Ku Klux Klan

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Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of several past and present organizations in the United States that have advocated white supremacy, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, racism, homophobia, anti-Communism and nativism. These organizations have often used terrorism, violence, and acts of intimidation, such as cross burning and lynching, to oppress African Americans and other social or ethnic groups.

The Klan's first incarnation was in 1866. Founded by veterans of the Confederate Army, its main purpose was to resist Reconstruction, and it focused as much on intimidating "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on putting down the freed slaves. The KKK quickly adopted violent methods. A rapid reaction set in, with the Klan's leadership disowning violence 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).

In 1915, a second distinct group was founded using the same name. It was inspired by the newfound power of the modern mass media, via the film The Birth of a Nation and inflammatory anti-Semitic newspaper accounts surrounding the trial and lynching of accused murderer Leo Frank. The second KKK was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure, that paid thousands of men to organize local chapters all over the country. At its peak in the early 1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men.<ref>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: The Ku Klux Klan, a brief biography!, accessed February 19, 2007.</ref> The second KKK typically preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and anti-Semitism. Some local groups took part in lynchings and other violent activities, but violence occurred mostly in the South, which had a tradition of lawlessness. <ref>Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967; reprint Chicago: Elephant Paperback, 1992, p.241-242</ref>Its popularity fell during the Great Depression, and membership fell further during World War II because of scandals resulting from prominent members' crimes and its support of the Nazis.

The name "Ku Klux Klan" has since been used by many different unrelated groups, including many who opposed the Civil Rights Act and desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, with members of these groups eventually being convicted of murder and manslaughter in the deaths of civil rights workers and children (such as in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, and the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi). Today, it is estimated that there are as many as 150 Klan chapters with up to 8,000 members nationwide.<ref>Klan growing, fed by anti-immigrant feelings, ADL report says</ref> These groups, with operations in separated small local units, are considered extreme hate groups. The modern KKK has been repudiated by all mainstream media, political and religious leaders.

Sommaire 1 First Klan 1.1 Creation 1.2 Recruitment 1.3 Activities 1.4 Decline and suppression 2 Second Klan 2.1 Creation 2.2 Membership 2.3 Activities 2.4 Political influence 2.5 Decline 3 Later Klans 4 Present 5 Vocabulary 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links

First Klan

Creation

The original Ku Klux Klan was created by six Confederate veterans<ref>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</ref> from Pulaski, Tennessee, after the American Civil War on December 24, 1865. They were bored with the postwar routine. The name was constructed by combining the Greek "kyklos" (κυκλος,circle) with "clan"<ref>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."</ref>

The Ku Klux Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a "reign of terror" against Republican leaders both black and white. Those assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who had served in constitutional conventions."<ref>Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 by Eric Foner, Perennial (HarperCollins), March 1989, p. 342.</ref>

Recruitment

In an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, an effort was made to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters reporting to county leaders, counties reporting to districts, districts reporting to states, and states reporting to a national headquarters. The proposals, in a document called the "Prescript," were written by a former Confederate brigadier general George Gordon. The Prescript included inspirational language about the goals of the Klan along with a list of questions to be asked of applicants for membership, which confirmed the focus of resisting Reconstruction and the Republican Party. The applicant was to be asked whether he was a Republican, a Union Army veteran, or a member of the Loyal League; whether he was "opposed to Negro equality both social and political;" and whether he was 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."<ref>Ku Klux Klan, Organization and Principles, 1868</ref>

Despite the work that came out of the 1867 meeting, the Prescript was never accepted by any local units. They continued to operate autonomously, and there never were county, district or state headquarters.

According to one oral report, Gordon went to former slave trader and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, and told him about the new organization, to which Forrest replied, "That's a good thing; that's a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the niggers in their place."<ref>Horn, 1939. Horn casts doubt on some other aspects of the story.</ref> A few weeks later, Forrest was selected as Grand Wizard, the Klan's national leader. In later interviews, however, Forrest denied the leadership role and stated he never had any effective control over the Klan cells.

Activities

The Klan sought to control the political and social status of freed slaves. It attempted to curb black education, economic advancement, voting rights and the right to bear arms. Although the Klan's focus was mainly African Americans, Southern Republicans became target of vicious intimidation. For example, in the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock, but in the November presidential election, the county cast only one vote for Republican candidate Ulysses Grant.<ref>Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era, accessed February 19, 2007.</ref>

Klan intimidation often targeted schoolteachers and operatives of the federal Freedmen's Bureau. Black members of the Loyal Leagues were frequent targets of Klan raids. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry<ref>History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. Volume: 7. by James Ford Rhodes, 1920, pages 157–158</ref>

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Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a single county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties.<ref>The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida by Michael Newton, 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."</ref>

An 1868 proclamation by Gordon<ref>Horn, 1939.</ref> demonstrates several issues surrounding Klan activities.

• Many black men were veterans of the Union Army and were armed. From the beginning, one of the original Klan's strongest focuses was on disarming blacks. In the proclamation, Gordon warned the Klan had been "fired into three times," and if blacks "make war upon us they must abide by the awful retribution that will follow."
• Gordon also stated the Klan was a peaceful organization. However, a federal grand jury in 1869 determined the Klan was a "terrorist organization." Hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism were issued. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina.<ref>White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction by Allen W. Trelease, Louisiana State University Press (Reprint edition) April 1995.</ref>
• Gordon warned some people had been carrying out violent acts in the name of the Klan. It was true many people not 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 difficult to prove. In many ways the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party, the planter class, and those who desired the restoration of white supremacy.<ref>Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 by Eric Foner, Perennial (HarperCollins), March 1989, p. 426.</ref>

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By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease<ref>Horn, 1939, p. 375.</ref> 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.<ref>Wade, 1987, p. 102.</ref> 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."<ref>Horn, 1939, p. 375.</ref>

In an 1868 newspaper interview,<ref>Cincinnati 'Commercial', August 28 1868, quoted in Wade, 1987. Full text of the interview on wikisource.</ref> Forrest boasted the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men, and although he was not a member, he was "in sympathy" and would "cooperate" with them, and he could muster 40,000 Klansmen with five days' notice. He stated 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. This was a half truth since one of the main reasons for targeting these white groups was they were impediments to efforts against the former slaves. The Klan went 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 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."<ref>Horn, 1939, p. 27.</ref>

Decline and suppression

The first Klan was never centrally organized. As a secret or "invisible" group, it had no membership rosters, no dues, no newspapers, no spokesmen, no chapters, no local officers, no state or national officials. Its popularity came from its reputation, which was greatly enhanced by its outlandish costumes and its wild and threatening theatrics. As historian Elaine Frantz Parsons discovered:<ref> Parsons, Elaine Frantz, "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan." The Journal of American History 92.3, 2005, page 816</ref> Modèle:Cquote

Forrest's national organization 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."<ref>quotes from Wade, 1987.</ref> Because of 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."<ref>Horn, 1939, p. 360.</ref> 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."<ref>Horn, 1939, p. 362.</ref>

Although the Klan was being used 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 unlikely to vote for conviction. In many states, there were fears that the use of black militiamen would ignite a race war.<ref name="jimcrow-stories">The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow — The enforcement acts (1870–1871), accessed February 19, 2006.</ref> When Republican Governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, the result was a backlash that led to Republicans losing their majority in the legislature, and ultimately, to his own impeachment and removal from office.<ref>Wade, 1987, p. 85.</ref>

Despite this power, there was resistance to Klan terror. "Occasionally, organized groups successfully confronted the Klan. White Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized 'the anti-Ku Klux,' which put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks patrolled the streets of Bennettsville, South Carolina, to prevent Klan assaults."<ref>Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 by Eric Foner, Perennial (HarperCollins), March 1989, p. 435.</ref>

There was also a national movement to crack down on the Klan, even though many Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan even existed or was just a creation of nervous Republican governors in the South.<ref>Wade, 1987.</ref> 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 Congressman (and former Union General) Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts (who was widely reviled by Southern whites) introduced federal legislation modeled on it.<ref>Horn, 1939, p. 373.</ref> 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, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.<ref>Wade, 1987, p. 88.</ref>

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.<ref name="jimcrow-stories" /> 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<ref>Wade, 1987, p. 102.</ref> 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 Akerman. 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,<ref>Wade, 1987, p. 109, writes that by ca. 1871–1874, "For many, the lapse of the enforcement acts was justified since their reason for being — the Ku-Klux Klan — had been effectively smashed as a result of the dramatic showdown in South Carolina." Klan "costumes or regalia" had disappeared by the early 1870s (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." An Annotated Guide to Oral History Interviews of the Forest History Society, accessed February 19, 2006. A PBS web page (accessed February 19, 2006) states that "By 1872, the Klan as an organization was broken."</ref> although in some areas similar activities, including intimidation and murder of black voters, continued under the auspices of local organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs.<ref>Wade, 1987, pp. 109–110.</ref> Even though the Klan no longer existed, it had achieved many of its goals, such as denying voting rights to Southern blacks.

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However, it took several more years for all Klan elements to be destroyed. On Easter Sunday, 1873, the bloodiest single instance of racial violence in the Reconstruction era happened during the Colfax massacre. The massacre began when black citizens fought back against the Klan and its allies in the White League. As Louisiana black teacher and legislator John G. Lewis later remarked, "They attempted (armed self-defense) in Colfax. The result was that on Easter Sunday of 1873, when the sun went down that night, it went down on the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes."<ref>Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, p. 437, and KKK Hearings, 46th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Report 693, and Joe G. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge, 1974), p. 268–270.</ref>

In 1882, long after the end of the first Klan, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional, saying that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend to private conspiracies.<ref>[http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/opeds/historylesson1.pdf History Lesson, Jack M. Balkin], accessed February 19, 2007.</ref> 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;<ref>The Civil Rights Movement, 1964–1968, accessed February 19, 2007.</ref> the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo;<ref>[1], accessed February 19, 2007.</ref> and Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic in 1991.

Second Klan

In the four and a half decades after the suppression of the first Ku Klux Klan, race relations remained very bad—the nadir of American race relations is often placed in this era, and according to Tuskegee Institute, the 1890s was the peak decade for lynchings.

Creation

The founding of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915. Three closely related events sparked the resurgence, but the chief causes were due to urbanization and industrialization, massive new immigration from eastern and southern Europe, the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, as well as the migration of African Americans to Southern cities. The Klan grew in cities which had high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit, Memphis, Dayton, Dallas and Houston.<ref>Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967; reprint, Chicago: Elephant Paperback, 1992, .241</ref> It was weak in other cities that did not have such high growth rates.

Another factor in the creation of the second Klan was the new power of modern mass media, specifically the success of the D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation, which mythologized and glorified the first Klan. The 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.<ref>Dray, 2002.</ref> The film's popularity and influence were enhanced by an endorsement by historian and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the standardized white costume and the burning cross, are imitations of the film, whose imagery was based on the writers romanticized concept of old Scotland as portrayed in novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott.

In the same year, an important event was the lynching of a Jewish factory manager named Leo Frank. Frank was accused of the horrendous rape and murder of a girl employed at his factory, Mary Phagan. After a questionable trial in Georgia, he was convicted of murder. The judge asked Frank and his counsel not be present when the verdict was read because of the violent mob 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. Much of the evidence in the murder pointed to the factory's black janitor, Jim Conley, who the prosecution claimed had only helped Frank to dispose of the body. The bulk of KKK founders were from an organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan. For many southerners who believed Frank to be guilty, there was a strong resonance between the Frank trial and The Birth of a Nation. They saw an analogy between Mary Phagan and the film's character Flora.

The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a meeting led by William J. Simmons on top of Stone Mountain. It was attended by a few aging members of the original Klan, along with members of the Knights of Mary Phagan.

Simmons found inspiration in the original Klan's "Prescripts," written in 1867 by George Gordon in an attempt to give the original Klan national organization.<ref> The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations: A History and Analysis by Chester L Quarles, Page 219. The second Klan's constitution and preamble, reprinted in Quarles book, states that the second Klan was indebted to the original Klan's Prescripts.</ref> The Prescript states as the Klan's purposes:<ref>The quote is from the 1868 Revised Precept, from Horn, 1939.</ref>

• 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.

"The Klan's resurgence in the 1920s partially stemmed from the extreme militant wing of the temperance movement. In Arkansas, as elsewhere, the newly formed Ku Klux Klan marked bootleggers as one of the groups that needed to be purged from a morally upright community. In 1922, 200 Klansmen torched saloons that had sprung up in Union County in the wake of the oil discovery boom. The national Klan office ended up in Dallas, Texas, but Little Rock was the home of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. The first head of this female auxiliary was a former president of the Arkansas WCTU." <ref> Lender, Mark E. and Martin, James K. Drinking in America. New York: Free Press, 1982, p. 33 </ref>

The KKK’s "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation" (emphasis in original) <ref> Prendergast, Michael L. A History of Alcohol Problem Prevention Efforts in the United States. In: Holder, Harold D. (Ed.) Control Issues in Alcohol Abuse Prevention: Strategies for States and Communities. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1987. Pp. 25-52. P. 27 </ref> and there was much interaction and overlap in membership between the Klan and other prohibition supporters. For example, a top leader of the Klan, Edward Young Clarke, raised funds for both the Klan and the Anti-Saloon League. <ref> Barr, A. Drink: A Social History of America. New York: Carroll & Graf,1999, p. 370 </ref>

Membership

Big city newspapers often ridiculed the Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Historians in recent years 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. Detailed analysis from Indiana<ref>Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1991)</ref> shows the stereotype was false:

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The Klan was successful in recruiting throughout the country, but the membership turned over rapidly. Still, millions joined, and at its peak in the 1920s the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population<ref>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: The Ku Klux Klan, a brief biography!, accessed February 19, 2007.</ref> and had chapters across the United States. There were clans founded in Canada, most notably in Saskatchewan, where there was a large clan movement against Catholic immigrants.<ref>When the KKK rode high across the Prairies by Kevin Weedmark, World Spectator, accessed February 19, 2007.</ref>

This Klan was operated as a profit-making venture by its leaders, and it participated in the boom in fraternal organizations. Organizers signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and bought KKK robes. 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 attempted to forge them into political activist groups.

Activities

The reorganized Klan had a new anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist and anti-immigrant slant. This was consistent with greater success recruiting in the Midwest than in the South. Recruiters made effective use of the idea America's problems were caused by blacks, communists, Jewish communists and Jewish bankers, or other such groups.

The first Klan had been Southern while the new Klan was influential throughout the United States, with major political influence over politicians in several states. The new Klan was popular as far north as New England, where it torched an African American school in Scituate, Rhode Island.<ref>Robert Smith, In The 1920s the Klan Ruled the Countryside, The Rhode Island Century, The Providence Journal, 4/26/1999</ref>

In the 1920s and 1930s a faction of the Klan called the Black Legion was very active in the Midwestern U.S. Rather than wearing white robes, the Legion wore black uniforms reminiscent of pirates. The Black Legion were notable for targeting and assassinating communists and socialists.

In addition, Klan groups also took part in lynchings, even murdering uniformed Black soldiers returning from World War I.<ref>Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988 by John Hope Franklin, Louisiana State University Press (reprint edition), February 1992, p. 145</ref> The Klan warned Blacks they must respect the rights of the white race "in whose country they are permitted to reside."<ref>Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988 by John Hope Franklin, Louisiana State University Press (reprint edition), February 1992, p. 145</ref>

Political influence

The second Ku Klux Klan rose to great prominence and spread from the South into the Midwest and Northern states and into Canada. At its peak, Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many regions, as high as 40% in some areas. Most of the membership resided in Midwestern states.

The KKK controlled the governments of Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon, in addition to some Southern legislatures. In Indiana, Klansman Edward Jackson was elected governor in 1924. In the same year, the Klan decided to make Anaheim, California into a model Klan city and secretly took over the city council. However, the Klan was voted out in a special recall election.<ref>It's been 70 years since Anaheim booted the Klan, reprinted from the Los Angeles Times</ref>

At the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City, often called the "Klanbake Convention," Klan delegates blocked the nomination of Catholic New York Governor Al Smith. The Klan supported William Gibbs McAdoo against Smith and after days of stalemate and rioting, both candidates withdrew in favor of compromise and John W. Davis was nominated. Klan delegates also defeated a Democratic Party platform plank that would have condemned their organization. On July 4 1924, thousands of Klansmen converged on a nearby field in New Jersey where they participated in cross burnings, burned effigies of Smith, and celebrated the defeat of the platform plank.

There is evidence in certain states the KKK showed a genuine desire for political and social reform.<ref>Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1999.</ref> In Alabama, the state's Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other "progressive" political measures. In many ways these reforms benefited ordinary and lower class white people; were the result of the Klan offering these same people their first chance to elect their own political champions.<ref> Rogers, William; Ward, Robert; Atkins, Leah; and Flynt, Wayne. Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1994. Pages 437 and 442.</ref> By 1925, powerful Alabama figures like J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black manipulated the KKK membership against the power of the "Big Mule" industrialists and Black Belt planters who had long dominated the state. Black was elected senator in 1926 and became a leading supporter of the New Deal. When he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937, the revelation he was a former Klansman shocked the country. In 1926, Bibb Graves, a former chapter head, won the governor's office with Klan support. He led one of the most progressive administrations in the state's history, pushing for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation.

At the peak of the Klan's political power, several highly notable political figures in the U.S. and Canada joined the Klan or flirted with membership. The list includes two Supreme Court justices and, according to evidence which is in some cases contested, possibly two presidents.

Decline

The second Klan collapsed partly as a result of the backlash against their actions and partly as a result of a scandal involving David Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana and fourteen other states. Stephenson was convicted of the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer in a sensational trial (she was bitten so many times that one man who saw her described her condition as having been "chewed by a cannibal"). According to historian Leonard Moore, the backlash against the klan and the resulting scandals resulted from a leadership failure which caused the organization's collapse:<ref>Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991, p. 186.</ref>

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In Alabama, the Klan's political successes caused the group to overstep. KKK vigilantes, thinking they enjoyed governmental protection, launched a wave of physical terror across Alabama in 1927, targeting both blacks and whites not only targeted people for violating racial norms but also for perceived moral lapses. In Birmingham, the Klan raided local brothels and roadhouses. In Troy, Alabama, the Klan reported to parents the names of teenagers they caught making out in cars. One local Klan group also "kidnapped a white divorcee and stripped her to her waist, tied her to a tree, and whipped her savagely."<ref>Rogers et al. Pages 432–433.</ref> As a result of these attacks, the state's conservative elite counterattacked. Grover C. Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, began a series of editorials and articles attacking the Klan for their "racial and religious intolerance." Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for his crusade.<ref>Rogers et al. Page 433.</ref> Other newspapers also kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan as violent and "un-American." Sheriffs cracked down on Klan violence. The counterattack worked; the state voted for Catholic Al Smith for president in the 1928 election, and the Klan's official membership in Alabama plunged to under six thousand by 1930.

This trend was repeated across the country as the Klan fell out of public favor in the 1930s and withdrew from political activity. Grand Wizard Hiram Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician, but they were unable to staunch the exodus of members. 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.

Folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan after World War II and provided information to media and law enforcement agencies. He also provided secret code words to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in a series of four episodes in which Superman took on the KKK. Kennedy's intention to strip away the Klan's mystique and trivialize the Klan's rituals and code words likely did have a negative impact on Klan recruiting and membership.<ref>Richard von Busack, Superman Versus the KKK on the MetroActive site, accessed April 11, 2006</ref> Kennedy eventually wrote a book based on his experiences, which became a bestseller during the 1950s and further damaged the Klan.<ref>The Klan Unmasked by Stetson Kennedy, University Press of Florida, 1990.</ref>

Later Klans

After the breakup of the second Klan, the name "Ku Klux Klan" began to be used by several independent groups. The following table shows the change in the Klan's estimated membership over time.<ref>. [http://www.alabamamoments.state.al.us/sec46qs.html The 20th Century Ku Klux Klan in Alabama], The Ku Klux Klan, a brief biography!, History of the Ku Klux Klan, What is the KKK?, Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century, all retrieved August 26, 2005.</ref> (The years given in the table represent approximate time periods.)

year	membership
1920	4,000,000
1924	6,000,000
1930	30,000
1980	5,000
2006	3,000

Beginning in the 1950s, a large number of the individual Klan groups began to resist the [[American Civil Rights Movement (1955-196Image:Cool.gif|civil rights movement]] with numerous acts of violence and intimidation. Among the more notorious events of this time period were:

• The assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In 1994, former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of Evers' murder.
• The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, also in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers was convicted of Dahmer's murder. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the other's indictment was dismissed.<ref>A Primer on Civil Rights. Accessed June 26, 2006.</ref>
• The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, which killed four children. Four Klansmen were named as suspects; they were not prosecuted until years later. The Klan members were Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted of murder in 2001 and 2002. The fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died before he was indicted.
• The murder of Willie Edwards, Jr., in 1957. Edwards was forced by Klansmen to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.<ref>Justice Still Absent in Bridge Death by Major W. Cox. Accessed June 26, 2006.</ref>
• The 1964 murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. In June 2005, Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter in the murders.<ref>Mississippi verdict greeted by a generation gap by Kris Axtman. The Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 2005.</ref>

• The 1965 murder of 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. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights Marchers.
• In August 2007, James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman was convicted of the 1964 murder of two black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, based on the confession of Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards. Seale was sentenced to serve three life sentences.<ref>"Seale gets 3 life terms for '64 murders" USA Today, Aug. 24, 2007</ref> Seale was a former Mississippi policeman and sheriff's deputy.<ref>[http://news.findlaw.com/usatoday/docs/crights/usseale12407ind.html "Reputed Klansman, Ex-Cop, and Sheriff's Deputy Indicted For The

1964 Murders of Two Young African-American Men in Mississippi,"] U.S. v. James Ford Seale, January 24, 2007, accessed Sept 9, 2007.</ref>

Klan groups also killed others during this time period, with many of these acts going unreported. For example, in 1951 Harry T. Moore, a school teacher and state director of the NAACP, died with his wife, Harriette, when their house was bombed. The FBI turned up several suspects but no one was prosecuted. "Forty years later, a former Marine and Ku Klux Klansman told NAACP officials that he and other Klansmen had conspired with law enforcement officials to plan and carry out the murder.... According to a subsequent report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some, like Harry Moore, were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who had refused to bow to racist convention or were innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random white terrorism."<ref>Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South by John Egerton, Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1994, p. 562–563.</ref>

But while the post-war Klan groups were extremely violent, during this time period the Klan was also successfully pushed back. For example, 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.<ref>Ingalls, 1979; January 1958 — The Lumbees face the Klan, accessed February 19, 2007.</ref>

In 1964, the FBI's COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Klan. Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the Klan in 1979, reported COINTELPRO's efforts had been highly successful. 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 later revealed to have been working for the FBI.<ref>Thompson, 1982.</ref>

Once the century-long struggle over black voting rights ended, the Klans shifted focus to affirmative action, immigration, and especially busing ordered by the courts to desegregate schools. In 1971, Klansmen used bombs to destroy ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, and Klansman David Duke was active in South Boston during the school busing crisis of 1974. Duke made efforts to update the Klans 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 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 candidate.

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

Vulnerability to lawsuits also 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.<ref>[2], accessed February 19, 2007.</ref> 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 was canceled because of a libel suit brought by the Klan.

Present

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 isolated, scattered groups with a total membership numbering no more than a few thousand.<ref>Extremism in America, Jewish Anti-Defamation League, 2002, accessed Sept. 4, 2006. According to the report, the KKK's estimated size at the moment is "No more than a few thousand, organized into slightly more than 100 units.</ref> In a 2002 report on "Extremism in America", the Jewish 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."<ref>Extremism in America, Jewish Anti-Defamation League, 2002, accessed Sept. 4, 2006.</ref> Since late 2006 the Anti-Defamation League has revised its assessment of the Ku Klux Klan, claiming that "The Ku Klux Klan, which just a few years ago seemed static or even moribund [...], has experienced a surprising and troubling resurgence due to the successful exploitation of hot-button issues including immigration, gay marriage and urban crime".<ref>The Ku Klux Klan Rebounds, Anti-Defamation League.</ref>

Today the only known former member of the Klan to hold a federal office in the United States is Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who says he "deeply regrets" joining the Klan over half a century ago, when he was about 24 years old.

Some of the larger KKK organizations currently in operation include:

• Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, prevalent in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and other areas of the Southeastern U.S.
• Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan<ref>Church of the American Knights of the KKK, accessed February 19, 2007.</ref>
• Imperial Klans of America
• Knights of the White Kamelia
• Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, headed by National Director Pastor Thom Robb, and based in Zinc, Arkansas. Claims to be biggest Klan organization in America today. It refers to itself as the "sixth era Klan" and continues to be a racist group.

There are also numerous smaller organizations using the Klan name.<ref>[3], retrieved June 26, 2005.</ref>

As of 2005, there were an estimated 3,000 Klan members, divided between estimates of 100<ref>Extremism in America, Jewish Anti-Defamation League, 2002, accessed Sept. 4, 2006.</ref> and 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.<ref>Southern Poverty Law Center. Active U.S. Hate Groups in 2004. Intelligence Report. Retrieved April 5, 2005 from Active U.S. Hate Groups in 2005.</ref><ref>Church of the American Knights of the KKK, retrieved June 26, 2005.</ref><ref>What is the KKK?, retrieved August 26, 2005.</ref>

Despite the large number of rival KKKs, the media and popular discourse generally speaks of the Ku Klux Klan, as if there was only one organization.

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

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. In May 2006, a Ku Klux Klan group led an anti-immigration march in Russellville, Alabama.<ref>Klan raises anti-immigrant clamor The Montgomery Advertiser, June 5, 2006, accessed June 5, 2006.</ref>

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.<ref>A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos and Tattoos</ref>

Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words<ref>Axelrod, 1997, p. 160</ref> beginning with "KL" including:

• Klabee: treasurers
• Kleagle: recruiter
• Klecktoken: initiation fee
• Kligrapp: secretary
• Klonvocation: gathering
• Kloran: ritual book
• Kloreroe: delegate
• Kludd: chaplain

All of the above terminology was created by William Simmons, as part of his 1915 revival of the Klan. The Reconstruction-era Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were "Wizard" (or Imperial Wizard) for the overall leader of the Klan, "Night Hawk" for the official in charge of security, and a few others, mostly for regional officers of the organization.

See also

• American Protective Association
• [[History of the United States (1865–191Image:Cool.gif]]
• Johnny Lee Clary
• Jim Crow laws
• Knights of the Golden Circle
• Ku Klux Klan regalia and insignia
• Silent Brotherhood
• Wide Awakes
• Notable alleged Ku Klux Klan members in national politics
• Hugo Black
• WKKK, KKK auxiliaries
• The Birth of a Nation
• The Clansman
• The Leopard's Spots
• The Five Orange Pips
• Christian Terrorism
• Timeline of Racial Tension in Omaha, Nebraska

Notes

References

• Axelrod, Alan. The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders, New York: Facts On File, 1997.
• Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House, 2002.
• Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 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 [4], 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."

• Ingalls, Robert P. Hoods: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1979.
• Levitt, Stephen D. and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: William Morrow (2005).
• Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1991.
• Newton, Michael, and Judy Ann Newton. The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1991.
• Parsons, Elaine Frantz, "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan." The Journal of American History 92.3 (2005): 811–836.
• Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. Volume: 7. (1920)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

• Rogers, William; Ward, Robert; Atkins, Leah; and Flynt, Wayne. Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1994.
• Steinberg. Man From Missouri. New York: Van Rees Press, 1962.
• Thompson, Jerry. My Life in the Klan, Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville. Originally published in 1982 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, ISBN 0-399-12695-3.
• Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press: 1995).

First published in 1971 and based on massive research in primary sources, this is the most comprehensive treatment of the Klan and its relationship to post-Civil War Reconstruction. Includes narrative research on other night-riding groups. Details close link between Klan and late 19th century and early 20th century Democratic Party.

• Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster (1987).

An unsympathetic account of both Klans, with a dedication to "my Kentucky grandmother ... a fierce and steadfast Radical Republican from the wane of Reconstruction until her death nearly a century later."

Further reading

• Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan, University of California Press, 1992, ISBN 0-520-07876-4
• The Growth of White Supremacist gangs in the USA

. Gainesville

 

.

External links

• Ku Klux Klan: A Secret History, a TV documentary on the KKK.
• The History of the Original Ku Klux Klan — by an anonymous author sympathetic to the original Klan.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center Report
• The ADL on the KKK
• Spartacus Education about the KKK
• MIPT Terrorist Knowledge Base for the KKK
• Proceedings of the Second Imperial Klonvocation (1924)
• 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)
• Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century (New Georgia Encyclopedia)
• The Protestant "Kluxing" of Cañyon City, Colorado — (Cañyon City Public Library)
• The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Alcohol, and Prohibition
• The Ku Klux Klan website

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