Ku Klux Klan

By: Shawn Lay

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Ku Klux Klan

First established in the spring of 1866 the Ku Klux Klan is the most notorious and enduring racial hate group in American history. Although the Klan's organizational structure and political agenda have varied over the years, the secret order has consistently maintained a commitment to white supremacy and the subordination of African Americans.

The Klan of Reconstruction.

The original Ku Klux Klan (a name based on the Greek word for circle, kuklos, combined with an alliterative form of “clan”) was founded by a group of Confederate war veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee. The Klan initially confined itself to fraternal rituals and riding at night attired in outlandish costumes, but it soon became involved in the bitter politics of the Reconstruction era. The central question during this period was the future status of the recently emancipated African American population. The federal government's efforts to grant the freedmen full civil and political equality fueled white racial hatred and paranoia, resulting in widespread violence against African Americans and white Republicans. The Klan eventually assumed a central role in this wave of criminal activity, assaulting and killing those who challenged the traditional racial order. In 1868 alone more than 1,300 black and white Republicans were assassinated, prompting Frederick Douglass to observe, “The South today is a field of blood.”

Klan-sponsored violence gradually alienated even white southerners, and popular sentiment in the region began to shift against the group. In response to continued Klan activity, Congress passed three Enforcement Acts, the most important of which, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, authorized the president to suspend the right of habeas corpus to counter armed groups that conspired against the civil rights of others. Subsequently President Ulysses S. Grant used the law to dispatch hundreds of federal troops to arrest Klansmen in nine South Carolina counties where the secret order had operated with impunity. By 1872 the Klan had been crushed in South Carolina and scores of its members faced trial in federal courts that used black jurors. This demonstration of the federal government's willingness to take decisive action served as a powerful warning to members elsewhere in the South, and the Klan rapidly dissipated.

KKK Threat to Black Voters. A member of the KKK brandishes a hangman's noose as a warning to blacks not to vote in a municipal primary election, Miami, Florida, 1939.

AP Images

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Historical Revision and the Rise of the Second Klan.

At the time that the original Klan expired in the 1870s few Americans—white southerners included—would have argued that it was an admirable organization. Looking back from the vantage point of 1901, Booker T. Washington recalled the “Ku Klux period” as the “darkest part of the Reconstruction days” and claimed, “There are few places in the South now where public sentiment would permit such organizations to exist.”

Washington's assessment proved overly sanguine. By the early twentieth century social and intellectual developments had provided the basis for a new evaluation of the Reconstruction Klan. At a time of boisterous Anglo-Saxonism, growing concerns over immigration, and new scientific theories that stressed innate racial differences, the Klan's efforts on behalf of white supremacy seemed in retrospect to be quite understandable. Such sentiments received support from such influential northern scholars as William A. Dunning, whose historical examinations of Reconstruction stressed the allegedly unjust and corrupt conditions that helped give rise to the Klan. It would not be until 1935, with the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, that a major scholarly study challenged this appraisal.

The Klan's improved historical image was well demonstrated by the popularity of Thomas Dixon's fictional work, The Clansman (1905), which depicted opposition to Reconstruction as the admirable struggle of white southerners against the dangerously misguided policies of Radical Republicans and hopelessly backward African Americans. A decade later Dixon's interpretation reached an even wider audience when the brilliant filmmaker D. W. Griffith turned the novel into the most famous and popular motion picture of the silent era, The Birth of a Nation. For years after its release in 1915 the film enjoyed incredible popularity; it was viewed by some 50 million people throughout the country. Despite the protests of black civil rights groups such as the NAACP—which took unsuccessful legal action to prevent the showing of the movie in New York City and Boston—most white viewers believed that the film was historically accurate. Among those convinced was President Woodrow Wilson, who after a private screening observed that his only regret about the film was that “it is so terribly true.”

Recognizing the opportunity presented by the widespread popularity of The Birth of a Nation, William J. Simmons, a former Methodist minister and recruiter for men's fraternal societies, decided to organize a new Klan. Taking the title “Imperial Wizard,” Simmons composed a new ritual for the secret order and designed the white hooded costume that would become so notorious. He required members to swear that they would “faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of white supremacy,” and, exploiting the growing anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism of the period, he restricted membership to native-born white Protestants. In November 1915, shortly before the local premiere of The Birth of a Nation, Simmons and fifteen charter members of the revived Klan climbed Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Georgia, burned a large wooden cross, and proclaimed the rebirth of the “Invisible Empire.”

For the next few years the Klan struggled to survive, but in 1920 and 1921, after revising its solicitation procedures, the group began to attract tens of thousands of recruits across the South, particularly in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Simultaneously, a wave of violent vigilantism swept across the region, as hundreds of Klansmen participated in appalling acts of terror. In one six-month period in Texas alone there were forty-three tar-and-featherings and scores of whippings. Although white moral transgressors were often the targets of the Klan's ire, the hooded order, in the tradition of its predecessor, continued to inflict terrible punishments on innocent African Americans. In one particularly horrific episode, Klansmen in Dallas, Texas, kidnapped a black bellhop, beat him senseless, and burned the letters KKK into his forehead with acid.

This surge of violence naturally created concern, and in October 1921 the U.S. House of Representatives Rules Committee held public hearings to determine whether there was need for federal action. Little concrete evidence against the Klan came to light, however; the hearings did little more than provide the organization with free publicity. Subsequently, Klan recruiters (“kleagles”) began to travel across the country, setting up Klan chapters (“klaverns”) from California to Maine. Eventually these efforts would garner a total membership of four to five million, establishing the second Klan as one of the largest grassroots social movements in American history. Klavern rosters from this period indicate that Klansmen were mostly ordinary and well-established members of the white middle class, clear evidence of the mainstream nature of racial and religious intolerance in the 1920s.

In 1922 Hiram W. Evans, a dentist from Texas, replaced William Simmons as Imperial Wizard. Evans aspired to turn the Klan into a “great militant political organization,” and under his guidance the Klan became a major force in American politics for a few years. Posing as the champion of traditional white Protestant culture and values, the group advocated stricter law enforcement (especially of the Prohibition laws) and denounced the shifting moral and social standards of the 1920s. Subsequently, the state governments of Colorado, Indiana, and Oregon fell under the control of the Klan for a period, and the organization exerted a powerful influence in Alabama (where future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was a member), Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. Once in office, however, most Klan-affiliated officials proved politically inept and were largely unable to advance their intolerant agenda. Nonetheless by 1924 the perceived power of the Klan was such that neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party was willing to denounce it by name.

Beginning in the mid-1920s the Klan entered a period of rapid decline owing to internal disputes, scandals, and the growing recognition among voters—even Klansmen—that the group had little to offer. Electoral setbacks in Texas and other states indicated that the Klan's political influence had peaked, and several states, most notably Oklahoma and Louisiana, passed strong anti-Klan measures that prohibited the wearing of masks in public and required secret organizations to provide state authorities with a list of their members. The extensively publicized trial and conviction of Indiana Klan leader David C. Stephenson in 1925 for the murder of a young woman further damaged the Klan and undermined the group's claim that it was guided by a sense of high moral purpose.

Another factor in the Klan's decline, particularly in northern industrial cities, was the determined opposition of Catholic, Jewish, and African American organizations. When the Klan arrived in Buffalo, New York, for example, African American ministers and the local branch of the NAACP warned, “With the Northern Negro, it will be ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ with this Klan.” Later Buffalo's African American leaders cooperated with Catholics and Jews to acquire the local klavern's secret membership list and published it as a pamphlet titled An Exposé of Traitors in the Interest of Jews, Catholics, and Negroes (1924). Though one of the most famous African American leaders of the 1920s, the black nationalist Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, met with national Klan leaders in 1922 and praised the group for its alleged “honesty of purpose toward the Negro,” the response of almost all other African American organizations was one of anger and defiance.

Reduced to a rapidly dwindling membership of less than 100,000 by 1930, the second Klan became increasingly fanatical and extreme during the Depression, denouncing New Deal policies, labor unions, and immigrants who competed for scarce jobs. By 1940 a significant number of northern Klansmen were open supporters of the pro-Nazi German American Bund, a stance that further discredited the organization and promoted concern among federal authorities. Four years later the Internal Revenue Service presented the secret order with a past-due tax bill for more than $600,000, forcing the group to sell its property and completely disband.

The Klan and the Civil Rights Movement.

Shortly after the end of World War II a new Klan group, the Association of Georgia Klans, was organized. Headed by Samuel Green, an Atlanta physician, the group railed against attempts to advance black civil rights and the threat of international Communism. When Green died in 1949, his organization fell apart and numerous other Klans and Klan-affiliated organizations appeared. Rarely numbering more than a few thousand participants, these groups were fanatically racist and anti-Semitic and usually derived their membership from the lower classes.

The civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s produced an upsurge in Klan activity in the South, as white supremacists attempted to preserve the crumbling Jim Crow system. There was a significant surge in Klan recruiting following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and again in 1957 when federal troops were used during the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, with the result that there were some forty thousand active Klansmen in the South by 1958. The Klansmen of this period continued to be drawn from the lower reaches of the white working class (the strata of society that felt most directly threatened by the advancement of black rights) while middle- and upper-class whites more typically joined the less violent White Citizens’ Councils in an effort to maintain the racial status quo.

The Klan of the 1950s and early 1960s often resorted to violence, as was demonstrated by dozens of church burnings and hundreds of attacks against black and white civil rights advocates. From 1956 to 1963 there were at least 138 bombings in the South, many perpetrated by Klansmen, including the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls in 1963. Increasingly lacking public support, even among southern whites, the Klan at this time served primarily as a vicious means of expressing defiance and of promoting fear and uncertainty among opponents.

Klan-sponsored violence proved extremely counterproductive for the segregationist cause in that it generated national sympathy for the civil rights movement and spurred the federal government to action. The Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church gave great political impetus to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. That same year, after members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) in Mississippi, the Federal Bureau of Investigation—which under Director J. Edgar Hoover had previously been apathetic and even hostile toward the civil rights movement—set up a counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO/White Hate, that systematically infiltrated and disrupted Klan organizations. In 1965, after Alabama Klansmen murdered another civil rights worker, Viola Liuzzo, President Lyndon Johnson denounced the Klan in a national radio and television address as a “hooded society of bigots” and warned that it would be forcibly suppressed. Outrage over the murder of Liuzzo subsequently assisted the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Ku Klux Klan. Meeting of the KKK in Georgia, c. 1939.

Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library

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In 1966 the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings on the Klan. When Robert M. Shelton, the head of the largest Klan organization of the 1960s, the United Klans of America, refused to cooperate, he was jailed for contempt of Congress. Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department coordinated the federal prosecution of Klansmen who evaded conviction in southern state courts, and the FBI continued its infiltration and disruption of the Klan. As a result of these efforts the total number of Klansmen in the country was reduced to fewer than two thousand by the early 1970s. Simultaneously what little public support there had been for the Klan evaporated.

The Persistent Klan.

Its diminished numbers, organizational fragmentation, and negative public image notwithstanding, the Klan has managed to survive to the present. In the mid-1970s David Duke, a well-educated and politically skilled Klan leader from Louisiana, succeeded in using the media to temporarily revive the hooded order's fortunes by stressing the issue of reverse discrimination against whites in employment and school admissions, but his organization soon fell apart amid internal dissension. That the Klan remained violent was demonstrated by a bloody shoot-out with Communist activists in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979 and by the cold-blooded murder of an African American teenager, Michael Donald, by two Klansmen in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981. This latter episode resulted in a successful civil lawsuit against the formerly powerful United Klans of America that left the group virtually dissolved.

Over the past two decades the Klan has increasingly cooperated with other racist organizations, such as the Aryan Nations and various neo-Nazi factions, and with militant right-wing religious and survivalist groups. As of early 2006, there were approximately three thousand Klansmen in the United States, organized into more than 150 local chapters closely monitored by law-enforcement officials and anti-Klan groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. Although the expansion of the Internet offers new opportunities for the Klan to spread its ideology, it appears unlikely that it will again become a powerful movement, but its endurance is a sobering reminder of the racial and religious intolerance that has plagued America.

[See also Birth of a Nation, The; Hate Groups; Lynching and Mob Violence; Racism; Violence against African Americans; and White Supremacy.]

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