Ku Klux Klan Pros And Cons

Ku Klux Klan: Basics

The Ku Klux Klan is a United states based white supremacy group. It was originally conceived in the Reconstruction Era (1867) by former confederates. After being disbanded for their numerous murders, the group was revived decades later in the 20’s. The KKK would go on to be disbanded and revived one last major time in the 50’s-60’s. These major periods of historic Klan activity will be addressed in waves based on time period; first, second and third, respectively.

Ku Klux Klan: Philosophy

From their conception, through their various revivals, and into the present day the Klu Klux Klan has always had this in common: they are a white supremacist group. Their actions as an organization reflect that they believe white

christians are superior to black people and other religious or racial minorites. The Klan has a pattern of viewing minorites as dangerous, contrary to rather less dogmatic evidence. For example, in early Klan activity documented in a pamphlet by Ida B. Well’s, the author laments on atrocity of lynchings where black people were hung without due process. A particular case is described of a black man hung for the rape of a white girl who said she was raped by a white man. In the 19th century Klan targets expanded from black people to include catholics and jewish people, as well as other politically tied ideas or groups they saw as threatening to american traditionalism. Things in this category included communism, organized labour, bootleggers, modernists, and radicalism. Their hatred for minorites other than black people, including Jewish people and Catholics, eventually lead to the “Nazification of the Klan” which continues into their modern ideology. Source author Waldo E. Martin attributes this to a particular Klan leader, saying “He (David Duke) led the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (1973-1982), and went on to win a Louisiana congressional seat in 1989 after forming the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP).”

Ku Klux Klan: Goals
Before the 19th Century began, the Ku Klux Klan was conceived by former confederates to resist what they saw as a radical republican takeover of the government and the enforcement of black dominance in the south. Their methods included exhibitionism and vigilante justice. During the 1920’s, the major revival of the Klan started as an adult fraternity with no clear goal, but quickly was found and controlled by advertisers for maximum profit. They maintained their racism and also supported for prohibition and feared a communist revolution in the US similar to the then-recent bolshevik revolution. Their staunch traditionalist aims gained McCarthy-like support at this time exceeding 4 million national members. The third wave KKK was the regathering of the broken 20’s groups that had laid dormant, mobilizing against segregation and the civil rights movement. At the time other “citizens councils” in support of segregation were also popular. Segregation supporters also shared other Klan aims, quoted by Journalist John N. Popham as describing the supreme court judges against school segregation as “brainwashed stooges for communism” (Organized Resistance to Racial Laws Grows, 1956). The Klan’s anti-communism from the 20’s onward was an extremely popular opinion during the cold war in America and also included anti-minority sentiments. The Klan’s high profile targets for terrorist acts such as murder during the 50’s and 60’s era KKK included civil-rights workers. In more modern years the Klan is more fragmented ideologically and less popular. Their ideology today consists of various white-supremacist ideas. As a result not all members of the Klan fall within the official Knights Party that runs today, and the group has fewer collective aims. Despite this the Klan ideology still triggers violence in a small groups, gangs, and individuals. A more recent and destructive example of this effect is the KKK sympathies of the Charleston Shooter. (Dylann Roof also gained his ideology from the Council of Conservative Citizens, previously the pro-segregation White Citizen’s Council mentioned by Journalist Popham during the third Klan wave)

Ku Klux Klan: Impact of Terrorism
Under lynch law during the Reconstruction Period, the Klan murdered some 728 African Americans without due process.

According to the pamphlet Southern Horrors the Klan’s acts actually garnered support, rather than disgust, from many African American’s due to the Klan’s justification of protecting against and avenging the rape of white women, which was the reason for 1/3 of lynchings. The black community at the time saw rape as abhorrent enough to justify the vigilante justice of the KKK, but the violence quickly became enough of a problem to be quelled by Ulysses S. Grant under the Ku Klux Klan Act. The 20’s revival of the Klan, heavily promoted and widely profitable to its leaders, spurred enough terrorist acts to prompt a congressional hearing on the subject. This investigation in October of 1921 was inconclusive. As discussed in St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, In a case of Klan violence before it disbanded again in 1944, Malcolm X’s father was murdered in what was ruled as a suicide. This was despite the fact the victim’s head was all but entirely severed and crushed. The murder and resulting troubles tore the family of the Malcolm apart early in his early life. Social workers pitted the family against each other, the suicide ruling mooted the life insurance policy of the father, and Malcolm was removed from his home prompting the mental breakdown of his mother thereafter. Later in 1965, during the third wave of the Ku Klux Klan, president Lyndon Johnson condemned the Klan and their hand in the murder of a civil rights worker. In this particular case the victim was a white woman, although other such civil rights activists were murdered during this period. The most well known case of Klan murder from the Civil Rights Era is the murder of three men; the white Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, and the jewish Michael

Schwerner.