This expansion of federal authority—which Ulysses S. Grant promptly used in to crush Klan activity in South Carolina and other areas of the South—outraged Democrats and even alarmed many Republicans. From the early s onward, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South as support for Reconstruction waned; by the end of , the entire South was under Democratic control once again. This second generation of the Klan was not only anti-Black but also took a stand against Roman Catholics, Jews, foreigners and organized labor.
It was fueled by growing hostility to the surge in immigration that America experienced in the early 20th century along with fears of communist revolution akin to the Bolshevik triumph in Russia in The organization took as its symbol a burning cross and held rallies, parades and marches around the country. At its peak in the s, Klan membership exceeded 4 million people nationwide. The civil rights movement of the s saw a surge of local Klan activity across the South, including the bombings, beatings and shootings of Black and white activists.
These actions, carried out in secret but apparently the work of local Klansmen, outraged the nation and helped win support for the civil rights cause. In , President Lyndon Johnson delivered a speech publicly condemning the Klan and announcing the arrest of four Klansmen in connection with the murder of a white female civil rights worker in Alabama.
The cases of Klan-related violence became more isolated in the decades to come, though fragmented groups became aligned with neo-Nazi or other right-wing extremist organizations from the s onward. As of , the Anti-Defamation League estimated Klan membership to be around 3,, while the Southern Poverty Law Center said there were 6, members total. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about years, from the post-Civil War era until —were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.
By the midth century, It was formed in New York City by white and Black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against In , a group of ten children and hundreds of spectators gathered for a mass baptism.
This was no mere religious rite. Yes, it is old fashioned, and certainly, it is impractical. That curious — absurd — pointed shape, with the sinister eye holes, immediately conjures up visions of lynchings, the fire-bombing of African-American churches and other acts of terrorism. It is a far more recognisable symbol than other logos used by the alt-right and other white supremacists, with the obvious exception of the swastika.
A quick trawl through some recent news stories seems to bear this out. In fact, the symbolism of the Klan is currently so powerful that it is difficult to think of a situation where using its instantly recognisable iconography would not bring near universal condemnation. The Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, discovered this recently when pictures emerged of the yearbook for the Eastern Virginia Medical School which he attended.
Northam, a Democrat, issued an apology, although later denied that he had been in the image. Still, he faced calls for his resignation. Within minutes of her remark, the postings on social media almost unanimously condemned the year-old actress and her script writers for insensitivity.
But the violence was not the attraction for most members of the Klan. Indeed, most would likely have disavowed their support for such activities, and many surely did not consider themselves to be mean-spirited racists at all. The Klan owed its popularity less to its endorsement of raw hatred directed toward nonwhites and the supposedly immoral than to how it allowed for the expression of white supremacy and moral conservatism in culturally acceptable and even ostensibly laudatory ways.
Like many organizations that presented themselves as fraternal orders, the Klan gave members the sense that they belonged to something special, complete with secret rituals; handshakes; mystical-sounding titles, like Imperial Wizard and Exalted Cyclops; code words; and uniforms.
The Klan sponsored parades and picnics, baseball teams and beautiful-baby contests. Klansmen had musical troupes that performed public concerts and bands that played at state fairs. Klan members showed up in churches on Sunday mornings to donate money and they ran charity drives.
They threw Christmas parties for orphans and raised money to build Protestant-only hospitals. They made efforts to fight supposed Catholic influence in public schools by donating American flags and Bibles. They created special Klan rites for wedding ceremonies, christenings, and funerals. They ran candidates for hundreds of state and local offices, and Americans elected countless Klan members as mayors, school-board and city-council members, sheriffs, and state legislators.
Klan officeholders in particularly prominent and powerful positions included Governors Edward Jackson of Indiana and Clifford Walker of Georgia, as well as U.
For every Klansmen who joined for the opportunity to bully, threaten, and beat blacks, immigrants, and adulterers, there were dozens attracted by these sorts of avenues for communal and civic engagement, for forging business and political connections to other middle-class white people, and for the chance to be publicly proud of being white, Protestant, and a native-born American.
None of which is to suggest that the ideology of intolerance or the racist violence was separable from the forging of community, the charity work, the pride, or the political activism. On the contrary, it was all of a piece, and even Klan members who came to the organization mostly because friends and neighbors encouraged them to do so saw the appeal of white supremacy and understood full well how the appearance of Klansmen in regalia struck fear into large numbers of their fellow Americans.
One factor that helped bring down the Klan was a growing recognition that that fear was legitimate. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge both opposed the Klan, and as the years went on a growing number of public officials and prominent citizens who had joined the Klan as its numbers increased in the early s turned against the organization as it became clear that they had cast their lot less with a salutary fraternal society than with a conspiracy that countenanced sadists and fanatics.
Ultimately, the march in Washington, D. By the end of the decade, its numbers had dwindled practically into insignificance. Rather, it went into decline mostly because of its own self-destructiveness, the fierceness and constancy of its opponents, and changing socioeconomic and political contexts that deprived the Klan of much of the energy that had given it life.
Klan leaders notoriously oversaw local and state chapters as dictators and stole funds from organizational treasuries, and the stream of members who left in frustration became a flood by the end of after the conviction of David Stephenson, the leading Klansmen in Indiana, for murdering a young woman he had also brutally raped. Perhaps most important in bringing down the Klan was that the vision of an America decaying from foreign ideologies, dangerous immigrants, and moral rot never came into being.
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