Ku Klux Klan

Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally in 1922.

Ku Klux Klan, is the name of a number of past and present fraternal organizations in the United States that have advocated white supremacy and anti-Semitism and opposed gay rights; in the past century it has practiced anti-Catholicism, and nativism. It is infamous for violently attacking its opponents, which have included African Americans, non-heterosexual people, people of non-conservative Protestant faiths, immigrants, women seeking equal rights with men, and people supporting equal rights for all of the above.

The Klan's first incarnation began in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee. It was founded as a social organization, but quickly its main purpose became to resist Congressional Reconstruction in the wake of the American Civil War, and it focused as much on intimidating "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on putting down the Freedmen. It quickly adopted violent methods, and was involved in a wave of 1,300 murders of Republican voters in 1868. A rapid reaction set in, with the Klan's leadership disowning it, and Southern elites seeing the Klan as an excuse for federal troops to continue their activities in the South. The organization was in decline from 1868 to 1870, and was destroyed in the early 1870s by President Ulysses S. Grant's vigorous action under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act).

William Joseph Simmons founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915.

The founding in 1915 by William J. Simmons of a second distinct group using the same name was inspired by the newfound power of the modern mass media, via the film The Birth of a Nation and inflammatory and anti-Semitic newspaper accounts surrounding the trial and lynching of accused murderer Leo Frank. This second Klan fought to maintain the dominance of white Protestants over Blacks, Asians, Catholics, and Jews. This group, although preaching racism and accused of violent activities, operated openly, and at its peak in the 1920s claimed millions of members; if these estimates are to be believed, about 15% of the eligible population of the U.S. were members.^[1] Many politicians at all levels of government were members, and at its height the organization secretly or openly influenced some state governments, including Oregon and Indiana. Scandals involving rape, murder, and support for the Nazis destroyed its popularity in the late 1920s, and by 1928 the Klan was orders of magnitude smaller and weaker.

The name "Ku Klux Klan" has since been used by many different unrelated groups, including many who opposed the civil rights movement and desegregation in the 1960s. Today, dozens of organizations with chapters across the United States and other countries use all or part of the name in their titles, but their total membership is estimated to be only a couple thousand.

The first Klan

A cartoon threatening that the KKK would lynch carpetbaggers, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, 1868.

Creation

The original Ku Klux Klan was created at a Christmas Eve, 1865 meeting in a law office by six educated, middle-class Confederate veterans^[2] who were bored with postwar life in Pulaski, Tennessee. The name was constructed by combining the Greek "kyklos" (circle) with "clan."^[3] It was at first a humorous social club centering on practical jokes and hazing rituals.^[4] From 1866 to 1867, the Klan began breaking up black prayer meetings and invading black homes at night to steal firearms. Some of these activities may have been modeled on previous Tennessee vigilante groups such as the Yellow Jackets and Redcaps.

A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic Party as continuations of the Confederacy.

In an 1867 convention held in Nashville, the Klan was formalized as a national organization under a "Prescript" written by George Gordon, a former Confederate brigadier general. The Prescript states as the Klan's purposes:^[5]

• First: To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of the Confederate soldiers.

• Second: To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States ...

• Third: To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity with the laws of the land.

Stripped of obfuscation and attempts to protect themselves from accusations of treason, this is essentially a statement that the Klan's purpose was to resist Congressional Reconstruction. The word "oppressed," for example, clearly refers to oppression by the Union Army, and "peers" implies that white Southern property holders should be protected from carpetbaggers and "uppity" freedmen. During Reconstruction the South was undergoing drastic changes to its social and political life. Whites saw this as a threat to their supremacy as a race and sought to end this process. (The provisions for Confederate widows and orphans can be seen as an adaptation to the post-Civil War context of the similar provisions for members' families made by many other 19th-century fraternal organizations^[6].)

The Prescript also includes a list of questions to be asked of applicants for membership, which confirms the focus on resisting Reconstruction and the Republican Party. The applicant is to be asked whether he was a Republican, a Union Army veteran, or a member of the Loyal League; whether he is "opposed to Negro equality both social and political;" and whether he is in favor of "a white man's government," "maintaining the constitutional rights of the South," "the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights," and "the inalienable right of self-preservation of the people against the exercise of arbitrary and unlicensed power."

Nathan Bedford Forrest

According to one oral report, Gordon went to former slave trader and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis and told him about the new organization, and a few weeks later, Forrest was selected as Grand Wizard, the Klan's national leader.

Activities

The Klan sought to control the political and social status of the freed slaves. Specifically, it attempted to curb black education, economic advancement, voting rights, and the right to bear arms. However, the Klan's focus was not limited to African Americans; Southern Republicans also became the target of vicious intimidation tactics, and a wave of 1,300 murders of Republican voters in 1868, was primarily a political purge rather than a racial conflict.^[7] The violence achieved its purpose. For example, in the April, 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1222 votes for Democrat Rufus Bullock, but in the November presidential election, the county cast only one vote for Republican candidate Ulysses Grant.^[8]

An 1868 proclamation by Gordon^[9] demonstrates several of the issues surrounding the Klan's violent activities.

• Many blacks were veterans of the Union Army, and were armed. From the beginning, one of the original Klan's strongest focuses was on confiscating firearms from Blacks. In the proclamation, Gordon warned that the Klan had been "fired into three times," and that if the blacks "make war upon us they must abide by the awful retribution that will follow."
• Gordon also stated that the Klan was a peaceful organization. Such claims were common ways for the Klan to attempt to protect itself from prosecution.
• Gordon warned that some people had been carrying out violent acts in the name of the Klan. It was true that many people who had not been formally inducted into the Klan found the Klan's uniform to be a convenient way to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence. However, it was also convenient for the higher levels of the organization to disclaim responsibility for such acts, and the secretive, decentralized nature of the Klan made membership fuzzy rather than clear-cut.

By this time, only two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was already beginning to decrease^[10] and, as Gordon's proclamation shows, to become less political and more simply a way of avoiding prosecution for violence. Many influential southern Democrats were beginning to see it as a liability, an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South.^[11] Georgian B.H. Hill went so far as to claim "that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain."^[12]

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

In an 1868 newspaper interview,^[13] Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men, and that although he himself was not a member, he was "in sympathy" and would "cooperate" with them, and could himself muster 40,000 Klansmen with five days' notice. He stated that the Klan did not see blacks as its enemy so much the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments like Tennessee governor Brownlow's, and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. There was an element of truth to this claim, since the Klan did go after white members of these groups, especially the schoolteachers brought south by the Freedmen's Bureau, many of whom had before the war been abolitionists or active in the underground railroad. Many white southerners believed, for example, that blacks were voting for the Republican Party only because they had been hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues. Black members of the Loyal Leagues were also the frequent targets of Klan raids. One Alabama newspaper editor declared that "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."^[14]

Klan Salute

In contrast to popular opinion the salute of the Ku Klux Klan is not a Nazi salute. The Klan Salute predates the Nazi counterpart but shares an origin in the salute of the Roman empire. The salute dates from when the Klan was first founded and is also used in the second Klan. The Klan salute is made with the left arm (not the right as in the Nazi salute). The five fingers on the hand are spread apart and the hand is tilted slightly upwards revealing the palm of the Klansman. The salute is accompanied by either the formal greeting "Klansman I greet you!" or the informal "K.I.G.Y." The salute has fallen out of use in the Klan in later years as extremists and neo-Nazis within the Klan have leaned more towards the Nazi salute itself.

Decline and suppression

Forrest's national organization, in fact, had little control over the local Klans, which were highly autonomous. One Klan official complained that his own "so-called 'Chief'-ship was purely nominal, I having not the least authority over the reckless young country boys who were most active in 'night-riding', whipping, etc., all of which was outside of the intent and constitution of the Klan..." Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating that it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace."^[15] Due to the national organization's lack of control, this proclamation was more a symptom of the Klan's decline than a cause of it. Historian Stanley Horn writes that "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment."^[16] A reporter in Georgia wrote in January 1870 that "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux."^[17]

Gov. William Holden of North Carolina attempted to use the state militia against the Klan, and was voted out of office.

Although the Klan was being used more and more often as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted against it. In lynching cases, whites were almost never indicted by all-white coroner's juries, and even when there was an indictment, all-white trial juries were extremely unlikely to vote for conviction. In many states, there were fears that the use of black militiamen would ignite a race war.^[18] When Republican governor Holden of North Carolina called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, the result was a backlash that lost him the upcoming election.^[19]

Meanwhile, many Democrats at the national level were questioning whether the Klan even existed, or had been imagined by nervous Republican governors in the South.^[20] In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican senator John Scott convened a committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. Many Southern states had already passed anti-Klan legislation, and in February former Union general Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts (who was widely reviled by Southern whites) introduced federal legislation modeled on it.^[21] The tide was turned in favor of the bill by the governor of South Carolina's appeal for federal troops, and by reports of a riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse, which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.^[22]

Benjamin Franklin Butler wrote the 1871 Klan Act.

In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation, the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was used along with the 1870 Force Act to enforce the civil rights provisions of the constitution. Under the Klan Act, federal troops were used rather than state militias, and Klansmen were prosecuted in federal court, where juries were often predominantly black.^[23] Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned, and habeas corpus was suspended in nine counties in South Carolina. These efforts were so successful that the Klan was destroyed in South Carolina^[24] and decimated throughout the rest of the country, where it had already been in decline for several years. Prosecutions were led by Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman. The tapering off of the federal government's actions under the Klan Act, ca. 1871–74, went along with the final extinction of the Klan,^[25] although in some areas similar activities, including intimidation and murder of black voters, continued under the auspices of local organizations such the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs.^[26] Even though the Klan no longer existed, it had achieved many of its goals, such as denying voting rights to Southern blacks.

In 1882, long after the end of the first Klan, the Supreme Court ruled in United States vs. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional, saying that Congress's power under the fourteenth amendment did not extend to private conspiracies.^[27] However, the Force Act and the Klan Act have been invoked in later civil rights conflicts, including the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner^[28]; the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo;^[29] and Bray vs. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic, 1991, which became an issue in the 2005 debate on the confirmation of John G. Roberts, Jr.'s nomination to the Supreme Court.^[30]

The second Klan

Creation

Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation.

The founding of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 demonstrated the newfound power of modern mass media. The year saw three closely related events:

• The film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan.
• Leo Frank, a Jewish man accused of the rape and murder of a young white girl named Mary Phagan, was lynched against a backdrop of media frenzy.
• The second Ku Klux Klan was founded with a new anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic agenda. The bulk of the founders were from an organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, and the new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the original Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.

An illustration from The Clansman: "Take dat f'um yo equal—"

D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan, which was now a fading memory. Griffith's film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon who said his purpose was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!" The film created a nationwide craze for the Klan. At a preview in Los Angeles, actors dressed as Klansmen were hired to ride by as a promotional stunt, and real-life members of the newly reorganized Klan rode up and down the street at its later official premiere in Atlanta. In some cases, enthusiastic southern audiences fired their guns into the screen.^[31] The film's popularity and influence were enhanced by a widely reported endorsement of its factual accuracy by historian and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (see below, under Political Influence) as a favor to an old friend. Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the standardized white costume and the burning cross, are imitations of the film, whose imagery was itself based on Dixon's romanticized concept of old Scotland rather than on the Reconstruction Klan.

A quote from Woodrow Wilson used in the film.

The Birth of a Nation includes extensive quotations from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People,^[32] e.g., "The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." Wilson, on seeing the film in a special White House screening on February 18, 1915, exclaimed, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."^[33] Wilson's family had sympathized with the Confederacy during the Civil War, and cared for wounded Confederate soldiers at a church. When he was a young man, his party had vigorously opposed Reconstruction, and as president he resegregated the federal government for the first time since Reconstruction. Given the film's strong Democratic partisan message and Wilson's documented views on race and the Klan, it is not unreasonable to interpret the statement as supporting the Klan, and the word "regret" as referring to the film's depiction of Radical Republican Reconstruction. Later correspondence with the film's director, D.W. Griffith, confirms Wilson's enthusiasm about the film. Wilson's remarks were widely reported and immediately became controversial. Wilson tried to remain aloof from the controversy, but finally, on April 30, he issued a non-denial denial.^[34] His endorsement of the film greatly enhanced its popularity and influence, and helped Griffith to defend it against legal attack by the NAACP; the film, in turn, was a major factor leading to the creation of the second Klan in the same year.

The lynching of Leo Frank.

In the same year, an important event in the coalescence of the second Klan was the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager. In sensationalistic newspaper accounts, Frank was accused of fantastic sexual crimes and of the murder of a Mary Phagan, a girl employed at his factory. He was convicted of murder after a questionable trial in Georgia (the judge asked that Frank and his counsel not be present when the verdict was announced due to the violent mob of people surrounding the court house). His appeals failed (Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented, condemning the intimidation of the jury as failing to provide due process of law). The governor then commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, but a mob calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from the prison farm and lynched him. Ironically, much of the evidence in the murder actually pointed to the factory's black janitor, Jim Conley, who the prosecution claimed only helped Frank to dispose of the body.

File:Stone-mountain2.jpg

The huge confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, site of the founding of the second Klan. Work was begun in 1923 with funding mainly from the Klan, and was completed in 1970.

For many Southerners who believed Frank to be guilty, there was a strong resonance between the Frank trial and The Birth of a Nation, because they saw an analogy between Mary Phagan and the film's character Flora, a young virgin who throws herself off a cliff to avoid being raped by the black character Gus, described as "a renegade, a product of the vicious doctrines spread by the carpetbaggers."

The Frank trial was used skillfully by Georgia politician Thomas E. Watson, the editor for The Jeffersonian magazine at the time and later a leader in the reorganization of the Klan who was later elected to the U.S. Senate. The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a mountaintop meeting led by William J. Simmons and attended by aging members of the original Klan, along with members of the Knights of Mary Phagan.

The burning cross is a symbol used by the Klan to create terror. Cross burning is said to have been introduced by William J. Simmons, the founder of the second Klan in 1915.

Activities

The new KKK was a small operation with fewer than 2000 members until 1920, when it devised a new strategy of growth in which organizers would form chapters and collect large initiation fees that they shared with state and national headquarters. In keeping with its origins in the Leo Frank lynching, the reorganized Klan had a new anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant slant. This was consistent with the new Klan's greater success at recruiting in the U.S. Midwest than in the South. The second KKK also preached moral regeneration and purification, attacking foreign elements for degrading American morality. The Klan was successful in recruiting throughout the country and in Canada, but the membership turned over rapidly, and since the Klan was a secret society, it is difficult to determine accurate membership numbers. As in the Nazi party's later propaganda in Germany, recruiters made effective use of the idea that prospective members' problems were caused by Blacks or by Jewish bankers, or by other targeted groups. This Klan was operated as a profit-making venture by its leaders, and participated in the boom in fraternal organizations at the time. Organizers signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and bought KKK costumes. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials. When the organizer was done with an area he organized a huge rally, often with burning crosses and perhaps a ceremonial presentation of a Bible to a local Protestant minister. He left town with all the money. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations, occasionally bringing in speakers. The state and national officials had little or no control over the locals and rarely or never attempted to forge them into political activist groups.

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

Political influence

In 1922 Hiram Wesley Evans (1881-1966) of Texas took control of the national organization as "imperial wizard" and kept it until 1939.

The second Ku Klux Klan rose to great prominence and spread from the South into the Midwest region and Northern states and even into Canada. At its peak, Klan membership may have been in the millions, but the numbers were always exaggerated by both Klan leaders and opponents. The Klan claimed that President Warren Harding had joined, but historical research has raised doubts about the claim. A number of notable figures in national politics were Klan members in their youth, including Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. As discussed in Notable Ku Klux Klan members in national politics, Harry S. Truman admitted to paying the $10 membership fee to join the Klan, but then backed out. In the 1920s the Klan claimed credit for electing many people, but in many cases there is no clearcut evidence either way. Senator Earl Mayfield of Texas, for example, was claimed by the Klan, but he always avoided the issue.

The first Klan was Democratic and Southern, but this Klan, while it still boasted members from the Democratic Party, was Democratic in the South but more Republican in the North. It was popular throughout the country and in parts of Canada, particularly in Saskatchewan where it played a crucial role in bringing to power the Conservative government of James Anderson. However, no prominent national politician in Canada or the US acknowledged membership in the Klan.

Some historians, as well as the Klan itself, state that the Klan had vast influence in many state governments, including Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon in addition to some of the Southern legislatures. However, it may often be impossible to reach clear conclusions, since Klan membership was typically secret, and even in cases where known Klansmen were in government, there is no way to prove whether or not a particular action was taken at the behest of the Klan.

Klan influence was particularly strong in Indiana, where Republican Klansman^[35] Edward Jackson was elected governor in 1924. By then, more than 40 percent of the native-born white males in Indianapolis claimed membership in the Klan. Klan-backed candidates took over the City Council, the Board of School Commissioners, and the Board of County Commissioners.

However, some historians are skeptical of the level of Klan control, and in many cases it may be difficult to prove anything beyond the fact that a large number of state or local elected officials were Klansmen. In one well-known example from the same year, the Klan decided to make Anaheim, California, into a model Klan city; it secretly took over the city council, but was voted out in a special recall election. Some historians believe the state Klan leaders were primarily interested in collecting money from the organizing drives. The opponents of the Klan consistently argued that they were politically dangerous. Some historians studying the state-by-state situations conclude that the Klan exerted little or no influence on state legislation, with the possible exception of laws in Oregon designed to banish Catholic parochial schools. No major newspaper supported the Klan; indeed, most newspapers strongly opposed it as hostile to American values of an open, democratic society. During the 1920s no major national politician acknowledged he was a member of the Klan. (Some young men who later became national figures did belong briefly, such as Hugo Black.)

File:Anaheim-klan.jpg

Klansmen in Anaheim, California, 1924.

The Klan was an issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. The convention initially pitted California Senator William McAdoo, a dry (supporter of prohibition) against New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic and outspoken wet (opponent of prohibition). The issue was a resolution denouncing the Klan by name, versus a generic denunciation of un-American activities. No leading delegate claimed Klan membership. After days of stalemate both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise candidate and the plank condemning the Klan by name lost in a very close vote.

In 1923, "Bloody Williamson" in southern Illinois was the scene of pitched battles between rum-running gangsters and Klansmen. The Klan essentially took over Williamson County, Illinois, forcing elected government officials out of office, to be replaced by unelected "Kluxers", as they were called in Illinois. Federal officials apparently deputized the Klan. Large mobs went door to door, searching houses for stocks of bootleg alcohol. This led to the "Klan War" in which local gangsters eventually overpowered the Klan and allowed the restoration of lawfully elected government (Charles Birger and Shelton Brothers Gang) that they controlled.

File:D C Stephenson mugshot.gif

D.C. Stephenson's prison mugshot, 1926

Decline

In many cases, the second Klan's efforts at the local had only short-lived effects, the organizers left town when their main drive was completed. During this period, the Klan was also left with almost no infrastructure or budget. The final collapse took place in different states at different times. The most spectacular episode was a scandal involving David Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana and fourteen other states, who was convicted of the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer in a sensational trial in 1925. The Klan had promoted itself as the enforcer of morality, so the scandals permanently destroyed its main attraction to people.

As a result of these scandals, the Klan withered away. Grand Wizard Hiram Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta doctor, but they were unable to staunch the exodus of members. The Klan's image was further damaged by Colescott's association with Nazi-sympathizer organizations, the Klan's involvement with the 1943 Detroit Race Riot, and efforts to disrupt the American war effort during World War II. In 1944 the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944. The name Ku Klux Klan then began to be used by a number of independent groups. The following table shows the decline in the Klan's estimated membership over time.^[36] (The years given in the table represent approximate time periods; years after 1944 represent the total for all groups using the Klan name.)

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

year	membership
1920	4,000,000
1930	30,000
1970	2,000
2000	3,000

Folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan after World War II and provided information, including secret code words, to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in a series of four episodes in which Superman took on the Klan. Kennedy intended to strip away the Klan's mystique, and the trivialization of the Klan's rituals and code words likely did have a negative impact on Klan recruiting and membership.

File:Viola-liuzzo.jpg

Anthony and Viola Liuzzo, 1949.

Later Ku Klux Klans

Following the demise of the second era KKK, there were three periods of resurgence, dubbed by some scholars and Klan participants as the third through sixth era Klans.

After World War II, the Klan's victims began to fight back. In a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans who had associated with white people, and then held a nighttime rally nearby, only to find themselves surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed.^[37] In 1966, Stokely Carmichael was preaching Black Power methods to African American communities across Mississippi. He stated that the only way to end terror by Whites such as the Klan was to meet them with armed resistance. As a result, several Blacks had their guns ready when the Klan came to harass their communities, and that caused the Klan to leave some communities once and for all.

A new focus of the postwar Klan was to resist the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In 1963, two Klan members carried out the bombing of a church in Alabama that had been used as a meeting place for civil rights organizers. Four young girls were killed, and outrage over the bombing helped to build momentum for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Klan used threats, intimidation, and murder to disrupt voter registration drives in the South, and to prevent registered black voters from voting. The Klan was involved in the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi, and also murdered Viola Liuzzo, a Southern-raised white mother of five who was visiting the South from her home in Detroit to attend a civil rights march.

Violence at a Klan march in Mobile, Alabama, 1977.

In 1964, the FBI's COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Klan. COINTELPRO occupied a curiously ambiguous position in the civil rights movement, since it used its tactics of infiltration, disinformation, and violence against violent far-left and far-right groups such as the Klan and the Weathermen, but simultaneously against peaceful organizations such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This ambivalence was shown dramatically in the case of the murder of Liuzzo, who was shot on the road by four Klansmen in a car, of whom one was an FBI informant. After she was murdered, the FBI spread false rumors that she was a communist, and that she had abandoned her children in order to have sex with black civil rights workers. Regardless of the FBI's ambivalence, Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated in the Klan in 1979, reported that COINTELPRO's efforts had been highly successful in disrupting the Klan; rival Klan factions both accused each other's leaders of being FBI informants, and one leader, Bill Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was in fact later revealed to have been working for the FBI.^[38]

Once the century-long struggle over black voting rights in the South had ended, the Klans shifted their focus to other issues, including affirmative action, immigration, and especially busing ordered by the courts in order to desegregate schools. In 1971, Klansmen used bombs to destroy ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, and charismatic Klansman David Duke was active in South Boston during the school busing crisis of 1974. Duke also made efforts to update its image, urging Klansmen to "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." Duke was leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from 1974 until he resigned from the Klan in 1978. In 1980, he formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a far-right white nationalist political organization. He was elected to the Louisiana State House of Representatives in 1989 as a Republican, even though the party threw its support to a different Republican candidate. In 1979 the Greensboro Massacre occurred in which five members of the Communist Workers Party were shot and killed while participating in an anti-Klan demonstration. The CWP had been active trying to organize black workers in Greensboro, North Carolina.

File:Kkk-donald-cartoon.jpg

An inflammatory cartoon that was used as evidence in the civil trial resulting from Michael Donald's murder.

In this period, resistance to the Klan became more common. Jerry Thompson reported that in his brief membership in the Klan, his truck was shot at, he was yelled at by black children, and a Klan rally that he attended turned into a riot when black soldiers on an adjacent military base taunted the Klansmen. Attempts by the Klan to march were often met with counterprotests, and violence sometimes ensued.

File:Lynching-of-michael-donald.jpg

The lynching of Michael Donald, 1981.

Vulnerability to lawsuits has encouraged the trend away from central organization, as when, for example, the lynching of Michael Donald in 1981 led to a civil suit that bankrupted one Klan group, the United Klans of America^[39]. Thompson related how many Klan leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series of multimillion-dollar lawsuits brought against them as individuals by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a result of a shootout between Klansmen and a group of African Americans, and curtailed their activities in order to conserve money for defense against the suits. Lawsuits were also used as tools by the Klan, however, and the paperback publication of Thompson's book, My Life in the Klan, was canceled because of a libel suit brought by the Klan.

Klan activity has also been diverted into other racist groups and movements, such as Christian Identity, neo-Nazi groups, and racist subgroups of the skinheads.

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

"Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" has been part of the title of at least ten organizations patterned on the original KKK. The most prominent of these was the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., which was founded in November 1915 by William J. Simmons and disbanded in 1944 by James Colescott. At its peak this fraternal organization had around three to five million members.

The most militant Klan group was "The White Knights of Mississippi" led by Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. Though not the largest, they were by far the most violent. They were responsible for many bombings, church burnings, beatings, and murders, including the killing of three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price, along with Edgar Ray Killen, Wayne Roberts of Meridian, Mississippi and several other members of the Klan, murdered the three young men, who were all members of C.O.R.E, (Congress Of Racial Equality) by shooting them and burying their bodies in a dam outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of these murders in 2005, 40 years after they occured. Price and Roberts are now deceased.

In 1989, The White Knights of Mississippi went national, and appointed Professional Wrestler Johnny Lee Clary, who was also known as Johnny Angel as it's new national Imperial Wizard, to succeed Sam Bowers. Clary appeared on many talk shows including Oprah and Morton Downey Jr., in an effort to build a new modern image for the Ku Klux Klan. It was thought that Clary could build membership in the Klan due to his celebrity status a professional wrestler. Clary tried to unify the various chapters of the Klan in a meeting held in the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, Pulaski, Tennessee, only to have it fall apart by infighting which occured when the Klan came together. Clary's girlfriend, was revealed to be an F.B.I informant, which resulted in mistrust of Clary among the different Klan members. Clary resigned from the Klan and later became a born again Christian and a civil rights activist.

In 2005 the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Knights Party) is headed by National Director Pastor Thom Robb, and based in Zinc, Arkansas. It is the biggest Klan organization in America today. The sixth era Klan continues to be a racist group.

Robb's group in the past produced such Klan stars as David Duke, but it is now continuing a long, slow decline. In 1991 Thom Robb said that he foresaw imminent respectability for the Klan: "You take Exxon. They had an identity thing to overcome after that oil spill. Well, the Klan has an image problem to overcome, also."

The Ku Klux Klan today

File:KKK holocaust a zionist hoax.jpg

KKK: the Nazi salute and Holocaust denial

Although often still discussed in contemporary American politics as representing the quintessential "fringe" end of the far-right spectrum, today the group only exists in the form of a number of very isolated, scattered "supporters" that probably do not number more than a few thousand. In a 2002 report on "Extremism in America", the Anti-Defamation League wrote "Today, there is no such thing as the Ku Klux Klan. Fragmentation, decentralization and decline have continued unabated." However, they also noted that the "need for justification runs deep in the disaffected and is unlikely to disappear, regardless of how low the Klan's fortunes eventually sink."

In some Klan units, anti-Catholicism has been dropped as a core principle; and in some cases Klan units have adopted neo-Nazism or Christian Identity as core ideological beliefs.

Today the only known former member of the Klan to hold a federal office in the United States is Senator Robert Byrd, (D-WV), who says he "deeply regrets" his roles as "Exalted Cyclops" and "Kleagle," or recruiter, for his local Klan in the 1940's.

Californian musical sisters Prussian Blue also perform at modern Ku Klux Klan rallies.

Some of the larger KKK organizations currently in operation include:

• Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan^[40]
• Imperial Klans of America
• Knights of the White Kamelia

There is a vast number of smaller organizations.^[41]

In 2005 there are an estimated 3,000 Klan members, divided among 158 chapters of a variety of splinter organizations, about two-thirds of which were in former Confederate states. The other third are primarily in the Midwest region. ^[42][43][44]

The American Civil Liberties Union has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK in defense of their First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, and marches, and their right to field political candidates.

In a July 2005 incident, a Hispanic man's house was burned down in Hamilton, Ohio, after accusations that he sexually assaulted a nine-year-old white girl. Klan members in Klan robes showed up afterward to distribute pamphlets.

Ku Klux Klan vocabulary

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

Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words ^[45] beginning with "KL" including:

• Klabee: treasurers
• Klavern: local chapter
• Kleagle: recruiter
• Klecktoken: initiation fee
• Kligrapp: secretary
• Klikadada: sacred ritual
• Klonvocation: gathering
• Kloran: ritual book
• Kloreroe: delegate
• Kludd: chaplain
• Klupalata: initiation ceremony
• Kluupa: the leader

The Ku Klux Klan in popular culture

While the Klan has faced decline during the latter part of the twentieth century, it nevertheless managed to resonate in the minds of those in the media.

Talk show host Jerry Springer had Klan members on his program The Jerry Springer Show numerous times.

The animated series South Park often pokes fun at the Klan. A repeated joke has a character or characters wear an ill-fitting sheet as a "ghost" costume but will come across as a Klansman to the town's African-American members.

In the movie Forrest Gump, the title character (played by Tom Hanks) is said to be named after his ancestor Nathan Bedford Forrest.

In Chappelle's Show, Chappelle plays a blind black man who wants to be a white supremacist. As he reveals himself in a speech, everyone was shocked (also a man's head explodes) because he is a black man who thinks he's white.

In the episode of Family Guy where Peter has a near death experience, during one of the flash backs, he meets his future friend Cleveland, and as he rides in Cleveland's van a car full of people dressed as Klan members are following them waving clubs and Peter says, "We're being chased by ghosts!"

See also

• Jim Crow laws
• Silent Brotherhood
• Neo-Nazism
• History of the United States (1865-1918)
• Wide Awakes
• Knights of the Golden Circle
• American Protective Association
• Notable Ku Klux Klan members in national politics

Notes

1. ^ According to the 1920 census, the population of white males 18 years and older was about 31 million, but many of these men would have been ineligible for membership because they were immigrants, Jews, or Roman Catholics. Klan membership peaked at about 4-5 million: http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2207/The_Ku_Klux_Klan_a_brief__biography, retrieved August 26 2005.
2. ^ 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.
3. ^ Horn, 1939, p. 11, states that Reed proposed "κύκλος" ("kyklos") and Kennedy added "clan." Wade, 1987, p. 33 says Kennedy came up with both words, but Crowe suggested transforming "κύκλος" into "kuklux."
4. ^ Wade, 1987.
5. ^ The quote is from the 1868 Revised Precept, from Horn, 1939.
6. ^ The Oddfellows, for example, were founded in 1810, and focused strongly on providing a safety net for members' families. Similar provisions were made by the United American Mechanics, founded in 1845. A later example was the Woodmen of the World, which had a connection to the second Klan via William J. Simmons.
7. ^ Horn, 1939. Horn casts doubt on some other aspects of the story.
8. ^ data compiled from http://users.bestweb.net/~rg/lynching_century.htm, retrieved June 26 2005
9. ^ http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-694, retrieved August 26 2005.
10. ^ Horn, 1939.
11. ^ Horn, 1939, p. 375.
12. ^ Wade, 1987, p. 102.
13. ^ Horn, 1939, p. 375.
14. ^ Cincinnati 'Commercial', August 28 1868, quoted in Wade, 1987. Full text of the interview on wikisource.
15. ^ Horn, 1939, p. 27.
16. ^ quotes from Wade, 1987.
17. ^ Horn, 1939, p. 360.
18. ^ Horn, 1939, p. 362.
19. ^ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html, retrieved August 11 2005.
20. ^ Wade, 1987, p. 85.
21. ^ Wade, 1987.
22. ^ Horn, 1939, p. 373.
23. ^ Wade, 1987, p. 88.
24. ^ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html, retrieved August 11 2005.
25. ^ Wade, 1987, p. 102.
26. ^ Wade, 1987, p. 109, writes that by ca. 1871-4, "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." Klan "costumes or regalia" had disappeared by the early 1870's (Wade, p. 109). That the Klan was entirely nonexistent for a period of decades is shown by the fact that in 1915, Simmons's refounding of the Klan was attended by only two aging "former Reconstruction Klansmen" (Wade, p. 144). Horn, a very sympathetic Southern historian of the first Klan, was careful in an oral interview to distinguish it from the later "spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute—and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days." http://www.lib.duke.edu/forest/Research/ohisrch.html, retrieved August 11 2005. A PBS web page (retrieved August 12 2005) states that "By 1872, the Klan as an organization was broken."
27. ^ Wade, 1987, pp. 109-110.
28. ^ http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/opeds/historylesson1.pdf (PDF), retrieved August 12 2005.
29. ^ http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-CivRts2.html, retrieved August 15 2005.
30. ^ http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAliuzzo.htm, retrieved August 15 2005.
31. ^ New York Times, August 12 2005, p. A14.
32. ^ Dray, 2002.
33. ^ http://www.geocities.com/emruf5/birthofanation.html, retrieved July 7 2005.
34. ^ Dray, 2002, p. 198. The comment was relayed to the press by Griffith and widely reported, and in subsequent correspondence, Wilson discussed Griffith's filmmaking in a highly positive tone, without challenging the veracity of the statement.
35. ^ Wade, 1987, p. 137.
36. ^ http://www.in.gov/statehouse/years/, retrieved Dec. 3, 2005
37. ^ http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2207/The_Ku_Klux_Klan_a_brief__biography, http://www.africanamericans.com/KuKluxKlan.htm, http://www.adl.org/hate-patrol/kkk.asp, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2730, all retrieved August 26 2005.
38. ^ Ingalls, 1979; http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/jan2005/jan05.html, retrieved June 26 2005.
39. ^ Thompson, 1982.
40. ^ http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAkkk.htm, retrieved June 26 2005.
41. ^ http://www.adl.org/backgrounders/american_knights_kkk.asp, retrieved June 26 2005.
42. ^ http://stop-the-hate.org/klanbody.html, retrieved June 26 2005.
43. ^ Southern Poverty Law Center. Active U.S. Hate Groups in 2004. Intelligence Report. Retrieved April 5 2005 from http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp.
44. ^ http://www.adl.org/backgrounders/american_knights_kkk.asp, retrieved June 26 2005.
45. ^ http://www.adl.org/hate-patrol/kkk.asp, retrieved August 26 2005.
46. ^ Axelrod, 1997, p. 160

References

• Alexander, Charles C. The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965).
• Chalmers, David Mark. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. (Durham: Duke UP 3rd edition 1987).
• Chalmers, David Mark. Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement." (Rowman & Littlefield: 2003).
• Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949 (1999)
• Horn, Stanley F. Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871, Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation: Montclair, NJ, 1939.

Horn, born in 1889, was a Southern historian who was sympathetic to the first Klan, which, in a 1976 oral interview [46], he was careful to distinguish from the later "spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute—and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days."

• Horowitz, David A. Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of a Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), based on the minutes of a chapter in Oregon.
• Lay, Shawn, ed. The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 2003).
• Christopher Long, "Ku Klux Klan" in Texas (2005) covers 1866-1990
• Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1991).
• Maclean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. (NY: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• 2001 essay interpreting KKK by Professor John McClymer, Assumption College
• Newton, Michael, and Judy Ann Newton. The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1991.
• "Kansas Battles the Invisible Empire: The Legal Ouster of the KKK From Kansas, 1922-1927," by Charles William Sloan, Jr. Kansas Historical Quarterly Fall, 1974 (Vol. 40, No. 3), pp 393-409 details how KKK operated
• Thompson, Jerry. My Life in the Klan, Rutledge Hill Press, Inc., 513 Third Avenue South, Nashville, Tennessee 37210. Originally published in 1982 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, ISBN 0399126953.
• Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), the best coverage of the first KKK.
• Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster (1987).

An unsympathetic account of both Klans by a clinical psychologist

External links

• Imperial Klans of America Website
• The Southern Poverty Law Center Report
• The ADL on the KKK
• MIPT Terrorist Knowledge Base group profile for the KKK
• In 1999, South Carolina town defines the KKK as terrorist
• A long interview with Stanley F. Horn, author of Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871.
• Full text of the Klan Act of 1871 (simplified version)
• Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era (New Georgia Encyclopedia), scholarly
• Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century (New Georgia Encyclopedia) scholarly
• Rank-and-File Radicalism within the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s (John Zerzan) a heterodox view of the KKK