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Racism in the usa history
Racism in the usa history
Klux klan in the civil rights movement
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Throughout history, minorities would be harassed for the color of their skin or their religion.
America has struggled with racism because of the terrorist group called the Ku Klux Klan, or
known as, the K.K.K.. In 1866, six ex-confederate soldiers started a fraternal society. Taking from their college Greek fraternity, they took the term for circle, "kuklos." (“Ku Klux Klan”) They added the word "klan" for alliteration, and soon, the Ku Klux Klan was born. The members would go on “night raids” and during them, members would disguise themselves in masks made from potato sacks and long robes. The Ku Klux Klan soon became a political successor to the pre-war slave patrols in controlling newly freed blacks. Mostly in the South, Klansmen’s goal was to drive black men out of politics, control black labor, and overturn the new Republican state governments. Throughout the Ku Klux Klan’s reign, they have murdered thousands of African Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was an American born racist terrorist organization that prevented equality and assisted in the process of overthrowing Republican reconstruction in the South.
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In an organizing meeting at the Maxwell House in Nashville, ex-Confederate Gen.
Nathan Bedford Forrest became grand wizard, and other generals served as state grand dragons. But in fact, the Klan was decentralized and local; each state and community had its own violent story. By 1869, the Klan had helped terrorize black voters and overturn elected Republican governments in the Deep South. In 1870 and 1871, the Radical Republicans struck back in Congress, passing the Enforcement and Ku Klux Klan Acts aimed at protecting the rights of blacks, and a Joint Select Committee issued a 12-volume report on its hearings on Klan violence. President Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, and convictions in South Carolina and Mississippi helped bring a decline in
violence. But Reconstruction was in retreat; when the Supreme Court ruled in 1883 that Congress lacked the authority to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals and organizations, the national government effectively abandoned its efforts to protect Negro rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Having helped restore white Democratic political power in the South, the Klan had finished its work. In white Southern legend, the Klan was enshrined as the savior of a downtrodden white people from what they saw as the fearful disorder of black equality. In the early twentieth century, the story of the post-Civil War Klan was carried in the history books, and, most famously, in Thomas Dixon's 1905 romanticized racist novel The Clansman, on which D.W. Griffith based his epic 1915 motion picture, "The Birth of a Nation." Inspired by the film, "Colonel" William J. Simmons of Atlanta, a former Methodist minister and salesman, initiated a small group of Klansmen in front of a blazing cross on top of nearby Stone Mountain. Simmons' reborn Klan would become the great fraternal lodge of the 1920s and the political engine of native-born, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, American nationalism. But it had only local success until after World War I, when Simmons hired a dynamic PR man, Edward Young Clarke, who saw the Klan's possibilities. Clarke and his salesmen would keep most of the $10 dollar initiation fee, so he hired hundreds of salesmen, mostly Protestant ministers, and sent them out across the country to sell the Klan. Soon the Klan was no longer narrowly Southern; law and order, prohibition and anti-Catholicism were added to its white supremacist beliefs, and it enrolled millions of Klansmen and Klanswomen. The aura of violence was part of the initial appeal — when you put on your robes, you were a warrior. In the early years there were hundreds of kidnappings and beatings in the South and Southwest, and outbreaks and episodes elsewhere. Often the victims of the Klan were not blacks, Catholics, Jews or new immigrants, but fellow white native-born Protestants who offended the Klan in some way. Between four million and seven million men and women belonged to the Klan in this era. It was active in every state. It found support in many northern and western cities and was particularly politically powerful in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, and Oregon, as well as the South. The Klan helped elect state and local officials and at least 20 governors and U.S. senators — from Maine to California. In Oregon, a Klan-dominated legislature passed an anti-Catholic school law, later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925), that required public school attendance. The Klan was deeply involved in politics, but it did not form its own political party. It was generally Democratic in the South and Republican in the North. It had no national platform. The Klan was a major issue at the 1924 Democratic Convention and the national election; in the 1928 presidential election, when New York Catholic Al Smith was the Democratic candidate, it helped the Republicans win. The Klan came to town bringing social excitement, Protestant morality, and reform. Prohibition was the great crusade, corrupt political machines were a useful issue, and Catholicism was held up as the leading conspiratorial threat to a Protestant Anglo-Saxon America. However, the Klan always produced opposition and its reputation was soon tarnished. Scandal, corruption and struggles over power and money proved ruinous in every state, and the Roman Catholic threat illusionary. Growing numbers of people came to believe that the Klan was a civic disaster, and it very rapidly declined. In the 1930s, the Klan had no response to the Great Depression, though it lingered, violently, in the Southeast — principally Georgia, Alabama and Florida — as an enemy of blacks and labor unions. In 1939, James Colescott became Imperial Wizard. An attempted merger with the German-American Bund proved to be a poor public-relations choice. With World War II, gas rationing, and a large bill for back taxes, Colescott formally closed down the Klan. Revived in the Southeast after the war by Atlanta obstetrician Samuel Green, the Klan was strictly working-class and anti-black. Green died of a heart attack in 1949, and the Klan fragmented. It was dangerous, but not going anywhere. Dynamite was its prime weapon. The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that public school segregation was unconstitutional gave the Klan a tremendous boost. When the Civil Rights Movement flowered in the Deep South in the 1960s, the Klan was there to meet it. Its members enjoyed what initially amounted to general immunity from arrest, prosecution and conviction. Many police officers were members. But the Klan's violence in Alabama and Mississippi, covered prominently by newspapers and television, produced a backlash of its own in the form of a heightened determination and activism among the young, and eventually a vigorous response from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The reaction to Klan violence helped produce the 1964 (Public Accommodations) and 1965 (Voting) Civil Rights Laws and turned the reluctant FBI into an effective Klan investigating force. Fear of Klan-produced anarchy and rumors of the possible use of federal troops helped the Mississippi establishment to minimally come to terms with the civil rights revolution. Initially, even the passage of the major civil rights bills provided no protection against the Klan — or the police. The killers of Viola Liuzzo on the road back to Selma, Ala., and Col. Lemuel Penn on the highway near Athens, Ga., were found not guilty. The killing of Mickey Schwerner, Ben Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, Miss., couldn't even get into court. The bombers of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church and the murderers of Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer, among others, walked free. The best the federal courts could do was send the Liuzzo, Penn, and Philadelphia, Miss., killers to jail with limited civil rights-violation sentences. The U.S. Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court for a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Era civil rights laws. In U.S. v. Guest (1966), the court broadened the federal power to protect civil rights and suggested that the Congress pass more protective law — which it did in 1968. In the changing social environment, the Klan was in for more trouble. Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Ala., came up with an innovative legal strategy: Acting under the civil law principle that an organization could be held responsible for the actions of its agents, they went to court and won confiscation of Klan assets, including Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton's Tuscaloosa, Ala., headquarters in 1987. And in the politically changing South, solid murder cases were eventually assembled in state courts against the Birmingham Church bombers and the murderers of Evers and Dahmer. In 2005, 41 years after the murders, Mississippi finished off the Philadelphia Klan trials with the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen. In the new century, Mississippi Klansmen were also convicted and received life sentences for the less publicized 1960s murders of Ben Chester White, Henry Dee, and Charles Moore. Though greatly weakened, Klan fragments hang on into the 21st century, sharing the anti-Semitism, anti-Latino and other ideologies of the Aryan Nations, Christian Identity, neo-Nazis and other violent organizations of the extreme right. Individual Klansmen still commit acts of intimidation and violence. Without funds, ideas, able leadership, and with only scattered membership, the Klan nonetheless remains the historic symbol of racist terrorism.
...ecame a hallmark of the Klan” (History.com). These acts were terrorizing in mostly the south and it made it very difficult for an African American to adapt and get used to life as a free person. This was a tragedy for the United States and Grant, the president at the time, was willing to use military force or martial law in an effort to put an end to these actions of resistance.
A few years ago, my mother told me something thought provoking: we had once lived on the same block as the leader of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter. That had been in Charlotte, North Carolina, around 1994. The Ku Klux Klan, according to Blaine Varney in Lynching in the 1890’s, used to “…set out on nightly ‘terror rides’ to harass ‘uppity Negroes’….” They are far more infamous, however, for their “lynching”—nightly “terror rides” that included murder—of African Americans. Varney tells us lynching levels reached their pinnacle in 1892, with 161 recorded murders that year. In modern times, most Americans would agree that the Klan, along with any form of white supremacy, has no place in society—and pointing out its survival is a good way to imply that we, as a people, are still not perfect.
The Ku Klux Klan was the most prominent organization and was established in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee. The original intent, a social club for former confederate soldiers, soon altered and changed to a terrorist organization. After the Klan was transformed into a terrorist organization, they were responsible for thousands of deaths and remarkably weakened the political power in the south of blacks and republicans. WGBH 1) Although many Americans associate Klan activity with the South, particularly Georgia and Alabama, the largest, most powerful states of the organizations were those of the Midwest, and especially Indiana in the early 1920’s where the Klan gained its greatest influence and highest level of membership for any state (Moore 2 ).
There have been traces of racism throughout America since the country was founded. Blacks, along with other races, were constantly fighting to be treated equally. Even though the slaves were freed in 1863, they still faced many racial and prejudice issues. However, in the early 1900s, it seemed as if African Americans were flourishing in the town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The thought of African Americans prospering disgusted most whites to the point they wanted to do something about it. These thoughts and actions caused a horrific event known as Tulsa Race Riots that not only affected everyone in the time period, but will continue to affect us and live in our memory.
Radical Republicans repassed the Civil Rights Bill and were also able to get the Reconstruction Acts passed in 1867 and 1868. Despite these acts, white control over Southern state governments was gradually restored when organizations such as the Ku Kux Klan were able to frighten blacks from voting in elections.
The KKK is the hooded legend of the past, present, and likely the future of the United States. Their stories of death and destruction across the United States and the midwest have frightened many of color and those of certain backgrounds and delegations for years.The history of the secret organization known as the Ku Klux Klan, goes back to 1865. The Ku Klux Klan began as a social group for Confederate veterans after the end of the civil war. On December 24th of the year 1865, the secret society that would change a nation, was born .
In the United States, racial discrimination has a lengthy history, dating back to the biblical period. Racial discrimination is a term used to characterize disruptive or discriminatory behaviors afflicted on a person because of his or her ethnic background. In other words, every t...
The KKK is a movement that has been very controversial since the Civil War. The Klan as they call themselves was created as a result of the occupation of Federal troops in the South. The KKK's purpose at the time was to provide the people of the south with the leadership to bring back the values of Western Civilization that was taken from them. In the 1920's the Klan had its most popular era. At this time the KKK was the most active politically then it has ever been in history. The KKK still exists today as a brotherhood and a new White racial community that lives and functions by the ideals it promotes. Today the Klan is in its 5th era and continues to be America's oldest and most effective White Christian Fraternal organization.
White Southerners who hated blacks started the Ku Klux Klan in 1866. It was also called the KKK. They tried to stop black people from voting and having other civil rights. They would wear white sheets and masks with pointed hoods. They would beat up blacks and public officials. They would burn crosses by the houses of people they wanted to scare. The KKK was declared illegal in 1...
In the spring of 1866, a year after the civil war had ended, six confederate veterans formed a social club in the town of Pulaski, Tennessee. Just out of the war and looking for excitement, they formed a secret society which they named the Ku Klux Klan. The name comes from the Greek word Kuklos, meaning circle. This small group started as a harmless, fun loving group, and developed into one of the largest, most violent groups in American history. The original group only lasted a few years, and left a permanent impression, rituals that people today still use.
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in May of 1866, in Pulaski, Tennessee by six veterans of the Confederate Army. The early years of the Klan's existence were focused mainly on restoring white power in the government. The Klan often spoke against Radical Republicans, the political party that most supported the rights of former slaves. At first the Klan seemed relatively harmless. But as time went on, the so called white supremacists showed how far they were willing to go to fulfill their craving for America to go back to its former ways.
The KKK was a very loosely organized group, and hierarchical structures beyond the county level probably were more symbolic than operational. The Klan in Georgia had a titular head, the Grand Dragon, who at one point was probably General John B. Gordon. Each congressional district had a Grand Titan and under him were Grand Giants for each county. Former Klansman John C. Reed recalled that Robert Toombs's law partner and son-in-law, Dudley M. DuBose, served as Grand Titan for the Fifth Congressional District while Reed himself served as Grand Giant of Oglethorpe County. In each militia district of his county Reed organized dens of ten or so men, most Confederate veterans with a good horse and a gun. Thus, Reed as a county leader had at his disposal more than 100 armed and mounted men.
name of the Ku Klux Klan. The name Ku Klux Klan comes from the Greek
Racism can be defined as "any set of beliefs, which classifies humanity into distinct collectives, defined in terms of natural and/or cultural attributes, and ranks these attributes in a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority" (Blum 5). It can be directly linked to the past and still, centuries later, serves as a painful reminder that race continues to be one of the "sharpest and deepest divisions in American life" (Loewen 138). What were the causes of racism? How did it develop historically? In order to answer those complex questions, I plan to examine the conditions of America's history from colonialism to present day society. It was these conditions of America's past that promoted the development of racist practices and ideas that continue to be embraced by many to this day.
After the civil war in 1865 , we later come across the reconstruction act in March 1867. This divided the south into several districts, The reconstruction act lasted until 1877. After the civil war ended ,reconstruction was well organized and peaceful until there was an increasing amount of fear and violence during the time of “Reign of Terror”. This was an unfortunate time because many blacks were being abused or murdered. The Ku Klux Klan became an organization by terrorists. “Give me liberty” by Eric Foner states “hundreds of former slaves were murdered, including fifty members of a black militia unit after they had surrendered.” (pg.468) You can assume this