Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a term used to refer to a number of past and present fraternal organizations in the United States that have advocated white supremacy, and historically promoted Protestantism to the exclusion of other religions. It was founded by veterans of the Confederate Army in 1866.
In its original incarnation, the Ku Klux Klan sought to reestablish Democratic power in the South, and opposed the reforms enforced on the South by federal troops regarding the treatment of former slaves, often using violence to achieve its goals. The first Klan was destroyed by President Ulysses S. Grant's vigorous action under the 1871 Klan Act and Enforcement Act.
A second distinct group using the same name was started atop Stone Mountain near Atlanta in 1915 by William J. Simmons. This second group existed as a money-making fraternal organization and fought to maintain the dominance of white Protestants over blacks, as well as Roman Catholics, Jews, Asians, and other immigrants. This group, although preaching racism and known for lynching and other violent activities, operated openly, and had 4 million members at its peak in the 1920s; many politicians at all levels of government were members. Its popularity fell during the Great Depression, and membership fell again during World War II, presumably because of mass enlistment or conscription to the Armed Forces.
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 1960s. Today, dozens of organizations with chapters across the United States and other countries use all or part of the name in their titles.
History
The original Ku Klux Klan
The original Ku Klux Klan was created after the end of the American Civil War on December 24, 1865 by six middle-class Confederate veterans who were bored with postwar Pulaski, Tennessee. It was at first a humorous social club centering on practical jokes and hazing rituals.[1] From 1866 to 1867, the Klan began breaking up black prayer meetings, and invading black homes at night to confiscate firearms. Some of these activities may have been modeled on previous Tennessee vigilante groups such as the Yellow Jackets and Redcaps.
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. A few weeks later, former slave trader and confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was selected as Grand Wizard, the Klan's national leader. The Prescript states as the Klan's purposes:
- "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 resistCongressional 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 the 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. Due to Congress enacting laws that promoted racial equality, southern whites could not turn to the law in order to regain their power through the Democratic Party. In addition, the Klan sought to control the political and social status of the freed slaves. More specifically, it attempted to curb black education, economic advancement, and voting rights. Violence came to be seen as the best way to accomplish their goals. However, the Klan's violence was not limited to African Americans; Southern Republicans also became the target of vicious intimidation tactics, and a wave of 1300 lynchings in 1868 was primarily a political purge rather than a racial conflict. The Klan became the violent arm of the Democratic Party. As federal control of the ex-Confederate states was withdrawn, the local white population re-established their power.
In a newspaper interview,[2] 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 as "carpetbaggers" (northerners who came south after the war ended) and "scalawags" (white Republican southerners). There was an element of truth to this claim, since the Klan did target these white 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 carpetbaggers.
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." The order had little effect, since the national organization did not even have reliable channels of communication with all the local Klans, and despite Forrest's order, many Klan groups around the country continued to function without a centralized organization. Like Forrest's public denial of his membership in the Klan, his order abolishing it may have been intended merely to protect Forrest himself from blame for its activities.[3]
In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant signed The Klan Act and Enforcement Act. The Klan became an illegal group, and the use of force was authorized to suppress and disrupt the organization's activities. Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned, and habeas corpus was suspended in some counties in South Carolina. These efforts were so successful that the Klan was eliminated in South Carolina and decimated throughout the rest of the country. The Klan Act was declared unconstitutional in 1882, but the Klan was largely gone by then, and had in fact achieved many of its original goals, such as denying political rights to blacks.
The second Ku Klux Klan
The year 1915 saw three closely related events: the release of the film The Birth of a Nation, the lynching of Leo Frank, and the founding of the second Ku Klux Klan.
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 intended "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.[4]
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 by 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 in 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, the evidence in the murder actually pointed to the factory's black janitor, Jim Conley, who had a criminal record, was seen washing a bloody shirt, and repeatedly changed his story.
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 and publisher 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 attended by aging members of the original Klan, along with members of the Knights of Mary Phagan. 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 US Midwest than in the South. As in the Nazi party's propaganda in Germany, recruiters made effective use of the idea that prospective members' problems were caused Blacks, or by Jewish bankers, or by other such groups.
This Klan was operated as a profit-making venture by its leaders, and participated in the boom in fraternal organizations at the time. It differed from the first Klan. The first Klan was Democratic and Southern, but this Klan boasted members from both the Democratic and to a lesser degree Republican parties, and was influential throughout the United States, with major political influence on politicians in several states. It collapsed largely as a result of 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 (she was bitten so many times that one man who saw her described her condition as having been "chewed by a cannibal"). The second Klan dwindled in popularity throughout the 1930s. It was disbanded in 1944 and the name Ku Klux Klan began to be used by a number of independent groups.
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 was the most violent and zealous faction of the Klan, and were notable for targeting and assassinating Communists and Socialists.
Stetson Kennedy, folklorist and author, infiltrated the Klan after World War II, and provided information, including secret codewords, 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 codewords likely did have a negative impact on Klan recruiting and membership.
Later Ku Klux Klans
After World War II, criminals targeted by the Klan began to fight back. In a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Indians 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.[5]
A new focus of the postwar Klans 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.
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 Weatherman, 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 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. Liuzzo 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.[6]
In this period, resistance to the Klan became more common. 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 counter-protests, and violence sometimes ensued.
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[7]. Thompson related how many Klan leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series multi-million-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.
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.
Political influence
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, most of the membership resided in Midwestern states. Through sympathetic elected officials, the KKK controlled the governments of Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon in addition to those of the Southern Democratic legislatures. Klan delegates played a significant role at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City, often called the "Klanbake Convention" as a result. The convention initially pitted Klan-backed candidate William McAdoo against New York Governor Al Smith, who drew the opposition of the group because of his Catholic faith. After days of stalemates and rioting, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise. Klan delegates defeated a Democratic Party platform plank that would have condemned their organization. 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 their defeat of the platform plank.
At its peak in the 1920s, Klan membership exceeded 4 million and counted many politicians among its members.
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson's "History of the American People" is repeatedly quoted in The Birth of a Nation,[8] and 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."[9] Given the film's strong Democratic partisan message, Wilson's documented views on race, and Wilson's resegregation of the federal government for the first time since Reconstruction, 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, which his party had vigorously opposed when he was a young man. Later correspondence with Griffith confirms his 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, issued a non-denial denial.[10]
Edward Douglass White
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Edward Douglass White, in 1915, fondly recounted to Thomas Dixon that he had been a member of the Klan.[11]
Warren Harding
There is plausible evidence Warren G. Harding was a Klansman. Historian Wyn Craig Wade states it as fact, and gives a detailed account of a secret swearing-in ceremony in the White House, based on a private communication in 1985 from journalist Stetson Kennedy. Kennedy, in turn, had received the account in a "late 1940's" deathbed interview with former Imperial Klokard Alton Young, who claimed to have been a member of the "Presidential Induction Team." Wade says,[12]
- Simmons' ultimate vindication came when President Warren G. Harding agreed to be sworn in as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. A five-man "Imperial induction team," headed by Simmons, conducted the ceremony in the Green Room of the White House. Members of the team were so nervous that they forgot their Bible in the car, so Harding had to send for the White House Bible. In consideration of his status, Harding was permitted to rest his elbow on the desk, as he knelt on the floor during the long oath taking. Afterward, the President appreciatively gave members of the team War Department license tags that allowed them to run red lights all across the nation.
Wade also states that "This matter was a major issue in letters sent to Coolidge during the 1924 election," and gives a reference to Coolidge's presidential papers. Craig's account of Hoover's induction is now repeated, almost verbatim, on some klans' web sites, and also on anti-klan sites.
Harry Truman
Democratic President Harry Truman paid a $10 membership fee to join the Klan in 1924, but at a meeting with a Klan officer arranged by Truman's friend, Klansman Edgar Hinde, the Klan officer demanded that Truman pledge not to hire any Catholics if he was reelected as county judge. Truman refused, and his membership fee was returned; many of the men he had commanded in World War I had been Catholic, and the Pendergast family was Catholic.[13] (When Truman became President of the United States, he had an extensive civil rights record and was much-hated by the Klan.)
James T.M. Anderson
In Saskatchewan, Canada the KKK was seen as having a dramatic effect on the provincial election of 1929, which defeated the James G. Gardiner Liberal government and installed the 1929-1934 Conservative government of James T.M. Anderson.
Hugo Black
Another former Klansman to rise to national prominence was the Democratic Senator and later Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who later repudiated the organization. Early in his political career Black defended one of the group's members for the assassination of Father James Coyle, an Alabama Catholic priest, and obtained a "not guilty" verdict through a Klan-controlled jury.
David Duke
David Duke served as a Republican state representative and ran for office in Louisiana in both Democratic and Republican primary elections. He served until 1978 as the National Director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and resigned from the Klan in 1980.
Robert Byrd
West Virginia's Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was a recruiter for the Klan while in his 20s and 30s, rising to the title of Kleagle, and defended the Klan in his 1958 U.S. Senate campaign when he was 41 years old.[14] He has since called joining the Klan his "greatest mistake."
Today
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 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 group's supporters' "need for justification runs deep in the disaffected and is unlikely to disappear, regardless of how low the Klan's fortunes eventually sink."
Some of the larger KKK organizations currently in operation include:
- Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan[15]
- Imperial Klans of America
- Knights of the White Kamelia
There is a vast number of smaller organizations.[16]
As of 2003, there were an estimated 5,500 to 6,000 dedicated 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. [17][18]
Individuals who consider themselves members of the Klan tend to conceal their affiliation. They may use the acronym AYAK ('Are you a Klansman?') in conversation to surreptitiously identify themselves to another potential member. The response AKIA ('A Klansman I am') completes the greeting.
The ACLU has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK, including defense of First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, marches, and field political candidates.
The Ku Klux Klan in the arts
The Ku Klux Klan are a common reference point for extremism in the arts. They have featured in British musical theatre, in :Jerry Springer - The Opera
Related articles
External links
- 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
- In 1999, South Carolina town defines the KKK as terrorist
Movies
Notes
- ^ Wade, 1987.
- ^ Cincinnati 'Commercial', August 28, 1868, quoted in Wade, 1987.
- ^ quotes from Wade, 1987.
- ^ Dray, 2002.
- ^ Ingalls, 1979; http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/jan2005/jan05.html, retrieved June 26, 2005.
- ^ Thompson, 1982.
- ^ http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAkkk.htm, retrieved June 26, 2005.
- ^ http://www.geocities.com/emruf5/birthofanation.html, retrieved July 7, 2005.
- ^ 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, withut challenging the veracity of the statement.
- ^ Wade, 1987, p. p. 137.
- ^ Wade, 1987, p. 126.
- ^ Wade, 1987, pp. 165, 477.
- ^ Wade, 1987, p. 196, gives essentially this version of the events, but implies that the meeting was a regular Klan meeting, rather than an individual meeting between Truman and a Klan organizer. An interview with Hinde at the Truman Library's web site (http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/hindeeg.htm, retrieved June 26, 2005) portrays it as a one-on-one meeting at the Hotel Baltimore with a Klan organizer named Jones. Truman's biography, written by his daughter (Truman, 1973), agrees with Hinde's version, but does not mention the $10 initiation fee; the same biography reproduces a telegram from O.L. Chrisman stating that reporters from the Hearst papers had questioned him about Truman's past with the Klan, and that he had seen Truman at a Klan meeting, but that "if he ever became a member of the Klan I did not know it." An important consideration for Truman may have been that the powerful Pendergast family was Catholic.
- ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105.html
- ^ http://www.adl.org/backgrounders/american_knights_kkk.asp, retrieved June 26, 2005.
- ^ http://stop-the-hate.org/klanbody.html, retrieved June 26, 2005.
- ^ 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.
- ^ http://www.adl.org/backgrounders/american_knights_kkk.asp, retrieved June 26, 2005.
References
- Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House, 2002.
- 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).
- 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.
- Truman, Margaret. Harry S. Truman. New York: William Morrow and Co. (1973).
- Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster (1987).