Ku Klux Klan

"KKK" redirects here. For other uses, see KKK (disambiguation).

Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally in 1923.

Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of an American organization with three divisional movements associated with white supremacy.

The first Klan was founded in 1866 by veterans of the Confederate Army. Its purpose was to restore white supremacy in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Klan resisted Reconstruction by intimidating "carpetbaggers," "scalawags" and freed slaves. The KKK quickly adopted violent methods, causing a backlash by many Southern elites who saw the Klan as an excuse for federal troops to continue occupation. The organization declined from 1868 to 1870 and was destroyed by President Ulysses S. Grant's action under the Civil Rights Act of 1871.

In 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation and the sensationalized newspaper coverage of the trial, conviction and lynching of Georgian Leo Frank caused the Klan's revival. It grew amid rapid changes in many major cities absorbing immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and the Great Migration of Southern blacks and whites to the North and Midwest. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. The second KKK preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, anti-Semitism and is known for ceremonial cross lighting. Some local groups took part in lynchings and flogging. Violence occurred mostly in the South, which had a tradition of lawlessness. Its popularity fell during the Great Depression, and because of scandals resulting from prominent members' crimes and its support of Nazi Germany, membership fell further during World War II.

The name Ku Klux Klan has since been used by independent groups opposing desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement. During that period, they often acted with impunity by alliances with Southern police departments, as during the reign of Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama; or governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama. Several members of KKK-affiliated groups were later convicted of manslaughter and murder in the deaths of three civil rights workers and four children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, and the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers. Today, researchers estimate there are 150 Klan chapters with up to 8,000 members nationwide. The US government classifies these groups, with operations in separated small local units, as hate groups. The modern KKK has been repudiated by all mainstream media, political and religious leaders.

First Klan

Creation

A cartoon threatening the KKK will lynch carpetbaggers, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, 1868

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

Nathan Bedford Forrest

The original Ku Klux Klan was created by six educated, middle-class Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, after the end of the American Civil War on December 24, 1865. The name was constructed by combining the Greek "kyklos" (κυκλος,circle) with "clan"

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 former Confederate brigadier general George Gordon. The Prescript stated Klan goals and mandated a perspective applicant be asked if 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." Despite the work that came out of the 1867 meeting, the Prescript was never accepted by local units. They continued to operate autonomously, and there never were county, district or state headquarters.

According to one oral report, Gordon told former slave trader and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, about the Klan, 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." A few weeks later, Forrest was selected as Imperial Wizard, the Klan's national leader. Although, Forrest always denied leadership.

The Ku Klux Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state. The Klan worked to defend the interest of the planter class and the Democratic Party by working to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to bear arms of blacks.

An 1868 Klan proclamation issued by Gordon, says:

• The Klan was "fired into three times" by black veterans of the Union Army, so therefore, the Klan will confiscate firearms from blacks.
• The Klan is a peaceful organization.
• Unaffiliated criminals carry out violent acts in the Klan name.

In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republican governments, people like Tennessee governor Brownlow and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. Many schoolteachers of the federal Freedmen's Bureau were former Northern abolitionists active in the underground railroad. Many southerners believed blacks were voting for the Republican Party because they were hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues. One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."

Activities

The Klan worked to defend the interest of the planter class and the Democratic Party by working to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to bear arms of blacks. The Ku Klux Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a "reign of terror" against Republican leaders. Those assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions."

The Klan raided black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen's Bureau workers. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry

One of these teachers (Miss Allen of Illinois), whose school was at Cotton Gin Port in Monroe County, was visited ... between one and two o'clock in the morning on March, 1871, by about fifty men mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long white robe and his face was covered by a loose mask with scarlet stripes. She was ordered to get up and dress which she did at once and then admitted to her room the captain and lieutenant who in addition to the usual disguise had long horns on their heads and a sort of device in front. The lieutenant had a pistol in his hand and he and the captain sat down while eight or ten men stood inside the door and the porch was full. They treated her "gentlemanly and quietly" but complained of the heavy school-tax, said she must stop teaching and go away and warned her that they never gave a second notice. She heeded the warning and left the county.

In the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock, and in the November presidential election, the county cast one vote for Republican candidate Ulysses Grant.

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

By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease and, as Gordon's proclamation shows, was becoming less political and simply a way of avoiding prosecution for violence. Many influential southern Democrats saw the Klan as an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South. Georgian B.H. Hill claimed "that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain."

Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties.

Decline and suppression

Although Forrest boasted the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and he could muster 40,000 Klansmen with five days' notice, 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, making it difficult to judge its membership. Its popularity came from its reputation, which was greatly enhanced by its costumes and and threatening theatrics. As historian Elaine Frantz Parsons discovered:

Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, bored young men, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.

One Klan official complained his, "so-called 'Chief'-ship was purely nominal, I having not the least authority over the reckless young country boys who were most active in 'night-riding,' whipping, etc., all of which was outside of the intent and constitution of the Klan..."

Some blacks believed Ku Klux Klan night riders were the ghosts of dead Confederates.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. It was true many people not formally inducted into the Klan used the Klan's uniform to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence. Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace." Historian Stanley Horn writes "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment." A reporter in Georgia wrote in January 1870, "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux."

Gov. William Holden of North Carolina.

Although the Klan was being used more often as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted. In lynching cases, Klan members were almost never indicted by juries, and when there was an indictment, juries were unlikely to vote for conviction. In many states, there were fears the use of black militiamen would ignite a race war. When Republican Governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, the result was Republicans losing their majority in the legislature, and ultimately, to Holden's impeachment and removal from office.

Despite this, 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.

There was a national movement to crack down on the Klan, though many Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan existed or was a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors. Many southern states passed anti-Klan legislation, and in January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Scott convened a committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. In February, former Union General and Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts (who was widely reviled by Southern whites) introduced the Ku Klux Klan act. The Governor of South Carolina's appeal for federal troops, and reports of a riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods, turned the tide in favor of the bill.

Benjamin Franklin Butler wrote the 1871 Klan Act.

In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation, which was used with the 1870 Force Act to enforce the civil rights provisions of the constitution. Under the Klan Act, federal troops were used, and Klansmen were prosecuted in federal court, where juries were often predominantly black. Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned, and in South Carolina, habeas corpus was suspended in nine counties. The Klan was destroyed in South Carolina 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. although in some areas, 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. Although destroyed, the Klan achieved many of its goals, such as denying suffrage to Southern blacks.

Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871  – via Wikisource.

However, on Easter Sunday, 1873, black citizens fought against the Klan and its allies in the White League. African American legislator John G. Lewis 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." This massacre was the bloodiest instance of racial violence in Reconstruction.

In 1882, long after the Klan was destroyed, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Harris the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional, saying that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend to private conspiracies. However, the Force Act and the Klan Act were used by Federal prosecutors in the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo; and Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic in 1991.

Disfranchisement and the Second Klan

Main article: Disfranchisement after the Civil War

The nadir of American race relations is often placed from the end of reconstruction to the 1910s, especially in the South. Once white Democrats regained political power, they passed legislation directed at restricting voter registration by blacks and poor whites. Agricultural depression in the South contributed to social tensions. According to Tuskegee Institute, the 1890s was the peak decade for lynchings, with most of them directed against African Americans in the South.

From the 1890s through the first decade of the 20th century, former Confederate states completed disfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites by approving new constitutions with provisions for requirements for voter registration: such as poll taxes, residency and literacy tests, which were often subjectively applied. Blacks were deprived of suffrage, representation at any level of government, local elected offices, and the right to serve on juries (usually restricted to voters). In most of the South, sweeping disfranchisement and white one-party government lasted until African Americans' leadership and activism in the Civil Rights Movement gained passage of Federal civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.

Creation

Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation

The second Klan rose in response to urbanization and industrialization, massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe, the start of the Great Migration of African Americans to the North and the migration of African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern cities. The Klan grew most in cities which had high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit, Memphis, Dayton, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston.

• 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 tried, convicted and lynched near Atlanta against a backdrop of media frenzy.
• The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in Atlanta with a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic agenda. The bulk of the founders were from an Atlanta-area organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan that had organized around the Frank trial. The new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.

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

Writer Thomas Dixon said his purpose was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!" He subsequently wrote The Clansman and the The Leopard's Spots, which was the basis for director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which glorifies the first Klan.

President Wilson

The film has extensive quotations from U.S. President and historian Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People, for example, "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." The film created a nationwide Klan craze. At a preview in Los Angeles, actors dressed as Klansmen rode by as a promotional stunt. At the later official premier in Atlanta, real-life members of the Klan rode up and down the street in front of the theater. In some cases, enthusiastic southern audiences fired their guns into the screen. The film's influence and popularity was further enhanced when Wilson, on seeing the film in a special White House screening on February 18 1915, supposedly exclaimed, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Given the film's strong Democratic message and Wilson's views on race, his statement was seen as supportive, and the word "regret" as referring to Radical Republican Reconstruction. Wilson's remarks were widely reported and immediately became controversial. Wilson tried to remain aloof, but finally, on April 30, he issued a non-denial denial. His endorsement greatly helped Griffith to defend it against legal attack by the NAACP. However, one of Wilson's aides named Joseph Tumulty claimed, "the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it."

As portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott, Dixon based the Klan iconography upon his romanticized concept of old Scotland. Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the standardized white costume and the lighted cross, are derived from the film. The film, in turn, was a major factor leading to the creation of the second Klan.

The lynching of Leo Frank

In the same year, an important event in the coalescence of the Klan was the trial, conviction and lynching of a Jewish factory manager named Leo Frank. In sensational newspaper accounts, Frank was accused of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a girl employed at his factory. After a questionable trial in Georgia, he was convicted. Because of the violent mob surrounding the court house, the judge asked Frank and his counsel not be present when the verdict was announced. Frank's appeals failed. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented, condemning the intimidation of the jury as failing to provide due process. After the governor commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, a mob calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from the prison farm and lynched him.

Many southerners saw an analogy between Mary Phagan and the Birth Of A Nation's character Flora.

File:Stone-mountain2.jpg

The Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, site of the founding of the second Klan; work was begun in 1923 and was completed in 1970.

Georgia politician, publisher and editor for The Jeffersonian magazine Thomas E. Watson exploited the Frank trail. He was a leader in the reorganization of the Klan and was later elected to the U.S. Senate.

The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a meeting led by William J. Simmons on top of Stone Mountain. It was attended by a few 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. 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.

"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."

The KKK’s "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation" (emphasis in original) 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, who was also indicted in 1923 for violating the Mann Act, raised funds for both the Klan and the Anti-Saloon League.

Members

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

Historians obtained membership rosters of some local units and matched the names against city directory and local records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big city newspapers were often hostile and ridiculed Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indiana show the stereotype was false:

Indiana's Klansmen represented a wide cross section of society: they were not disproportionately urban or rural, nor were they significantly more or less likely than other members of society to be from the working class, middle class, or professional ranks. Klansmen were Protestants, of course, but they cannot be described exclusively or even predominantly as fundamentalists. In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.

The Klan was successful in recruiting 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.

This Klan participated in the boom in fraternal organizations. 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 lighted crosses and perhaps a ceremonial presentation of a Bible to a local Protestant minister. He then left town with 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 political activist groups.

Activities

Cross burning is said to have been introduced by William J. Simmons, the founder of the second Klan in 1915.

The Klan adopted anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist and anti-immigrant slants. In addition, because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the U.S. Midwest. The Klan grew in rapidly changing Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.

The Klan had major political influence in several states and was influential throughout the country. The Klan was popular in New England, where it torched an African American school in Scituate, Rhode Island.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a violent and zealous faction of the Klan called the Black Legion was very active in the Midwestern U.S.. The Legion wore black uniforms and targeted and assassinated communists and socialists.

Klan groups lynched and murdered Black soldiers returning from World War I while they were still in military uniforms. The Klan warned Blacks that they must respect the rights of the white race "in whose country they are permitted to reside."

Political influence

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

The Klan spread into the Midwest, Northern states and into Canada where there was a large movement against Catholic immigrants. At its peak, Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, with 40% in some areas. Most of the membership resided in Midwestern states

The KKK controlled Southern legislatures and the governments of Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. In Indiana, Republican Klansman Edward Jackson was elected governor in 1924. In the same year, the Klan decided to make Anaheim, California a model Klan city; it secretly took over the city council but was voted out in a special recall election.

At the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City, often called the "Klanbake Convention," Klan delegates moved the convention away from Catholic New York Governor Al Smith. Klan delegates defeated a Democratic Party platform plank that would have condemned their organization. On July 4 1924, thousands of Klansmen celebrated victory on a nearby field in New Jersey by burning effigies of Smith and by lighting crosses.

There is evidence in certain states, such as Alabama, the KKK showed a genuine desire for political and social reform. The state's Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other "progressive" political measures. In many ways these reforms benefited lower class white people.

By 1925, the Klan was a powerful force in the state, as politicians like J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black manipulated the KKK membership against the power of the Alabama "Big Mule" industrialists and Black Belt planters who long dominated. Black was elected senator in 1926 and became a leading supporter of the New Deal. In 1926, Bibb Graves, a former chapter head, won the governor's office with Klan support. He pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation.

Decline

When the Grand Dragon of Indiana and fourteen states, David Stephenson, was convicted for the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, millions of Klan members resigned. Stephenson was convicted 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, a leadership failure caused the organization's collapse:

Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana's Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan's stated goals. They were disinterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement. For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power. These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership. More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan, or who pursued some of the interests of their Klan constituents, also accomplished little. Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience. When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan's behalf.

In Alabama, KKK vigilantes, thinking they had governmental protection, launched a wave of physical terror in 1927, targeting anyone for violating racial norms and perceived moral lapses. In Birmingham, the Klan raided local brothels and roadhouses. One local Klan group "kidnapped a white divorcee and stripped her to her waist, tied her to a tree, and whipped her savagely." Grover C. Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, began a series of editorials and articles attacking the Klan for "racial and religious intolerance," winning a Pulitzer Prize. Other newspapers steadily presented the Klan as violent and "un-American." Sheriffs cracked down and in the 1928 presidential election, the state voted for Catholic Al Smith and Klan membership in Alabama plunged to under six thousand by 1930.

Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke up. To try to blunt attacks, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed. One group began to publish Klan membership and members quickly declined. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People carried on public education about Klan activities and lobbied against Klan abuses in Congress.

Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician, but they were unable to restore the Klan. 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 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.

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

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. Kennedy eventually wrote a book based on his experiences, which became a bestseller during the 1950s and further damaged the Klan.

The following table shows the change in the Klan's estimated membership over time. (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

Later Klans

The name "Ku Klux Klan" began to be used by several independent groups. Beginning in the 1950s, Klan groups resisted the Civil Rights Movement by bombing forty houses of African Americans in transitional neighborhoods. In Birmingham, Alabama, Klan groups were allied with police commissioner Bull Connor and operated with impunity. In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, there were alliances with governors' administrations.

Among the more notorious murders by Klan members:

• The 1957 murder of Willie Edwards, Jr. Klansmen forced Edwards to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.
• The 1963 assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In 1994, former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted.
• The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four black girls. The perpetrators were Klan members Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2001 and 2002. The fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died before he was indicted.
• The 1964 murders of three civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. In June 2005, Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter.
• The 1964 murder of two black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in Mississippi. In August 2007, based on the confession of Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards, James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted. Seale was sentenced to serve three life sentences. Seale was a former Mississippi policeman and sheriff's deputy.

File:Viola-liuzzo.jpg

Anthony and Viola Liuzzo, 1949

• The 1965 Alabama murder of Viola Liuzzo. She was a Southern-raised Detroit mother of five in the state to attend a civil rights march. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights Marchers.
• The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers was convicted. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the other's indictment was dismissed.

Many murders went unreported and unprosecuted. For example, in 1951 Harry T. Moore, a school teacher and state director of the NAACP in Florida, 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 he and other Klansmen 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 refused to bow to racist convention or were innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random terrorism."

However, in a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan lighted 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.

Violence at a Klan march in Mobile, Alabama, 1977

When Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, the police commissioner Bull Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police. When local and state authorities failed to protect them, the federal government established more effective intervention.

While the FBI had paid informants in the Klan, for instance in Birmingham, Alabama in the early 1960s, their relations with local law enforcement and the Klan were often ambiguous. The head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover, appeared more concerned about Communist links to civil rights activists. 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 were highly successful. Rival Klan factions accused each other's leaders of being FBI informants. Bill Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was later revealed to have been working for the FBI.

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

Once blacks secured Federal legislation to protect their civil and voting rights, the Klans' shifted focus to opposing affirmative action, immigration, and especially the court ordered busing to desegregate schools. In 1971, Klansmen used bombs to destroy ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. Klansman David Duke was active in South Boston during the school busing crisis of 1974. Duke made efforts to update the Klan's 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. Though the Republican party threw its support to a different candidate, Duke was elected to the Louisiana State House of Representatives in 1989.

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

File:Lynching-of-michael-donald.jpg

The lynching of Michael Donald, 1981

In 1981 the lynching of Michael Donald was followed by a civil suit for damages against the United Klans of America, leading to its bankruptcy. This increased the trend to decentralization. Thompson related Klan leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series of multimillion-dollar lawsuits by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This was the result of a shootout between Klansmen and a group of African Americans. Klansmen curtailed activities to conserve money for defense against the suits. However, lawsuits were used as tools by the Klan. The paperback publication of Thompson's book was canceled because of a libel suit.

Present

File:KKK holocaust a zionist hoax.jpg

KKK members displaying the Nazi salute and advocating Holocaust denial.

The Anti-Defamation League says, "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".

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 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
• Imperial Klans of America
• Knights of the White Kamelia
• Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, headed by National Director and self-claimed Pastor Thom Robb, and based in Zinc, Arkansas. 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.

As of 2005, there were an estimated 3,000 Klan members, divided between estimates of 100 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.

Despite the large number of rival KKKs, the media and popular discourse generally speaks of the Ku Klux Klan, as if there were 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. Various Klan rallies occur every year across the country.

Vocabulary

The Klan has signs members 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 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 (1865-1918)
• 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 Leopard's Spots
• Christian terrorism
• Timeline of racial tension in Omaha, Nebraska

References

• Axelrod, Alan (1997). The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders. New York: Facts On File. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Barr, Andrew (1999). Drink: A Social History of America. New York: Carroll & Graf. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Dray, Philip (2002). At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Egerton, John (1994). Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Alfred and Knopf Inc. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Feldman, Glenn (1999). Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Foner, Eric (1989). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. Perennial (HarperCollins). {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Franklin, John Hope (1992). Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988. Louisiana State University Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Horn, Stanley F. (1939). Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871. Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Horn, born in 1889, was a Southern historian who was sympathetic to the first Klan, which, in an 1976 oral interview, 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. (1979). Hoods: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Jackson, Kenneth T. (1967). The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930. Oxford University Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |locationNew York= and |coauthors= (help)
• Kennedy, Stetson (1990). The Klan Unmasked. University Press of Florida. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Lender, Mark E. (1982). Drinking in America. New York: Free Press. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Levitt, Stephen D. (2005). Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: William Morrow. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• McWhorter, Diane (2001). Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Moore, Leonard J. (1991). Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Newton, Michael (1991). The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia. New York & London: Garland Publishing. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Parsons, Elaine Frantz (2005). "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan". The Journal of American History. 92 (3): 811–836. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
• Template:Harvard reference.
• Rhodes, James Ford (1920). History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. Vol. 7. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

• Rogers, William (1994). Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Steinberg, Alfred (1962). The man from Missouri; the life and times of Harry S. Truman. New York: Putnam. OCLC 466366. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Taylor, Joe G. (1974). Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877. Baton Rouge. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Thompson, Jerry (1982). My Life in the Klan. New York: Putnam. ISBN 0399126953. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Trelease, Allen W. (1995). White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. Louisiana State University Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

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 (1987). The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

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

• Blee, Kathleen M. (1992). Women of the Klan. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07876-4. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• "White supremacist groups flourishing". The Associated Press.

External links

• Klan Tableau,A film documenting William Christenberry's Klan Tableau in Washington, D.C. (Includes interview with Christenberry.)
• 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
• 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)
• The Protestant "Kluxing" of Cañyon City, Colorado — (Cañyon City Public Library)
• The Ku Klux Klan website