First KKK

9 Key excerpts on "First KKK"

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  Vigilantism against Migrants and Minorities

  • Tore Bjørgo, Miroslav Mareš, Tore Bjørgo, Miroslav Mareš(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  We present the best information available about the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilantism, but it is important to note that data about the Klan is always partial. As a secret society that is often engaged in illegal actions or plans, the Klan takes care to obscure its leadership, structure, and locations and to exaggerate its size and influence. Even evidence about the Klan from law enforcement or government agencies can be suspect, as some state officials have been sympathetic to the Klan’s violence or reluctant to reveal its ability to pursue vigilante actions with few legal consequences (Blee, 2017; Cunningham, 2012; McVeigh and Cunningham, 2012; (Wright, 1985). The sources on which we rely for data on vigilantism in the Ku Klux Klan thus required extraordinarily complex methods of research to surmount the Klan’s secrecy, intimidation, and sharp difference between publicly available statements of plans and ideologies and what happens within its groups (Blee, 2002).

  Klan vigilantism across historical periods

  1st Klan: 1860s–1870s

  The first Klan arose in the wake of the Civil War, which ended with the defeat of the Confederacy, a secessionist movement of southern states that sought to preserve their slavery-based economy and social order. The Klan emerged as a loosely organized association of white men, largely in the rural areas of the South, who wielded vigilante terrorism and violence to defend white supremacy and the racial state. Their name was meant to denote a circle of brothers, suggesting the racial fraternity that would long be a characteristic of Klan groups. Klan targets were primarily emancipated blacks and white northerners who had come to the south to reconstruct the state in the post-Civil War period. Its organization was limited, with officials holding titles such as Grand Dragon that were more symbolic than reflective of an actual integrated organization. Indeed, the Klan’s locally based and largely uncoordinated groups mostly resembled loosely organized gangs.

  Due to its loose organizational form, the Klan’s vigilante violence was locally targeted with little overall strategy among groups beyond a shared antipathy toward both blacks and the northern, federally directed project of reconstructing the southern racial state. Indeed, it is difficult to identify precisely the acts of violence that are attributable to Klan groups, as white violence against blacks and their white allies was pervasive across the post- Civil war era South. Such violence was both vicious and extensive, taking the form of murders, arsons, lynchings, expulsion from homes and communities, robbery, and enslavement. In the state of Georgia alone, the Freedman’s Bureau cited 336 murders or assaults in 1868, a significant proportion of which might have been related to the Klan, while the Klan was also responsible for burning schools and churches and numerous acts of political intimidation (Bryant, 2002). In one county in South Carolina, white vigilante violence, much likely attributable to Klan members, took the form of whipping, terrorizing, attacking, and even murdering and lynching former slaves who tried to leave their plantations (as well as those that hired them) or who showed disrespect to whites, (for men) approached white women, or were thought to be fomenting insurrection or resistance to white rule (Parsons, 2005; Tolnay & Beck, 1995). Moreover, the Klan in that county was responsible for two large scale raids on jails that ended in deaths after a black militia attempted to block the delivery of illegal liquor to a local hotel (Parsons, 2005).

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  Available until 27 Jan |Learn more

  The Politics of Losing

  Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment

  • Rory McVeigh, Kevin Estep(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  By comparing Trump’s rise with that of the Klan we do not mean to equate the two, or exaggerate the extremism of Trump or the people who voted for him. Each time the Klan erupted, it attracted huge followings, drawing in members and supporters who were, in many ways, quite ordinary. On a Saturday night, a Klansman might light a cross and march down Main Street in full hooded regalia. And on Sunday morning he might go to church and picnic with his family in the afternoon. Our comparisons help us explore when and how white nationalist movements emerge, but also how their goals enter the mainstream. We look at the Klan of the 1920s because it was the most effective in attracting broad support, spreading farther and faster than the others. Its growth surprised its contemporaries and still puzzles us today. Understanding it will crack the code of Trump’s own surprising rise to power. But first, we revisit all the Klans of the past.

  THE RECONSTRUCTION KLAN

  The first Ku Klux Klan emerged as Southerners dealt with the devastation of the Civil War. Historians estimate that six hundred thousand Americans died in the war, which also destroyed the South’s transportation infrastructure, property, and local economy.1 The Southern elite, in particular, faced the challenge of rebuilding their fortunes—fortunes made through property ownership and slave labor.2 They worried about the economic consequences of emancipation, and feared violent retribution from former slaves and, worse, a coming political revolution that could seize their land.3 Before the Klan came into being, white Southerners already anticipated black threats to institutional white supremacy—and reacted with violence.4

  This violence was itself an extension of practices developed before the war, when “night riders” patrolled the countryside to capture escaped slaves and intimidate those who might be contemplating escape.5 Slaves were geographically concentrated. A relatively small proportion of Southerners owned the vast majority of slaves, who worked primarily in cotton-growing regions of the Deep South. To ward off rebellion, slave owners would sometimes don white sheets, pretending to be ghosts, in an effort to scare slaves into submission.6 Folklorist Gladys-Marie Fry writes that whites in the South were terrified of the prospects of slave uprisings: “Slaves posed a constant threat, a storm cloud that could erupt at any moment into a hurricane of disaster.”7

  In 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee, six Confederate war veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan. It’s not clear how they came up with the name. Two of the original members would later claim that it was meaningless but sounded mysterious.8 These first Klansmen were relatively prosperous and styled themselves as intellectuals: Frank McCord was the editor of the local newspaper; Calvin Jones, John Lester, and Richard Reed were attorneys; James Crowe was a cotton broker; and John Kennedy, it appears, was a well-off farmer, though not a plantation owner.9 Historical accounts say that the men started the group, at first, to relieve boredom. They staged plays and concerts in Pulaski:10 McCord played the fiddle, and Jones played the guitar.11 Some evidence suggests that they were part of the minstrel tradition, performing locally under the name of the “Midnight Rangers.”12

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  The Politics of the Extreme Right

  From the Margins to the Mainstream

  • Paul Hainsworth(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  One, which straddles the boundary between radical right and the extreme right, is the Patriot movement - of which the Militias are a part. Another is National Socialism. A third, which we shall now go on to discuss in some historical detail, is the oldest and best-known form of the extreme right: the Ku Klux Klan. Born out of the calamity of the American Civil War, it has persisted over time and even today forms an important core of the violent right in the United States. 288 THE EXTREME RIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES The origins of the Ku Klux Klan One aspect of what has been termed American exceptionalism was the persistence of the institution of slavery, that peculiarly pre-capitalist social form adapted to capitalist purposes following the development of tobacco-growing in Virginia during the seventeenth century, and cotton in the states south of the Mason-Dixon line. Tragically, the abolition of slavery left the South economically shredded and morally bruised, and its white inhabitants determined to reassert their dominance over the newly emancipated black population. The Ku Klux Klan was to be a key instrument in this process of reassertion (Trelease, 1972). The original Klan was not simply some quaint, rather oddly dressed group of nightriders standing on the edge of southern society - even less the romantic defenders of a misunderstood oppressed civilization portrayed in D. W. Griffith's 'rampantly racist' film Birth of a Nation (Wright, 1976: 28). Rather, it was an organized conspiracy whose primary objective was to restore white supremacy after the Civil War (Horn, 1939). First established in 1865 when six ex-confederate soldiers met in their home town of Pulaski, Tennessee, the aims of the Klan were never in doubt: to force reforming northerners out of the Confederacy and to destroy every vestige of nascent black political power in the southern states. The ideology of the Klan was explicitly supremacist.

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  The Extreme Right in Europe and the USA

  • Paul Hainsworth(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  However, before looking at the present, it would perhaps be useful to plot the history of one of the most successful right-wing extremist organizations in the Western world: the Ku Klux Klan. After this we shall examine the activities of the more respectable, though equally influential 'radical right'. The ideology and organizational strength of the contemporary extreme right will then be looked at in some detail, to be followed by a discussion of the most potent right-wing force on the American political scene today: the David Duke phenomenon. Finally, an attempt will be made to assess what the future holds for right-wing extremism in the United States. The Historical Origins of the Ku Klux Klan One aspect of what has been termed American exceptionalism was the persistence of the institution of slavery, that peculiarly pre-capitalist social form adapted to capitalist purposes following the development of tobacco-growing in Virginia during the seventeeth century, and cotton in the states south of the Mason-Dixon line. Tragically, the abolition of slavery left the South economically shredded and morally bruised and its white inhabitants determined to reassert their dominance over the newly emancipated black population. The Ku Klux Klan was to be a key instrument in this process of reassertion (Trelease, 1972). The original Klan was not some quaint, rather oddly-dressed group of nightriders standing on the edge of southern society, even less the romantic defenders of a misunderstood oppressed civilization portrayed in D.W. Griffith's 'rampantly racist' film Birth of a Nation (Wright, 1976, p. 28). Rather it was an organized conspiracy whose primary objective was to restore white supremacy after the Civil War (Horn, 1969).

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  Another Kind of War

  The Nature and History of Terrorism

  • John A. Lynn(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  This second Klan claimed a membership in the millions across the United States during the 1920s under the banner of “100 percent Americanism.” This new avatar of intolerance varied from state to state, but it was above all a political, social, and religious movement of White Protestant Americans. The final decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth intensified na-tivist sentiment—a perception by those native-born Americans of north-ern European and Protestant descent that “their” America was threat-ened by the immigration of eastern and southern Europeans, Jews, and Catholics. The new Klan directed its enmity against all these, while still demeaning and attacking African-Americans. So extensive was its mem-bership that the new Klan put wealth and political power in the hands of its leadership, and this opened the door to corruption. The second Klan, unlike the first was and the third would be, was not clandestine, but boldly open. In a sense it was a creation of the dark side of popular culture. Fittingly, while the social and racial antagonism that white knights 91 fueled the resurgence of the Klan was piled high and dangerously flam-mable, the spark that set it alight was surprisingly superficial: D. W. Grif-fith’s movie The Birth of a Nation , released in February 1915. Technically, it ranks as a cinematic masterstroke, but socially it must be condemned as virulent. Griffith based his plot on the Thomas Dixon novel The Clansman (1905), a racist work that includes the line: “For a thick-lipped, flat nosed, spindle-shanked Negro, exuding his nauseating animal odor, to shout in derision over the hearth and homes of White men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief.” 19 The film portrayed a chivalrous Ku Klux Klan saving Whites in the South from the evils of Reconstruction and its Black henchmen. Its plot deals in stereotypes of ignorant and violent Blacks, driven by the desire for sexual dominance over White women.

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  The Modern Ku Klux Klan

  • Henry P. (Henry Peck) Fry(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  A careful investigation of the history of the original movement shows that it was divided into three separate and distinct periods. It was first organized as a secret society for the amusement of its members, without any serious attempt to act as a “regulator” of social and political affairs; it was then transformed into a great political-military movement, enforced law and order, drove the negro and the carpetbagger out of politics, and was then ordered disbanded; and lastly it attempted in unorganized fashion, without the authority of its former leaders, to rule many communities, and an enormous number of acts of violence were committed either by it or in its name.

  There were several different organizations which sprang into existence in the South during the reconstruction periods, each one operating along the same general lines but bearing different names. There were the Ku Klux Klan, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces, the Constitutional Union Guards, and the Knights of the White Camelia, which was larger than any of them. In the latter days of the reconstruction, when acts of lawlessness in the South were so bad that an investigation was held by Congress, the general name of Ku Klux was applied to all extra-legal Southern movements. As this narrative deals only with the Ku Klux Klan, a discussion of the other movements is unnecessary.

  The Ku Klux Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tenn., in May, 1866. Several young men who had served in the Confederate Army, having returned to their homes, found themselves suffering from the inactivity and reaction that followed army life. There was nothing to do in which to relieve it. There was but little work to do, and but few had capital to engage in new mercantile or professional pursuits. The amusements and diversions of normal society were lacking, and to meet this situation, it was decided to form a secret society merely for the purpose of burlesque and fun-making. After the society was organized, and a name was sought, one of the members suggested the word “kukloi” from the Greek word “Kuklos

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  CQ Press Guide to Radical Politics in the United States

  • Susan Burgess, Kate Leeman(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 ), and to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned racial segregation in public accommodations, restricted discriminatory hiring and housing practices, and empowered the federal government to bring lawsuits and revoke funding of public school systems that failed to integrate. United Klans of America members were implicated in some of this violence, including the July 11, 1964, murder of Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a Black World War II veteran who was fatally shot while driving through Clarke County, Mississippi, on his way home from Army Reserve training.

  In the wake of this dramatic upsurge in Klan violence, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy pressured FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to take a more active role in restoring order in the South. Prior to this time, Hoover had viewed the civil rights movement’s civil disobedience and purported ties to communism as a greater threat to national security than the Klan, generally considering the investigation and prevention of White supremacist violence as a state law enforcement issue (see Chapter 5 ).134 However, in September 1964, Hoover established a secret program that came to be known as COINTELPRO–White Hate, an offshoot of an earlier secret FBI counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO, established in 1956 to target communist groups operating within the United States (see Chapter 2 ). Although the FBI increasingly assisted local law enforcement in the investigation of Klan crimes, the bureau was less interested in obtaining convictions in court than in disrupting and discrediting the Klan, both internally and externally. In a memo to agents regarding the establishment of this counterintelligence program, the director of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division wrote, “We intend to expose to public scrutiny the devious maneuvers and duplicity of the hate groups; to frustrate any efforts or plans they may have to consolidate their forces; to discourage their recruitment of new or youthful adherents; and to disrupt or eliminate their efforts to circumvent or violate the law.”135

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  Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History

  • Stephen E. Atkins(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Since members of the group were Catholics, there was no possibility of more than occasional cooperation with the Ku Klux Klan. Federal Government Efforts to Undermine the Ku Klux Klan As violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan against civil rights demonstrators increased, the FBI began infiltrating the Klan, reluctantly at first. In the period between 1955 and 1965, there were more than 225 bombings, and 1,000 acts of racial violence, reprisal, and intimidation took place in the South, with none of the perpetrators or suspects ever detained or arrested. 142 Southern law enforcement was often in the hands of authorities Ku Klux Klan Movements 23 who either belonged to or were sympathetic to the KKK. Those law enforcement officials who were anti-Klan were limited in what they could do. This was the case with Richard Flowers, attorney general of the state of Alabama, who openly attacked the Klan in 1966. The Klan to me is a group primarily of those that use the civil rights issue to foster an organization or a Klan, as they are, and will take the law into their own hands. They have become more or less·more or less their own police power. They are a police group within themselves, dedicated to defiance of law and violence. They are, as I have expressed it before, they are a hooded bunch of killers and nightriders and floggers that this nation and this state has no use for whatsoever. 143 Even the FBI was reluctant to intervene because J. Edgar Hoover had little sympathy for the civil rights movement. Political pressure from the Johnson administration, however, forced Hoover to become more receptive to intervention. Slowly, the FBI became concerned about the lawlessness and the consequences of the violence. Because local law enforcement was so unreliable, the FBI had to employ its own resources in the form of undercover agents. Undercover agents were recruited from outside the ranks of the FBI.

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  The Birth of Modern America, 1914 - 1945

  Paradox and Disillusionment

  • John McClymer(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Comparisons of the first and second Klans yield a great many differences as well. The first Klan sought to put newly freed blacks back in “their place,” i.e., to restore white supremacy. The second, while also hostile to African Americans who tried to live as first‐class citizens, defined “white supremacy” to mean the ascendancy of “Nordic Americans” over all others. The members of the first Klan were overwhelmingly Protestant, but anti‐Catholicism formed no part of their movement. Nor did anti‐Semitism. Nor did nativism. The first Klan fixated entirely upon the immediate issues of Reconstruction. Moreover, while local klaverns of the second Klan did engage in “night riding” and other forms of vigilante activity, this was not the sole focus of the KKK of the 1920s. In fact, Imperial Wizard Evans and other Klan leaders sought, at least publicly, to distance the organization from the “invisible government” actions of the immediate postwar years and to insist upon the Klan’s reverence for established legal authority. The first Klan, in short, was a paramilitary organization; the second was not. Still another important difference is the second Klan’s insistence upon “Americanism.” The first was an organization of white Southern males. The second attracted support from all sections and from women.

  Some in the 1920s suggested a different historical comparison, the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s. Writing in the North American Review of January 1924, William Starr Myers noted that the Klan, “with the possible exception of masks, robes, and other like paraphernalia,…is an almost complete replica of the old Know Nothing movement of the ‘fifties of the last century.”

  The Know Nothing party…spread over the eastern and northern sections of the country, with Grand Councils, Superior Councils, Subordinate Councils, and all the other hierarchy of a well thought out and clear cut organization. It had a grip, pass words, secret signs, and much of the ritual that has proved so attractive to the average American citizen, whether the object of an organization be fraternal, social, political, or religious. It was organized in opposition to the naturalization of foreign immigrants, then first coming to the United States in large numbers, and also opposed to the activities and spread of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Unlike the Klan, the Know Nothings, aka the Native American Party, were not necessarily hostile to African Americans. In fact, in states like Massachusetts, the Know Nothings vehemently denounced the Kansas‐Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Law. In Worcester, a center of Know Nothingism, the party swept the 1854 municipal elections as its newspaper, the Daily Evening Journal

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