KU KLUX KLAN

KU KLUX KLAN. A RECONSTRUCTION-era terrorist group founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan has been resurrected in a variety of forms from that time to the present; it is one of the powerful, enduring symbols of violent white supremacy and bigotry in American history.

Initially a fraternal organization for a small group of Confederate veterans, the Reconstruction-era Klan quickly turned in a violent, overtly political direction. Like similar groups that appeared across the South in 1866 and 1867 (the Knights of the White Camellia, for example), the Klan used violence and the threat of violence to thwart perceived challenges to white supremacy and Democratic rule. Its mayhem was intended, among other purposes, as a means of controlling black labor, reinforcing social deference to whites, disciplining perceived instances of interracial sexual relationships, and punishing any whites sympathetic to or working on behalf of the Republican Party. Most often, the Klan's victims were African American community leaders—ministers, teachers, politicians, former or current soldiers, or anyone else who clearly held a place of special importance among the former slaves. Murders, floggings, beatings, and sexual assaults carried out against these leaders often achieved the intended goal not only of undermining Reconstruction government, but also of demoralizing the wider black community. Klan terror erupted on a vast scale during the election year of 1868, leading to more than two thousand political assassinations and murders in the former Confederate states, often carried out with the approval or even direct support of local Democratic leaders. "Run nigger, run, or the Kuklux will catch you," warned one Democratic newspaper in Alabama (Trelease, White Terror, p. 63). The violence completely eliminated Republican opposition in some areas of the South. Similar waves of Klan activity in 1870 and 1872 led to a series of congressional acts that gave the federal government historic new authority to enforce civil rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The most significant of these

were the Enforcement Act of 1870 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The Klan faded from the scene after Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, but remained a vivid symbol of barbarous racial violence in the minds of African Americans—and an equally powerful emblem for many whites of what they saw as a just struggle against the tyranny of Reconstruction and "black rule."

By the early twentieth century, idealized images of the Klan as savior of white civilization had become a mainstay of scholarly and popular representations of the Reconstruction era. Thomas Dixon's best selling, turn-of-the-century novels The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman told the story of heroic Klansmen with melodramatic flair. In 1915, the motion picture visionary D. W. Griffith used The Clansman as the basis for his sweeping epic, Birth of a Nation.

In that same year, previously unsuccessful fraternal organizer William J. Simmons capitalized on the enormous popularity of Griffith's film by launching a new Klan movement. For five years the "second" Klan barely survived, maintaining a small membership in Georgia and Alabama. In 1920, however, in the wake of extensive postwar labor and racial strife and the onset of national PROHIBITION, it began a five-year period of enormous, nationwide popularity. The revived Klan was based on romantic images of the original, but ultimately was a very different organization. While the first Klan had little formal structure or leadership outside of individual communities, the second had a highly developed organization, with a hierarchy of local, state, and national leaders, public relations advisers, a string of newspapers, and a marketing operation that sold official uniforms and other paraphernalia. Using recruiting agents—who earned a 25 percent commission on each ten-dollar initiation fee—and holding mass public ceremonies, parades, and social events to attract widespread attention, the second Klan enrolled perhaps as many as five million male and female members (women joined a separate organization, Women of the Ku Klux Klan). Its largest state memberships and greatest local influence came outside the South, in the Midwest and the West. The Indiana Klan enrolled approximately 25 percent of all native-born white men in the state; at least one half million men and women became Klan members in Ohio.

The goals and tactics of the second Klan also differed markedly from those of the first. While the original movement used terror to confront the significant challenge to white supremacy that came with Reconstruction, the Klan of the 1920s faced no such threat and was focused instead on upholding a more general sense of white, Protestant hegemony within American society. The perceived threat came from Catholics, Jews, immigrants, African Americans, Prohibition-related lawlessness, gambling, prostitution, immoral popular culture and personal behavior, and a sense of decline in religion, "pure womanhood," and the family. Vigilante violence did occur in association with the new Klan, most often in the South, targeted in some instances, of course, against African Americans. But more often, when violence did occur, it was directed against fellow white Protestants as punishment for drinking, gambling, adulterous behavior, or other perceived moral lapse. Mob violence was also directed against the Klan, particularly in northern and midwestern cities where ethnic minorities vastly outnumbered native, white Protestants and Klan parades and demonstrations were not well received. The main thrust of the second Klan movement, however, was to elect its members and supporters to public office. Promising to uphold traditional values and enforce the law—Prohibition in particular—the Klan won control of mayor's offices, city councils, school boards, sheriff and district attorney offices, and judgeships in many communities across the nation. It gained complete control of state politics for a time in Indiana, Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Alabama, and was an important political force in almost every state outside the Northeast. The second Klan began to lose its momentum by 1925 when Klan politicians proved as incapable as other elected officials of halting Prohibition-related vice and other unwanted conditions. Membership dropped precipitously after a series of scandals, the most famous involving Indiana Klan leader D. C. Stephenson, who was convicted of second-degree murder after committing a brutal sexual assault against an Indianapolis woman who eventually died from her injuries.

By the end of the 1920s only small pockets of Klan members remained, most of them in the South and devoted primarily to perpetuating the tradition of racial vigilantism. After World War II, support for Klan groups began to increase again as war-related social changes and the rising expectations of African Americans threatened the Jim Crow system. Once the civil rights movement took hold, the spirit of massive white resistance and the leadership of the White Citizens' Council gave birth to a number of independent, regional Klan organizations. Like the Reconstruction-era Klan cells, these new groups operated mainly through terror, committing hundreds of murders, and countless other acts of violence and intimidation, with the goal of stopping the second Reconstruction. In the face of intense media coverage and the persistent courage of civil rights workers, however, Klan violence actually back fired by broadening public sympathy for the cause of racial justice. Klan groups have continued to exist since that time as part of a diverse, sometimes violent right-wing element in American life, although consistently and effectively assailed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups. In one notable instance, one-time Louisiana Klan leader David Duke gained widespread national attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s by proclaiming himself a mainstream conservative Republican, winning election to the state legislature, and falling just short of the governors' office. National party leaders, however, rejected Duke, underscoring the fact that the Klan itself had lost any place of legitimacy or influence in American life.

KU KLUX KLAN

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