The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan formed in 1964 after splitting from the Original Knights 246 According to an FBI report published in May 1965 the KKK was divided into 14 different organizations at the time with a total membership of approximately 9 000 246 The FBI reported that Roy Davis s Original Knights was the largest faction and had about 1 500 members Robert Shelton of Alabama was leading a faction of 400 600 members 246 Congressional investigators found that by the end of 1965 most members of Original Knights organization joined Shelton s United Klans and the Original Knights of the KKK disbanded Shelton s United Klan continued to absorb members from the competing factions and remained the largest Klan group unto the 1970s peaking with an estimated 30 000 members and another 250 000 non member supporters during the late 1960s 245 247 1950s 1960s post war opposition to civil rights After the decline of the national organization small independent groups adopted the name Ku Klux Klan along with variations They had no formal relationships with each other and most had no connection to the second KKK except for the fact that they copied its terminology and costumes Beginning in the 1950s for instance individual Klan groups in Birmingham Alabama began to resist social change and Black people s efforts to improve their lives by bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods The white men worked in mining and steel industries with access to these materials There were so many bombings of Black people s homes in Birmingham by Klan groups in the 1950s that the city was nicknamed Bombingham 97 During the tenure of Bull Connor as police commissioner in Birmingham Klan groups were closely allied with the police and operated with impunity When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham in 1961 Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police to quell the attack 97 When local and state authorities failed to protect the Freedom Riders and activists the federal government began to establish intervention and protection In states such as Alabama and Mississippi Klan members forged alliances with governors administrations 97 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 Black people across the South meant that most could not serve on juries which were all white and demonstrably biased verdicts and sentences 97 Goodman Chaney and Schwerner were three civil rights workers abducted and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan 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 248 Among the more notorious murders by Klan members in the 1950s and 1960s 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 249 The 1957 murder of Willie Edwards Jr who was forced by Klansmen to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River 250 The 1963 assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi In 1994 former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in September 1963 in Birmingham Alabama which killed four African American girls and injured 22 people 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 Chaney Goodman and Schwerner three civil rights workers in Mississippi In June 2005 Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter 251 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 252 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 related to the Selma to Montgomery March The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr 58 in Mississippi In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Samuel 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 In July 1966 in Bogalusa Louisiana a stronghold of Klan activity Clarence Triggs was found murdered 253 The 1967 multiple bombings in Jackson Mississippi of the residence of a Methodist activist Robert Kochtitzky the synagogue and the residence of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum These were carried out by Klan member Thomas Albert Tarrants III who was convicted in 1968 Another Klan bombing was averted in Meridian the same year 254 Resistance There was considerable resistance among African Americans and white allies to the Klan In 1953 newspaper publishers W Horace Carter Tabor City North Carolina who had campaigned for three years and Willard Cole Whiteville North Carolina 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 255 In a 1958 incident in North Carolina the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans for associating with white people and threatened more actions When the KKK held a nighttime rally nearby they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbee Gunfire was exchanged and the Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond 256 257 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 97 As 20th century Supreme Court rulings extended federal enforcement of citizens civil rights the government revived the Enforcement 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 258 and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo They were also the basis for prosecution in 1991 in Bray v Alexandria Women s Health Clinic In 1965 the House Un American Activities Committee started an investigation on the Klan putting in the public spotlight its front organizations finances methods and divisions 259 1970s present Violence at a Klan march in Mobile Alabama 1977 After federal legislation was passed prohibiting legal segregation and authorizing enforcement of protection of voting rights KKK groups began to oppose court ordered busing to desegregate schools affirmative action and the more open immigration authorized in the 1960s In 1971 KKK members used bombs to destroy 10 school buses in Pontiac Michigan By 1975 there were known KKK groups on most college campuses in Louisiana as well as at Vanderbilt University the University of Georgia the University of Mississippi the University of Akron and the University of Southern California 260 Massacre of Communist Workers Party protesters On November 3 1979 five communist protesters were killed by KKK and American Nazi Party members in Greensboro North Carolina in what is known as the Greensboro massacre 261 The Communist Workers Party had sponsored a rally against the Klan in an effort to organize predominantly Black industrial workers in the area 210 Klan members drove up with arms in their car trunks and attacked marchers 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 William Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was revealed to have been working for the FBI 262 Thompson also related that KKK leaders showed great concern about a series of civil lawsuits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center claiming damages amounting to millions of dollars These were filed after KKK members shot into a group of African Americans Klansmen curtailed their activities in order to conserve money for defense against the lawsuits The KKK also used lawsuits as tools they filed a libel suit in order to prevent the publication of a paperback edition of Thompson s book but were unsuccessful Chattanooga 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 The third defendant Marshall Thrash was sentenced by the same jury to nine months on lesser charges He was released after three months 263 264 265 In 1982 a jury awarded the five women 535 000 in a civil trial 266 Michael Donald lynching After Michael Donald was lynched in 1981 in Alabama the FBI investigated his death The US attorney prosecuted the case Two local KKK members were convicted for his murder including Henry Francis Hays who was sentenced to death After exhausting the appeals process Hays was executed by electric chair for Donald s death in Alabama on June 6 1997 267 It was the first time since 1913 that a white man had been executed in Alabama for a crime against an African American 268 With the support of attorneys Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center SPLC and state senator Michael A Figures 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 269 The all white jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching of Donald and ordered the Klan to pay US 7 million but the KKK did not have sufficient funds to pay the fine They had to sell off their national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa 269 268 Neo Nazi alliances and Stormfront Main article Stormfront website In 1995 Don Black and Chloe Hardin the ex wife of the KKK grand wizard David Duke began a small bulletin board system BBS called Stormfront which has become a prominent online forum for white nationalism Neo Nazism hate speech racism and antisemitism in the early 21st century 270 271 272 Duke has an account on Stormfront which he uses to post articles from his own website He also polls 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 273 274 Current developments The modern KKK is not one organization rather it is composed of small independent chapters across the United States 275 According to a 1999 ADL report the KKK s estimated size then was No more than a few thousand organized into slightly more than 100 units 276 In 2017 the Southern Poverty Law Center SPLC which monitors extremist groups estimated that there were at least 29 separate rival Klan groups currently active in the United States and they compete with one another for members dues news media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan 277 The formation of independent chapters has made KKK groups more difficult to infiltrate and researchers find it hard to estimate their numbers Analysts believe that about two thirds of KKK members are concentrated in the Southern United States with another third situated primarily in the lower Midwest 276 278 279 For some time the Klan s numbers have been 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 280 A 2016 analysis by the SPLC found that hate groups in general were on the rise in the United States 281 The ADL published a report in 2016 that concluded Despite a persistent ability to attract media attention organized Ku Klux Klan groups are actually continuing a long term trend of decline They remain a collection of mostly small disjointed groups that continually change in name and leadership 105 In 2015 however the number of KKK chapters nationwide grew from 72 to 190 The SPLC released a similar report stating that there were significant increases in Klan as well as Black separatist groups 281 Recent KKK membership campaigns have stimulated people s anxieties about illegal immigration urban crime civil unions and same sex marriage 282 In 2006 J Keith Akins argued 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 283 The Klan has produced Islamophobic propaganda and distributed anti Islamic flyers 284 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 285 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 286 The imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights Frank Ancona was fatally shot in Missouri in February 2017 several days after disappearing The coroner declared his death a homicide Ancona s wife and stepson were charged with first degree murder in connection with the killing The prosecutor in the case believes that the killing happened because of a marital dispute and was not connected to Ancona s Klan participation 277 Ancona s group was not considered the largest or the most influential iteration of the Klan but he was skilled at attracting the spotlight 277 The February 14 2019 edition of the Linden Alabama weekly newspaper The Democrat Reporter carried an editorial titled Klan needs to ride again written by Goodloe Sutton the newspaper s owner publisher and editor which urged the Klan to return to staging their night rides because proposals were being made to raise taxes in the state In an interview Sutton suggested that Washington D C could be clean ed out by way of lynchings We ll get the hemp ropes out loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them Sutton said He also specified that he was only referring to hanging socialist communists and compared the Klan to the NAACP The editorial and Sutton s subsequent comments provoked calls for his resignation from Alabama politicians and the Alabama Press Association which later censured Sutton and suspended the newspaper s membership In addition the University of Southern Mississippi s School of Communication removed Sutton who is an alumnus of that school from its Mass Communication and Journalism Hall of Fame and strongly condemned his remarks Sutton was also stripped of a distinguished community journalism award he had been presented in 2009 by Auburn University s Journalism Advisory Council 287 Sutton expressed no regret and said that the editorial was intended to be ironic but that Not many people understand irony today 288 Current Klan organizations A list is maintained by the Anti Defamation League ADL 289 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 276 Imperial Klans of America 290 Knights of the White Camelia 291 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan headed by national director and self claimed pastor Thomas Robb and based in Harrison and Zinc Arkansas 292 293 It claims to be the largest Klan organization in America today 294 Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan a North Carolina based group headed by Will Quigg 295 is currently thought to be the largest KKK chapter 296 White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Outside the United StatesAside from the Ku Klux Klan in Canada there have been various attempts to organize KKK chapters outside the United States in places in Asia Europe and Oceania although most of them ultimately came to naught 297 Africa In South Africa during Apartheid there were attempts in the 1960s to establish a branch at Rhodes University with the help of Terry Venables Some far right activists took some of the lore such as by writing Ku Klux Klan Africa on the ANC Cape Town offices or wearing their dresses 298 In the 1970s Rhodesia had a Ku Klux Klan led by Len Idensohn attacking Ian Smith for his relative moderation 299 300 America In Mexico the KKK endorsed and funded the Calles government during the 1920s Cristero War with the intention of destroying Catholicism there 301 On 1924 vigilantes claimed to have organized themselves into a Klan against criminals publishing a program of social epuration 302 In Sao Paulo Brazil the website of a group called Imperial Klans of Brazil was shut down in 2003 and the group s leader was arrested 303 The Klan has also been established in the Canal Zone 297 Klan was present in Cuba under the name of Ku Klux Klan Kubano directed against both West Indian migrant workers and Afro Cuban and using the fear of the 1912 Negro Rebellion 297 304 Asia During the Vietnam War klaverns were established on some US military bases often tolerated by military authorities 305 306 In the 1920s the Klan briefly existed in Shanghai 297 307 Europe Recruitment activity has also been reported in the United Kingdom In the 1960s klaverns were established in the Midlands the following decade saw visits by leading Klansmen and the 1990s saw recruitment drives in London Scotland and the Midlands and huge internal turnoil and splintering for example a leader Allan Beshella had to resign after 1972 conviction for child sex abuse was revealed 308 309 On 2018 Klan clad far right activists marched in front of a Northern Irish mosque 310 In Germany a KKK related group Ritter des Feurigen Kreuzes Knights of the Fiery Cross was established in 1925 by returning naturalized German born US citizens in Berlin who managed to gather around 300 persons of middle class occupations such as merchants and clerks It soon saw the original founders being removed by internal conflicts and mocking newspapers about the affair After the Nazis took over Germany the group disbanded and its members joined the Nazis 311 297 312 On 1991 Dennis Mahon then of Oklahoma s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan reportedly helped to organize Klan groups 309 Another German KKK related group the European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan has organized and it gained notoriety in 2012 when the German media reported that two police officers who held membership in the organization would be allowed to keep their jobs 313 314 In 2019 the German authorities conducted raids against a possibly dangerous group called National Socialist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Deutschland 315 316 317 In the 1920s the Klan was rumoured to exist in Lithuania and Czechoslovakia 297 Oceania In Australia in the late 1990s former One Nation member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country 318 319 and circa 2012 the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First 320 A Ku Klux Klan group was established in Fiji in 1874 by white American and British settlers wanting to enact White supremacy although its operations were quickly put to an end by the British who although not officially yet established as the major authority of Fiji had played a leading role in establishing a new constitutional monarchy the Kingdom of Fiji that was being threatened by the activities of the Fijian Klan which owned fortresses and artillery By March it had become the British Subjects Mutual Protection Society which included Francis Herbert Dufty 321 322 323 324 In the 1920s the Klan had been rumoured to exist in New Zealand 297 Titles and vocabularyMain articles Kloran and Ku Klux Klan titles and vocabulary Membership in the Klan is secret Like many fraternal organizations the Klan has signs that members can use to recognize one another In conversation a member may use the acronym AYAK Are you a Klansman to surreptitiously identify themselves to another potential member The response AKIA A Klansman I am completes the greeting 325 Throughout its varied history the Klan has coined many words 326 259 beginning with Kl including Klabee treasurers Klavern local organization Imperial Kleagle recruiter Klecktoken initiation fee Kligrapp secretary Klonvokation gathering Kloran ritual book Kloreroe delegate Imperial Kludd chaplainAll of the above terminology was created by William Joseph Simmons as part of his 1915 revival of the Klan 327 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 328 SymbolsThe Ku Klux Klan has utilized a variety of symbols over its history Blood Drop Cross The Primary symbol used by the clan for the past century has been the Mystic Insignia of a Klansman commonly known as the Blood Drop Cross a white cross on a red disk with what appears to be a blood drop in the middle It was first used in the early 1900s with the symbol in the center originally appearing as a red and white Ying Yang which in the subsequent years lost the white part and was reinterpreted as a blood drop 329 Triangular Klan symbol The Triangular Ku Klux Klan symbol is made of what looks like a triangle inside a triangle similar to a Sierpinski triangle but in fact represents three letter Ks interlocked and facing inward referencing the name of the group A variation on this symbol has the K s facing outwards instead of inwards It is an old Klan symbol that has also been resurrected in the modern day hate symbol 330 Burning cross Main article Cross burning Although predating the Klan in modern times the symbol of the burning cross has become almost solely associated with the Ku Klux Klan and has become one of the most potent hate symbols in the United States 331 Burning crosses didn t become associated with the clan until Thomas Dixon s The Clansman and its film adaptation D W Griffith s The Birth of a Nation inspired members of the second Klan to take up the practice 332 In the modern day the symbol of the burning cross is so associated with racial intimidation that it is used by many non Klan racist elements and has spread to locations outside the United States 331 Blood Drop Cross Triangular Klan symbol Cross burning in Lumberton North Carolina 1958 See alsoAnti mask laws Black Legion political movement Camp Nordland History of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey Ku Klux Klan in Maine Ku Klux Klan members in United States politics Ku Klux Klan raid Inglewood Ku Klux Klan titles and vocabulary Leaders of the Ku Klux Klan List of Confederate monuments and memorials List of Ku Klux Klan organizations List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups List of white nationalist organizations Mass racial violence in the United States Ocoee massacre Racism in the United States Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials Rosewood massacre Terrorism in the United States White supremacy in the United StatesReferencesNotes The Ku Klux Klan opposed the civil rights and Black rights movements and often killed Black people that either committed crimes or simply exercised their rights of voting owning guns or land etc 4 The Ku Klux Klan has been described as nativist 7 as well as being anti feminist anti progressivist anti abortion 8 and anti LGBT 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Commonly mispronounced ˌ k l uː An analyzes of this cartoon can be found in Hubbs 2015 Citations Historical Flags of Our Ancestors Flags of Extremism Part 1 a m www loeser us Retrieved December 2 2022 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 Ku Klux Klan Southern Poverty Law Center Archived from the original on July 23 2013 Retrieved February 7 2013 Blow Charles M January 7 2016 Gun Control and White Terror The New York Times Retrieved March 3 2022 Al Khattar Aref M 2003 Religion and terrorism an interfaith perspective Westport Connecticut Praeger pp 21 30 55 Michael Robert and Philip Rosen Dictionary of antisemitism from the earliest times to the present Lanham Maryland Scarecrow Press 1997 p 267 ISBN missing a b Pegram 2011 pp 47 88 Dibranco Alex February 3 2020 The Long History of the Anti Abortion Movement s Links to White Supremacists The Nation In 1985 the KKK began creating wanted posters listing personal information for abortion providers doxing before the Internet age Groups like the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan trafficked in rhetoric that mirrored that of the anti abortion movement with an anti Semitic twist More than ten million white babies have been murdered through Jewish engineered legalized abortion since 1973 here in America and more than a million per year are being slaughtered this way Ku Klux Klan distributes homophobic antisemitic flyers targeting school board in Virginia Archived from the original on June 30 2021 Police in Virginia are investigating a series of violently antisemitic and homophobic flyers targeting a local school board that were distributed by a white supremacist group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan KKK Flyers denouncing the school board in Fairfax Va as Jew inspired communist queer loving sex fiends violating the words of the Holy Bible were discovered on Wednesday Ku Klux Klan rallies against homosexuals in Lancaster United Press International August 24 1991 Archived from the original on July 4 2021 Ku Klux Klan supports Alabama chief Justice Rory Moore s attempts to stop gay marriage Independent February 13 2015 Archived from the original on July 4 2021 Ku Klux Klan distributes anti transgender fliers in at least 1 Alabama neighborhood May 24 2016 KKK Allegedly Threatens Gay Political Candidate in Florida NBC News Ku Klux Klan plans rally to support anti gay counseling student LGBTQ Nation KKK to Floridians End AIDS by bashing gays LGBTQ Nation Ku Klux Klan Rallies In Ellijay GA Condemns Homosexuals Illegal Immigrants Black Americans and Others September 13 2010 KKK members protest LGBTQ pride march in Florence June 13 2017 Ku Klux Klan plans rally to support anti gay counseling student LGBTQ Nation October 5 2010 Archived from the original on July 13 2022 Retrieved October 5 2010 Mississippi KKK leader defends post Orlando anti gay leaflets CBS News Archived from the original on July 28 2022 Retrieved June 22 2016 Klan leader calls for death for homosexuals Tampa Bay Times July 13 1992 Archived from the original on July 28 2022 50 Klansmen skinheads and supporters proclaimed gays and lesbians should receive the death penalty Anti Semitic and racist KKK fliers dropped in Philadelphia suburb The Times of Israel KKK drops antisemitic fliers in Florida to recruit members October 18 2017 KKK Flyers Threatening Blacks And Jews Found In Florida The Forward October 10 2017 Antisemitic racist KKK fliers dropped in Cherry Hill NJ Jewish Ledger October 16 2018 Racist antisemitic fliers dropped in Virginia neighborhood before MLK Day Archived from the original on June 12 2021 Ku Klux Klan extends antisemitic campaign to Argentina Jewish Telegraph Agency Archived from the original on July 28 2022 a b c Laats Adam 2012 Red Schoolhouse Burning Cross The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Educational Reform History of Education Quarterly 52 3 323 350 doi 10 1111 j 1748 5959 2012 00402 x ISSN 0018 2680 JSTOR 23251451 S2CID 142780437 a b c Kingdom Time January 17 1927 ISSN 0040 781X Retrieved December 25 2022 a b c Ku Klux Klan Ledgers History Colorado www historycolorado org Retrieved December 25 2022 a b c Principles and Purposes of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan 1920 Kristin Dimick The Ku Klux Klan and the Anti Catholic School Bills of Washington and Oregon Archived from the original on May 14 2022 Philip N Racine 1973 The Ku Klux Klan Anti Catholicism and Atlanta s Board of Education 1916 1927 The Georgia Historical Quarterly Georgia Historical Society 57 1 63 75 JSTOR 40579872 Archived from the original on July 28 2022 Christine K Erickson The Boys in Butte The Ku Klux Klan confronts the Catholics 1923 1929 MA thesis University of Montana Archived from the original on July 28 2022 Ku Klux Klan Fliers Promoting Islamophobia Found In Washington State Neighborhood March 2 2015 Alabama KKK actively recruiting to fight the spread of Islam December 10 2015 In the Army and the Klan he hated Muslims The Washington Post Archived from the original on July 13 2022 Retrieved June 5 2018 KKK member convicted in plot to kill Muslims Obama with death ray Times of Israel Archived from the original on July 24 2022 Retrieved August 22 2016 Mosque Receives Threatening Letter Signed By KKK Newsweek September 2 2021 Archived from the original on July 24 2022 Retrieved September 2 2021 Accused of threatening Mosque man also contacted KKK Local 10 March 19 2019 Archived from the original on July 24 2022 Retrieved March 19 2019 Gerald Wallace said he liked KKK s stance on Muslims in newly released video Mosques vandalized with KKK graffiti The Mirror June 19 2020 Archived from the original on July 24 2022 Retrieved June 19 2020 a b c Baker 2011 Barkun pp 60 85 Abernathy Jesse October 25 2012 Indian family cites KKK threat in South Dakota indianz com Retrieved November 27 2022 KKK targets LGBT ordinance in Florida Washington Blade November 24 2015 Archived from the original on August 1 2022 The Ku Klux Klan has distributed fliers against a proposed ordinance that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity Andrea Castillo June 4 2015 Fresno GLBT Pride Parade a celebration of culture history The Fresno Bee Archived from the original on June 17 2021 Two dozen Klansmen showed up in white robes A Bee article quoted their spokesman Jim Cheney saying We can t hang them or tar and feather them anymore but we can do other things Members of the group continued making appearances at the festival through 1998 Jaime Ritter December 9 2015 Anti Muslim KKK fliers pop up in Alabama CBS42 Archived from the original on August 1 2022 The Alabama chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations CAIR says that the Ku Klux Klan KKK is recruiting in Alabama to fight the spread of Islam in our country Klan Plans Protests At Abortion Clinics Los Angeles Times August 21 1994 Archived from the original on August 3 2022 Ku Klux Klansmen plan to demonstrate at abortion clinics in Pensacola within the next month a spokesman for the group said Saturday The group plans to picket against abortion and the use of federal marshals to guard the clinics Moira Donegan January 24 2022 White nationalists are flocking to the US anti abortion movement The Guardian Archived from the original on August 3 2022 In 1985 the KKK began circulating Wanted posters featuring the photos and personal information of abortion providers The posters were picked up by the anti choice terrorist group Operation Rescue in the early 90s Baudouin 1997 p 23 Bigots began to howl more loudly than in years and a new Klan leader began to beat the drums of anti Black anti union anti Jew anti Catholic and anti Communist hatred This man was Samuel Green an Atlanta doctor Petersen William Against the Stream Reflections of an Unconventional Demographer Transaction Publishers p 89 ISBN 978 1412816663 Retrieved May 8 2016 Pratt Guterl Matthew 2009 The Color of Race in America 1900 1940 Harvard University Press p 42 ISBN 978 0674038059 John Skipper December 28 2005 Charles city Klansman plans to protest gay marriage Courier Lee News Service Archived from the original on August 3 2022 Nicole Hensley February 18 2015 KKK calls on members to protest Alabama s same sex marriages New York Daily News Archived from the original on August 3 2022 Mississippi s top Ku Klux Klan leader is rallying his klansmen to protest Alabama s overturned gay marriage ban but to leave their hoods at home Brent Waller imperial wizard for the state s United Dixie White Knights took to Stormfront an online white supremacist forum to salute Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore s refusal to bow to the yoke of Federal tyranny he wrote Sara Isaac June 26 1988 Klansmen Picket Gay Rights Rally Orlando Sentinel Every American has a right to worship and believe as he sees fit But they homosexuals are discrediting the U S Constitution They re taking advantage of their rights said one Klansman who refused to be identified They should be dealt with accordingly he said The counterdemonstration was organized by the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan based in Shelton Conn Klansmen wore the rubber gloves to symbolize their belief that AIDS is primarily a homosexual disease that God created to wipe out the country s homosexual population Anti gay KKK newsletters left at Miss homes 11 Alive June 20 2016 Polly Ross Hughes October 27 2005 Prop 2 supporters avoid anti gay KKK rally Houston Chronicle Archived from the original on July 28 2022 Klu Klux Klan Established a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint url status link KKK in Washington State Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project depts washington edu Retrieved January 26 2023 Rothman Joshua D December 4 2016 When Bigotry Paraded Through the Streets The Atlantic Retrieved January 26 2023 McVeigh 2009 Matthew N Lyons Right Wing Populism in America 2000 ch 3 5 13 Chalmers 2003 p 163 Quarles 1999 p 100 See e g Klanwatch Project 2011 illustrations pp 9 10 Parsons 2005 pp 811 836 Dimick Kristin The Ku Klux Klan and the Anti Catholic School Bills of Washington and Oregon Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project Retrieved March 3 2022 Toy Eckard Ku Klux Klan Oregon Encyclopedia Retrieved March 4 2022 Mandel Nicole L April 26 2012 The Quiet Bigotry of Oregon s Compulsory Public Education Act Portland State University Retrieved March 4 2022 Both the Anti Defamation League Archived October 3 2012 at the Wayback Machine and the Southern Poverty Law Center Archived February 19 2010 at the Wayback Machine 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 ed Hate and Bias Crime A Reader Routledge 2003 p 112 At 150 KKK sees opportunities in US political trends Archived from the original on July 1 2016 Retrieved July 2 2016 Newton 2001 Perlmutter Philip 1999 Legacy of Hate A Short History of Ethnic Religious and Racial Prejudice in America M E Sharpe p 170 ISBN 978 0765604064 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 believed their membership in keeping with one hundred percent Americanism and Christian morality a b c The present day Ku Klux Klan movement Report by the Committee on Un American activities Washington DC U S Government Printing Office 1967 a b Ku Klux Klan Extremism in America Anti Defamation League Archived from the original on February 12 2011 Retrieved February 20 2011 Ku Klux Klan not founded by the Democratic Party AP News October 23 2018 Retrieved July 19 2020 a b Stevens 1907 Dixon Thomas Jr August 27 1905 The Ku Klux Klan Some of Its Leaders The Tennessean p 22 Archived from the original on October 23 2016 Retrieved September 28 2016 via Newspapers com Michael K Jerryson 2020 Religious Violence Today Faith and Conflict in the Modern World p 217 Kinney Alison January 8 2016 How the Klan Got Its Hood The New Republic Retrieved November 29 2022 Trelease 1995 p 18 John W Morton Passes Away in Shelby The Tennessean November 21 1914 pp 1 2 Archived from the original on October 8 2016 Retrieved September 25 2016 via Newspapers com To Captain Morton came the peculiar distinction of having organized that branch of the Ku Klux Klan which operated in Nashville and the adjacent territory but a more signal honor was his when he performed the ceremonies which initiated Gen Nathan Bedford Forrest into the mysterious ranks of the Ku Klux Klan J Michael Martinez 2007 Carpetbaggers Cavalry and the Ku Klux Klan Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction Rowman amp Littlefield p 24 ISBN 978 0742572614 Wormser Richard The Enforcement Acts 1870 71 Jim Crow Stories PBS Archived from the original on March 4 2012 Retrieved May 12 2012 Foner 1988 p 458 Rable 1984 pp 101 110 111 Rable 1984 A 1905 Silent Movie Revolutionizes American Film and Radicalizes American Nationalists Southern Hollows podcast Archived from the original on May 27 2018 Retrieved June 3 2018 Baker 2011 p 248 Jackson 1967 pp 241 242 MacLean Nancy 1995 Behind the Mask of Chivalry The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0195098365 a b Blee 1991 The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s www pbs org American Experience PBS Retrieved April 5 2022 Lutholtz M William 1993 Grand Dragon D C Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana West Lafayette Indiana Purdue University Press pp 43 89 ISBN 1557530467 Retrieved March 25 2015 Lay Shaun Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century New Georgia Encyclopedia Coker College Archived from the original on October 25 2005 Retrieved August 26 2005 Sher 1983 pp 52 53 Pitsula 2013 a b c d e f McWhorter 2001 About the Ku Klux Klan Anti Defamation League Archived from the original on December 26 2009 Retrieved January 2 2010 Inquiry Begun on Klan Ties Of 2 Icons at Virginia Tech The New York Times November 16 1997 p 138 Archived from the original on October 6 2010 Retrieved January 2 2010 Lee Jennifer November 6 2006 Samuel Bowers 82 Klan Leader Convicted in Fatal Bombing Dies The New York Times Archived from the original on May 12 2011 Retrieved January 2 2010 Brush Pete May 28 2002 Court Will Review Cross Burning Ban CBS News Archived from the original on October 6 2010 Retrieved January 2 2010 Dallas FBI gov Domestic terrorism by the Klan remained a key concern Archived March 5 2010 at the Wayback Machine FBI Dallas office Klan named terrorist organization in Charleston Reuters October 14 1999 Archived from the original on June 5 2015 Retrieved January 2 2010 Allerfeldt Kristofer The KKK is in rapid decline but its symbols remain worryingly potent The Conversation a b c d e l Tattered Robes The State of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States Archived November 18 2017 at the Wayback Machine Anti Defamation League 2016 Extremist Files Ku Klux Klan Archived April 6 2018 at the Wayback Machine Southern Poverty Law Center accessed October 21 2017 Horn 1939 p 11 states that Reed proposed kyklos kyklos and Kennedy added clan Wade 1987 p 33 says that Kennedy came up with both words but Crowe suggested transforming kyklos into kuklux Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era New Georgia Encyclopedia October 3 2002 Archived from the original on September 19 2008 Retrieved February 20 2011 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 1905 p 27 Du Bois 1935 pp 679 680 Du Bois 1935 pp 671 675 Lindemann 1991 p 225 Harper s Weekly Ku Klux Klan Organization and Principles 1868 State University of New York at Albany Archived from the original on March 3 2016 Retrieved February 27 2016 Wills Brian Steel 1992 A Battle from the Start The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest New York HarperCollins Publishers p 336 ISBN 978 0060924454 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 1988 pp 425 426 Foner 1988 p 342 History of the Ku Klux Klan Preach the Cross preachthecross net Archived from the original on September 16 2014 Retrieved September 15 2014 Du Bois 1935 pp 677 678 Foner 1988 p 432 Du Bois 1935 pp 674 675 Du Bois 1935 pp 680 681 Bryant Jonathan M Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era The New Georgia Encyclopedia Georgia Southern University Archived from the original on September 19 2008 Retrieved August 26 2005 Newton 2001 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 a b Wade 1987 p 102 Foner 1988 p 435 Wade 1987 Ranney Joseph A 2006 In the Wake of Slavery Civil War Civil Rights and the Reconstruction of Southern Law Greenwood Publishing Group pp 57 58 ISBN 978 0275989729 Horn 1939 p 373 Wade 1987 p 88 a b Scaturro Frank October 26 2006 The Presidency of Ulysses S Grant 1869 1877 College of St Scholastica Archived from the original on July 19 2011 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 Archived from the original on February 28 2016 Retrieved February 27 2016 The New York Times N B Forrest September 3 1868 a b Trelease 1995 Quotes from Wade 1987 p 59 Horn 1939 p 360 Horn 1939 p 362 Wade 1987 p 85 Wade 1987 p 109 writes that by 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 Foner 1988 pp 458 459 Wade 1987 pp 109 110 Balkin Jack M 2002 History Lesson PDF Yale University Archived from the original PDF on March 4 2016 Retrieved February 27 2016 Wade 1987 p 109 The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow The Enforcement Acts 1870 1871 Public Broadcast Service Archived October 19 2017 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved April 5 2008 Wade 1987 p 144 The Various Shady Lives of the Ku Klux Klan Time April 9 1965 Archived from the original on August 6 2009 Retrieved August 1 2009 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 John Milton Cooper Jr 2011 Woodrow Wilson A Biography Random House Digital Inc pp 272 273 ISBN 978 0307277909 Archived from the original on April 14 2015 Retrieved June 27 2015 Brian R Farmer American Conservatism History Theory and Practice 2005 p 208 ISBN missing Blee 1991 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 0805089066 a b c d Jackson 1967 Nation The Various Shady Lives of The Ku Klux Klan Time April 9 1965 Archived from the original on August 6 2009 Retrieved December 24 2009 Jackson 1967 p 296 Imperial Nighthawk Vol 1 No 8 Imperial Nighthawk Vol 1 no 8 Atlanta Georgia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan January 1 1923 via Internet Archive The Kourier January 1 1924 OCLC 1755269 a href Template Cite magazine html title Template Cite magazine cite magazine a Cite magazine requires magazine help Jackson 1967 p 241 Jackson 1967 p 18 Miller Robert Moats 1956 A Note on the Relationship between the Protestant Churches and the Revived Ku Klux Klan The Journal of Southern History 22 3 355 368 doi 10 2307 2954550 JSTOR 2954550 quotes pp 360 363 Backstory When the KKK paraded in Oak Cliff February 28 2017 Archived from the original on March 27 2019 Retrieved March 17 2019 Good Deeds by Day Dark Deeds by Night The Ku Klux Klan in Fort Worth Hometown by Handlebar Archived from the original on March 19 2019 Retrieved March 17 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missing Allen Lee N 1963 The McAdoo Campaign for the Presidential Nomination in 1924 Journal of Southern History 29 2 211 228 doi 10 2307 2205041 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 978 0807820582 a b Christopher N Cocoltchos 2004 The Invisible Empire and the Search for the Orderly Community The Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim California Shawn Lay ed The invisible empire in the West pp 97 120 ISBN missing a b Feldman 1999 Ball 1996 p 16 Roger K Newman 1997 Hugo Black A Biography pp 87 104 ISBN missing Ball 1996 p 96 D C Stephenson manuscript collection Indiana Historical Society Archived from the original on February 8 2010 Retrieved February 20 2011 Moore 1991 p 186 Rogers et al 1994 pp 432 433 History of the Montgomery Advertiser Montgomery Advertiser a Gannett Company Retrieved November 8 2013 Archived August 25 2012 at the Wayback Machine Rogers et al 1994 p 433 Editorial 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Press Action Archived October 6 2008 at the Wayback Machine Death to the Klan March NCpedia North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Archived from the original on July 31 2017 Retrieved March 26 2016 a b Schamber amp Stroud 2000 p 11 a b The Ku Klux Klan a brief biography www aaregistry org Archived from the original on August 25 2012 Retrieved July 19 2012 a b c d e Baudouin 1997 The Various Shady Lives of The Ku Klux Klan Time April 9 1965 Archived from the original on May 13 2010 Retrieved December 24 2009 a b c Klobuchar 2009 p 74 Lay Shawn Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century The New Georgia Encyclopedia Coker College Archived from the original on October 25 2005 Retrieved August 26 2005 Klobuchar 2009 p 84 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 The New York Times May 31 1946 Archived from the original on July 23 2018 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 Archived from the original on May 11 2015 Retrieved February 27 2016 Kennedy 1990 Fox 2011 Pegram 2011 pp 221 228 Chalmers 1987 p 322 Amann Peter H 1986 A Dog in the Nighttime Problem American Fascism in the 1930s The History Teacher 19 4 562 doi 10 2307 493879 JSTOR 493879 Pegram 2011 p 222 Pegram 2011 p 225 Moore 1996 Kenneth T Jackson The Ku Klux Klan in the City 1915 1930 1967 ISBN missing Pegram 2011 Baker 2011 p 11 MacLean Nancy K 1995 Behind the Mask of Chivalry The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan Oxford University Press p 8 ISBN 978 0195098365 Retrieved December 7 2020 Moore 1991 Moore 1991 p 188 Arthur Hope The Story of Notre Dame 1999 ch 26 online Archived March 1 2010 at the Wayback Machine See also the semi fictional account Tucker Todd 2004 Notre Dame vs The Klan How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan Loyola Press ISBN 978 0829417715 Sixth Lynching The Crisis October 1940 p 324 Dr Colescott Dies Successor of Hiram W Evans Disbanded Order in 1944 Joined Group in 1920s The New York Times January 13 1950 Retrieved February 11 2009 Dr James A Colescott former chief of the Ku Klux Klan died last night in the United States veterans Hospital at Coral Gables His age was 53 Quarles 1999 pp 80 83 Staff report March 4 1986 Samuel W Roper 90 was second director of GBI in early 1940s Atlanta Journal Constitution Imperial Wizard Says KKK s Membership Very Small in Texas Dallas Morning News February 11 1961 Ku Klux Klan Active In Shreveport Area The Times of Shreveport February 10 1961 Klan Is Renounced By 4 000 at Chattanooga The Tennessean October 4 1924 Simmons Order Growing Rapidly 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Levitt Steven D 2012 Hatred and Profits Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan Quarterly Journal of Economics 127 4 1883 1925 doi 10 1093 qje qjs028 S2CID 155051122 Gordon Linda 2017 The Second Coming of the KKK The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition Liveright ISBN 978 1631493690 Reviewed by Kruse Kevin M January 1 2018 The Second Klan Linda Gordon s new book captures how white supremacy has long been part of our political mainstream The Nation 306 1 33 35 Horn Stanley F 1939 Invisible Empire The Story of the Ku Klux Klan 1866 1871 Montclair NJ Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation Hubbs G Ward 2015 Searching for Freedom After the Civil War Klansman Carpetbagger Scalawag and Freedman University of Alabama Press ISBN 978 0817318604 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 Klobuchar Lisa 2009 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing The Ku Klux Klan s History of Terror Capstone ISBN 978 0756540920 Retrieved April 14 2019 Lay Shawn 1995 Hooded Knights on the Niagara The Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo New York New York London New York University Press ISBN 978 0814751015 OCLC 32086454 Lender Mark E Martin James K 1982 Drinking in America New York Free Press Lewis George September 4 2013 An Amorphous Code The Ku Klux Klan and Un Americanism 1915 1965 Journal of American Studies Cambridge University Press 47 4 971 992 doi 10 1017 S0021875813001357 S2CID 143647351 Lindemann Albert S 1991 The Jew Accused Three Anti Semitic Affairs Dreyfus Beilis Frank 1894 1915 Cambridge University Press ISBN 0521403022 McVeigh Rory 2009 The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan Right wing Movements and National Politics University of Minnesota Press ISBN 978 0816656196 Retrieved November 14 2021 McWhorter Diane 2001 Carry Me Home Birmingham Alabama The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution New York Simon amp Schuster Miller Robert Moats August 1956 A Note on the Relationship between the Protestant Churches and the Revived Ku Klux Klan The Journal of Southern History 22 3 355 368 doi 10 2307 2954550 JSTOR 2954550 Moore Leonard J 1991 Citizen Klansmen The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana 1921 1928 Chapel Hill NC University of North Carolina Press Moore Leonard J December 1996 Good Old Fashioned New Social History and the Twentieth Century American Right Reviews in American History Johns Hopkins University Press 24 4 555 573 doi 10 1353 rah 1996 0084 S2CID 143600463 Retrieved November 17 2021 Nelson Jack 1993 Terror in the Night The Klan s Campaign Against the Jews New York Simon amp Schuster ISBN 978 0671692230 Newton Michael Newton Judy Ann 1991 The Ku Klux Klan An Encyclopedia New York London Garland Publishing Newton Michael 2001 The Invisible Empire The Ku Klux Klan in Florida University Press of Florida ISBN 978 0813021201 Retrieved November 17 2021 Newton Michael 2009 The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi A History McFarland Inc ISBN 978 0786457045 Retrieved November 17 2021 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 JSTOR 3659969 Parsons Elaine Frantz 2016 Ku Klux The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press ISBN 978 1469625423 Pegram Thomas R October 16 2011 One Hundred Percent American Ivan R Dee ISBN 978 1566639224 Retrieved November 13 2021 Pitsula James M 2013 Keeping Canada British The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan University of British Columbia Press ISBN 978 0774824927 Retrieved November 13 2021 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 CT JAI Press Quarles Chester L 1999 The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations A History and Analysis McFarland amp Company ISBN 978 0786406470 Retrieved span c, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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