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Ku Klux Klan

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: North American History;
Politics and government

   Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally in 1922.
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   Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally in 1922.

   Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of a number of past and present
   fraternal organizations in the United States that have advocated white
   supremacy, anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Catholicism, homophobia, and
   nativism. These organizations have often used terrorism, violence and
   acts of intimidation such as cross burning to oppress African Americans
   and others.

   The Klan's first incarnation was in 1865 by veterans of the Confederate
   Army, its main purpose was to resist Reconstruction, and it focused as
   much on intimidating " carpetbaggers" and " scalawags" as on putting
   down the freed slaves. It quickly adopted violent methods. A rapid
   reaction set in, with the Klan's leadership disowning violence, and
   Southern elites seeing the Klan as an excuse for federal troops to
   continue their activities in the South. The organization was in decline
   from 1868 to 1870 and was destroyed in the early 1870s by President
   Ulysses S. Grant's vigorous action under the Civil Rights Act of 1871
   (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act).
   William Joseph Simmons founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915.
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   William Joseph Simmons founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915.

   The founding, in 1915, of a second distinct group using the same name
   was inspired by the newfound power of the modern mass media, via the
   film The Birth of a Nation and inflammatory anti-Semitic newspaper
   accounts surrounding the trial and lynching of accused murderer Leo
   Frank. The second KKK was a formal membership organization, with a
   national and state structure, that paid thousands of men to organize
   local chapters all over the country. Millions joined and, at its peak
   in the 1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation's
   eligible population. The second KKK typically preached racism,
   anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and anti-Semitism, and some
   local groups took part in lynchings and other violent activities. Its
   popularity fell during the Great Depression, and membership fell
   further during World War II, due to scandals resulting from prominent
   members' crimes and its support of the Nazis.

   The name "Ku Klux Klan" has since been used by many different unrelated
   groups, including many who opposed the Civil Rights Act and
   desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, with members of these groups
   eventually being convicted of murder and manslaughter in the deaths of
   Civil Rights workers and children (such as in the bombing of the 16th
   Street Baptist Church in Alabama). Today, dozens of organizations with
   chapters across the United States and other countries use all or part
   of the name in their titles, but their total membership is estimated to
   be only a few thousand. These groups, with operations in separated
   small local units, are considered extreme hate groups. The modern KKK
   has been repudiated by all mainstream media and political and religious
   leaders.

The first Ku Klux Klan

   A cartoon threatening that the KKK would lynch carpetbaggers,
   Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, 1868
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   A cartoon threatening that the KKK would lynch carpetbaggers,
   Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, 1868
   A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic party as
   continuations of the Confederacy
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   A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic party as
   continuations of the Confederacy
   Nathan Bedford Forrest
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   Nathan Bedford Forrest

Creation

   The original Ku Klux Klan was created after the end of the American
   Civil War on December 24, 1865, by six educated, middle-class
   Confederate veterans who were bored with postwar routine from Pulaski,
   Tennessee. The name was constructed by combining the Greek "kuklos"
   (circle) with " clan." It was at first a humorous social club centering
   on practical jokes and hazing rituals but soon spread into nearly every
   Southern state, launching a "reign of terror" against Republican
   leaders both black and white. Those assassinated during the campaign
   included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the
   South Carolina legislature, and several men who had served in
   constitutional conventions."

   From 1866 to 1867, the Klan began breaking up black prayer meetings and
   invading black homes at night to steal firearms. Some of these
   activities may have been modeled on previous Tennessee vigilante groups
   such as the Yellow Jackets and Redcaps.

   In an 1867 meeting in Nashville, 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 George Gordon, a
   former Confederate brigadier general. The Prescript included
   inspirational language about the goals of the Klan along with a list of
   questions to be asked of applicants for membership, which confirmed the
   focus on resisting Reconstruction and the Republican Party. The
   applicant was to be asked whether he was a Republican, a Union Army
   veteran, or a member of the Loyal League; whether he was "opposed to
   Negro equality both social and political;" and whether he was in favour
   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 any of the local units. They continued to operate
   anonymously, and there never were county, district or state
   headquarters.

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

Activities

   The Klan sought to control the political and social status of the freed
   slaves. Specifically, it attempted to curb black education, economic
   advancement, voting rights, and the right to bear arms. However, the
   Klan's focus was not limited to African Americans; Southern Republicans
   also became the target of vicious intimidation tactics. The violence
   achieved its purpose. For example, in the April 1868 Georgia
   gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican
   Rufus Bullock, but in the November presidential election, the county
   cast only one vote for Republican candidate Ulysses Grant.

   Klan intimidation was often targeted at schoolteachers and operatives
   of the federal Freedmen's Bureau. Black members of the Loyal Leagues
   were also the frequent targets of Klan raids. In a typical episode 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 other violence, Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a
   single county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties.

   An 1868 proclamation by Gordon demonstrates several of the issues
   surrounding the Klan's violent activities.
     * Many black men were veterans of the Union Army, and were armed.
       From the beginning, one of the original Klan's strongest focuses
       was on confiscating firearms from blacks. In the proclamation,
       Gordon warned that the Klan had been "fired into three times," and
       that if the blacks "make war upon us they must abide by the awful
       retribution that will follow."
     * Gordon also stated that the Klan was a peaceful organization. Such
       claims were common ways for the Klan to attempt to protect itself
       from prosecution. However, a federal grand jury in 1869 determined
       that 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.
     * Gordon warned that some people had been carrying out violent acts
       in the name of the Klan. It was true that many people who had not
       been formally inducted into the Klan found the Klan's uniform to be
       a convenient way to hide their identities when carrying out acts of
       violence. However, it was also convenient for the higher levels of
       the organization to disclaim responsibility for such acts, and the
       secretive, decentralized nature of the Klan made membership fuzzy
       rather than clear-cut. In many ways the Klan was a military force
       serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class,
       and those who desired the restoration of white supremacy.

     * The 1868 interview with Forrest: Interview with Nathan Bedford
       Forrest

   By this time, only two years after the Klan's creation, its activity
   was already beginning to decrease and, as Gordon's proclamation shows,
   to become less political and more simply a way of avoiding prosecution
   for violence. Many influential southern Democrats were beginning to see
   it as a liability, an excuse for the federal government to retain its
   power over the South. Georgian B.H. Hill went so far as to claim "that
   some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political
   friends of the parties slain."
   Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi,
   September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family.
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   Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi,
   September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family.

   In an 1868 newspaper interview, 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 the Loyal
   Leagues, Republican state governments like Tennessee governor
   Brownlow's, and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. There was an element
   of truth to this claim, since the Klan did go after white members of
   these groups, especially the schoolteachers brought south by the
   Freedmen's Bureau, many of whom had before the war been abolitionists
   or active in the underground railroad. Many white southerners believed,
   for example, that blacks were voting for the Republican Party only
   because they had been hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues. Black members of
   the Loyal Leagues were also the frequent targets of Klan raids. One
   Alabama newspaper editor declared that "The League is nothing more than
   a nigger Ku Klux Klan."

Decline and suppression

   The first Klan was never well organized. As a secret or "invisible"
   group, it had no membership rosters, no dues, no newspapers, no
   spokesmen, no chapters, no local officers, no state or national
   officials. Its popularity came from its reputation, which was greatly
   enhanced by its outlandish costumes and its wild and threatening
   theatrics. As historian Elaine Frantz Parsons discovered :

     "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."

   As has been previously stated, Forrest's national organization had
   little control over the local Klans, which were highly autonomous. One
   Klan official complained that his own "so-called 'Chief'-ship was
   purely nominal, I having not the least authority over the reckless
   young country boys who were most active in 'night-riding,' whipping,
   etc., all of which was outside of the intent and constitution of the
   Klan..." Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating that it
   was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic
   purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public
   peace." Due to the national organization's lack of control, this
   proclamation was more a symptom of the Klan's decline than a cause of
   it. Historian Stanley Horn writes that "generally speaking, the Klan's
   end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration
   than a formal and decisive disbandment." A reporter in Georgia wrote in
   January 1870 that "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux
   are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit
   crimes call themselves Ku Klux."
   Gov. William Holden of North Carolina attempted to use the state
   militia against the Klan, and was voted out of office.
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   Gov. William Holden of North Carolina attempted to use the state
   militia against the Klan, and was voted out of office.

   Although the Klan was being used more and more often as a mask for
   nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted against
   it. In lynching cases, whites were almost never indicted by all-white
   coroner's juries, and even when there was an indictment, all-white
   trial juries were extremely unlikely to vote for conviction. In many
   states, there were fears that 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
   a backlash that lost him the upcoming election.

   Despite this power, there was resistance to Klan terror. "Occasionally,
   organized groups successfully confronted the Klan. White Union Army
   veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized 'the anti-Ku
   Klux,' which put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with
   reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black
   churches and schools. Armed blacks patrolled the streets of
   Bennettsville, South Carolina, to prevent Klan assaults."

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

   In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation, the Ku
   Klux Klan Act, which was used along with the 1870 Force Act to enforce
   the civil rights provisions of the constitution. Under the Klan Act,
   federal troops were used rather than state militias, and Klansmen were
   prosecuted in federal court, where juries were often predominantly
   black. Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned, and habeas
   corpus was suspended in nine counties in South Carolina. These efforts
   were so successful that the Klan was destroyed in South Carolina 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 Ackerman. The tapering off of the federal government's
   actions under the Klan Act, ca. 1871–74, went along with the final
   extinction of the Klan, although in some areas similar activities,
   including intimidation and murder of black voters, continued under the
   auspices of local organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts,
   saber clubs, and rifle clubs. Even though the Klan no longer existed,
   it had achieved many of its goals, such as denying voting rights to
   Southern blacks.
     * The 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act: Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871

   However, it took several more years for all Klan elements to be
   destroyed. On Easter Sunday, 1873, the bloodiest single instance of
   racial violence in the Reconstruction era happened during the Colfax
   massacre. The Massacre began when black citizens fought back against
   the Klan and its allies in the White league. As Louisiana black teacher
   and legislator John G. Lewis later remarked, "They attempted (armed
   self-defense) in Colfax. The result was that on Easter Sunday of 1873,
   when the sun went down that night, it went down on the corpses of two
   hundred and eighty negroes."

   In 1882, long after the end of the first Klan, the Supreme Court ruled
   in United States vs. Harris that 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 have been invoked in later civil rights conflicts,
   including the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; the 1965
   murder of Viola Liuzzo; and Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic in
   1991.

The second Klan

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

Creation

   Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation
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   Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation

   The founding of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 demonstrated the
   newfound power of modern mass media. The year saw three closely related
   events:
     * 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 lynched against a backdrop of
       media frenzy.
     * The second Ku Klux Klan was founded with a new anti-immigrant and
       anti-Semitic agenda. The bulk of the founders were from an
       organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, and the new
       organization emulated the fictionalized version of the original
       Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.

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

   D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan,
   which was by then a fading memory. His film was based on the book and
   play The Clansman and the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas
   Dixon who said his purpose was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by
   a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience
   into a good Democrat!" The film created a nationwide craze for the
   Klan. At a preview in Los Angeles, actors dressed as Klansmen were
   hired to ride by as a promotional stunt, and real-life members of the
   newly reorganized Klan rode up and down the street at its later
   official premiere in Atlanta. In some cases, enthusiastic southern
   audiences fired their guns into the screen.

   The film's popularity and influence were enhanced by a widely reported
   endorsement of its factual accuracy by historian and U.S. President
   Woodrow Wilson (see below, under Political Influence) as a favour to an
   old friend. Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the
   standardized white costume and the burning cross, are imitations of the
   film, whose imagery was itself based on Dixon's romanticized concept of
   old Scotland as portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott
   rather than on the Reconstruction Klan.
   A quote from Woodrow Wilson used in the film
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   A quote from Woodrow Wilson used in the film

   The Birth of a Nation includes extensive quotations from Woodrow
   Wilson's History of the American People, e.g., "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." 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." Wilson's family had sympathized with the
   Confederacy during the Civil War, and cared for wounded Confederate
   soldiers at a church. When he was a young man, his party had vigorously
   opposed Reconstruction, and as president he resegregated the federal
   government for the first time since Reconstruction.

   Given the film's strong Democratic partisan message and Wilson's
   documented views on race and the Klan, 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. Later correspondence with Griffith, the film's
   director, confirms Wilson's 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, he
   issued a non-denial denial. His endorsement of the film greatly
   enhanced its popularity and influence, and helped Griffith to defend it
   against legal attack by the NAACP; the film, in turn, was a major
   factor leading to the creation of the second Klan in the same year.
   The lynching of Leo Frank
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   The lynching of Leo Frank

   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 Mary Phagan, a girl employed at 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 surrounding
   the court house). His appeals failed (Supreme Court Justice Oliver
   Wendell Holmes dissented, condemning the intimidation of the jury as
   failure 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, much of the evidence in the murder actually pointed to the
   factory's black janitor, Jim Conley, who the prosecution claimed only
   helped Frank to dispose of the body.
   The huge Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, site of the founding
   of the second Klan; work was begun in 1923 with funding mainly from the
   Klan, and was completed in 1970.
   Enlarge
   The huge Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, site of the founding
   of the second Klan; work was begun in 1923 with funding mainly from the
   Klan, and was completed in 1970.

   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
   meeting led by William J. Simmons on top of Stone Mountain, and
   attended by aging members of the original Klan, along with members of
   the Knights of Mary Phagan.

   Simmons found inspiration for this second Klan in the original Klan's
   "Prescripts," written in 1867 by George Gordon (a former Confederate
   brigadier general) in an attempt to give the original Klan a sense of
   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.

Membership

   Historians in recent years have obtained membership rosters of some
   local units and matched the names against city directory and local
   records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big city
   newspapers were unanimously hostile and often ridiculed the Klansmen as
   ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indiana shows 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 predominately 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 throughout the country, but the
   membership turned over rapidly. Still, millions joined and at its peak
   in the 1920s the organization included about 15% of the nation's
   eligible population and had chapters across the United States. There
   were even clans founded in Canada, most notably in Saskatchewan, where
   there was a large clan movement against Catholic immigrants.

   This Klan was operated as a profit-making venture by its leaders, and
   participated in the boom in fraternal organizations at the time.
   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 burning crosses and
   perhaps a ceremonial presentation of a Bible to a local Protestant
   minister. He left town with all the money. The local units operated
   like many fraternal organizations, occasionally bringing in speakers.
   The state and national officials had little or no control over the
   locals and rarely or never attempted to forge them into political
   activist groups.

Political influence

   The second Ku Klux Klan rose to great prominence and spread from the
   South into the Midwest and Northern states and even into Canada. At its
   peak, Klan membership exceeded 4 million and comprised 20% of the adult
   white male population in many broad geographic regions, as high as 40%
   in some areas. 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
   some of the Southern legislatures. Klan influence was particularly
   strong in Indiana, where Republican Klansman Edward Jackson was elected
   governor in 1924, and the entire apparatus of state government was
   riddled with Klansmen. In another well-known example from the same
   year, the Klan decided to make Anaheim, California, into a model Klan
   city; it secretly took over the city council, but was voted out in a
   special recall election.
   Klansmen in Anaheim, California, 1924
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   Klansmen in Anaheim, California, 1924

   Klan delegates played a significant role at the pathsetting 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 favour 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.

   There is also evidence that in certain states, such as Alabama, the KKK
   was not a mere hate group and showed a genuine desire for political and
   social reform. Because of the elite conservative political structure in
   Alabama, the state's Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of
   better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road
   construction, and other " progressive" political measures. In many ways
   these progressive political goals, which benefited ordinary and lower
   class white people in the state, were the result of the Klan offering
   these same people their first chance to install their own political
   champions into office.

   By 1925 the Klan was a powerful political force in the state, as
   powerful figures like J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo
   Black manipulated the KKK membership against the power of the "Big
   Mule" industrialists and Black Belt planters who had long dominated the
   state. Black was elected Senator in 1926 and became a leading supporter
   of the New Deal. Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937, the revelation
   that he was a former Klansman shocked the country but he stayed on the
   Court. In 1926 Bibb Graves, a former chapter head, won the governor's
   office with KKK members' support. He led one of the most progressive
   administrations in the state's history, pushing for increased education
   funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor
   legislation.

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

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

Decline

   The second Klan collapsed partly as a result of the backlash against
   their actions and partly as a result of a scandal involving David
   Stephenson (at the time a member of the Republican Party, after
   previous active membership in the Socialist Party and then in the
   Democratic Party), 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").
   According to historian Leonard Moore, at the heart of the backlash to
   the Klan's actions and the resulting scandals was a leadership failure
   which 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.

   As a result of these scandals, the Klan fell out of public favour in
   the 1930s and withdrew from political activity. Grand Wizard Hiram
   Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana
   veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician, but they were
   unable to stanch the exodus of members. The Klan's image was further
   damaged by Colescott's association with Nazi-sympathizer organizations,
   the Klan's involvement with the 1943 Detroit Race Riot, and efforts to
   disrupt the American war effort during World War II. In 1944 the IRS
   filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott
   was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944.
   Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
   in 1928.
   Enlarge
   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 on the Klan to media and law
   enforcement agencies. He also provided Klan information, including
   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.

Later Ku Klux Klans

   After the breakup of the second Klan, the name Ku Klux Klan began to be
   used by a number of independent groups. 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
                               1970      2,000
                               2000      3,000

   Beginning in the 1950s, a large number of the individual Klan groups
   began to resist the civil rights movement. This resistance involved
   numerous acts of violence and intimidation. Among the more notorious
   events of this time period were:
   Anthony and Viola Liuzzo, 1949
   Enlarge
   Anthony and Viola Liuzzo, 1949
     * The assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi.
       In 1994, former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted
       of Evers' murder.
     * The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58,
       also in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers
       was convicted of Dahmer's murder. Two other Klan members were
       indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the other's
       indictment was dismissed.
     * The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama,
       which killed four children. Four Klansmen were named as suspects in
       they were not prosecuted until years later. The Klan members were
       Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank
       Cherry, convicted of murder in 2001 and 2002. The fourth suspect,
       Herman Cash, died before he was indicted.
     * The murder of Willie Edwards, Jr., in 1957. Edwards was forced by
       Klansmen to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.
     * The 1964 murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and
       Schwerner in Mississippi. In June 2005, Klan member Edgar Ray
       Killen was convicted of manslaughter in the murders.
     * The 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo, a Southern-raised white mother of
       five who was visiting the South from her home in Detroit to attend
       a civil rights march. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was
       transporting Civil Rights Marchers.

   In addition to these murders, Klan groups also killed a number of
   others during this time period, with many of these acts going
   unreported. For example, in 1951 Harry T. Moore, a school-teacher and
   state director of the NAACP, died with his wife, Harriette, when their
   house was bombed. Even though an FBI investigation at the time turned
   up several suspects, no one was prosecuted in the case. "Forty years
   later, a former Marine and Ku Klux Klansman told NAACP officials that
   he and other Klansmen had conspired with law enforcement officials to
   plan and carry out the murder.... According to a subsequent report from
   the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty black
   Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some, like Harry
   Moore, were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but
   most were either people who had refused to bow to racist convention, or
   were simply innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random white
   terrorism."

   However, while the post-war Klan groups were extremely violent, this
   was also the period that saw a successful push back against the KKK.
   For example, in a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan burned crosses
   at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans who had associated with
   white people, and then held a nighttime rally nearby, only to find
   themselves surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was
   exchanged, and the Klan was routed.
   Violence at a Klan march in Mobile, Alabama, 1977
   Enlarge
   Violence at a Klan march in Mobile, Alabama, 1977

   In 1964, the FBI's COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE program infiltrated and
   disrupted the Klans. Yet COINTELPRO also occupied a curiously ambiguous
   position in the civil rights movement, since it used its tactics of
   infiltration, disinformation, and violence not only against violent
   far-left and far-right groups such as the Klan and the Weathermen, 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 Liuzzo, who 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 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.

   Once the century-long struggle over black voting rights in the South
   had ended, the Klans shifted their focus to other issues, including
   affirmative action, immigration, and especially busing ordered by the
   courts in order to desegregate schools. In 1971, Klansmen used bombs to
   destroy ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, and charismatic Klansman
   David Duke was active in South Boston during the school busing crisis
   of 1974. Duke also made efforts to update its image, urging Klansmen to
   "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." Duke was
   leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from 1974 until he resigned
   from the Klan in 1978. In 1980, he formed the National Association for
   the Advancement of White People, a white nationalist political
   organization. He was elected to the Louisiana State House of
   Representatives in 1989 as a Republican, even though the party threw
   its support to a different Republican candidate.

   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 counterprotests, 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. Thompson related how many Klan leaders who appeared
   indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series
   of multimillion-dollar lawsuits brought against them as individuals by
   the Southern Poverty Law Centre 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
   skinheads.

The Ku Klux Klan 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 isolated,
   scattered groups with a total membership numbering no 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 "need for justification
   runs deep in the disaffected and is unlikely to disappear, regardless
   of how low the Klan's fortunes eventually sink."

   Today the only known former member of the Klan to hold a federal office
   in the United States is Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West
   Virginia, who says he "deeply regrets" joining the Klan over half a
   century ago, when he was about 24 years old. There are currently no
   known members of the Klan who also hold a Federal office.

   Also recent attacks include the lynching of blaenavon schoolboy Adam
   South by known KKK member 'Silent' Bob Davies. 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 US.
     * 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 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 a number of 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.

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

   In a July 2005 incident, a Hispanic man's house was burned down in
   Hamilton, Ohio, after accusations that he sexually assaulted a
   nine-year-old white girl. Klan members in Klan robes showed up
   afterward to distribute pamphlets. In May 2006, a Ku Klux Klan group
   led an anti-immigration march in Russellville, Alabama.

Notable Klan leaders

     * Don Black
     * Sam Bowers
     * David Duke
     * Thomas Robb

Ku Klux Klan vocabulary

   Membership in the Klan is secret, and the Klan, like many fraternal
   organizations, has signs members can use to recognize one another. A
   member may use the acronym AYAK (Are you a Klansman?) in conversation
   to surreptitiously identify himself to another potential member. The
   response AKIA (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.

   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.

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