Guitar's Struggle With Racism

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Literary Footnotes

6/3/10

The Ku Klux Klan was first created after the Civil War, in Pulaski, Tennessee in an effort to keep the Civil Rights Movement from giving rights to African-Americans and freed slaves. The Klan experienced its greatest growth “in the 1920s, [when] the Klan spread well beyond the South” (O’Malley). Three million members soon joined from the South, allowing the clan to win over political power in non-southern states. In an effort to stop African American rights, they “tortured and killed black Americans and sympathetic whites” who acted in favor of the Civil Rights Movement, especially the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (Simkin). Theodore Bilbo, the governor of Mississippi during this time, was a Klan member who did all in his political power to stop the Civil Rights Movement, and any law that was passed for the benefit of African-Americans, and freed slaves.

The men were gathered in Tommy’s barbershop listening to the radio when they heard that Emmett Till, “a young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Su...

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