What is the Ku Klux Klan?

The oldest and largest terrorist organization in the United States. The word Ku-Klux comes from the Greek KuKloo, which means gathering. The Klan is a race. Because the three prefixes all start with K, they are called the Ku Klux Klan. Also known as the White Alliance and the Invisible Empire. Founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865. The party flag is triangular in shape, with a yellow background and red edges, with a black dragon on it. The uniforms of party members are white coats and white cloth hoods covering the head, giving people a sense of mystery and terror. Party membership was limited to white Protestants born in the United States. The party joining ceremony was held late at night. Party discipline is very strict. Subordinates must obey their superiors absolutely. They only have vertical relationships with each other. Party members must keep the secrets of the conservative party. On the surface, the Ku Klux Klan's platform is to "support the Constitution," "maintain law and order," and "believe in Christ." In fact, it advocates "racial distinctions," spreads racism, and advocates depriving blacks of their basic rights. Persecute black people or open-minded people through illegal terrorist methods such as kidnapping, lynching, and mass killings. In 1871, President Grant ordered the disbandment of all Ku Klux Klans in the South. In 1915 Colonel Simmons of Georgia re-established the Klan organization. After World War I, the Ku Klux Klan experienced unprecedented growth, reaching 5 million members in 1924. In 1940 the Ku Klux Klan merged with the German American Alumni Association. During World War II, the Ku Klux Klan was disbanded. Public activities resumed in April 1944. After the war, the Ku Klux Klan targeted communism, progressives and the black masses, and regarded Catholicism as a "forgivable object" and no longer opposed it. It gradually gained legal status in California and Florida, and was active in 18 other states. Affiliated organizations of the Ku Klux Klan include the Columbian Society in Georgia, the Knights and Women of the Ku Klux Klan in New York, and the United Sons of America. The party often interacts with some fascist organizations that promote racial discrimination and supports each other. But it is not recognized by authorities and the public in most states.

Introduction

The Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1866 by veterans of the defeated Confederate army in the Civil War. In its early days, the Ku Klux Klan's goal was to restore the power of the Democratic Party in the American South and to oppose the policies enforced by federal troops in the South to improve the treatment of old black slaves. The group often uses violence to achieve its goals. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant issued the Ku Klux Klan and Execution Act, forcibly outlawing the political organization.

The second organization to bear this name was founded in 1915 by William Simmons at Stone Mountain Peak near Atlanta. It was a for-profit organization whose purpose was to win the relative advantage of white Protestants over blacks, Roman Catholics, Jews, Asians and other immigrants. Although the organization promoted racism and committed lynchings and other acts of violence, it operated openly in the United States and at its peak in the 1920s had 4 million members, including politicians at all levels of government. The organization hit a low point during the Great Depression, and lost many members to conscription or volunteer service during World War II.

The group's name "Ku Klux Klan" has also been used by many other groups, including those who opposed the Civil Rights Act and advocated racial discrimination in the 1960s. There are still dozens of organizations today in the United States and other countries that use all or part of the word as their names.

History

The Early Ku Klux Klan

The earliest Ku Klux Klan was formed on December 24, 1865, shortly after the end of the Civil War, by six members of the Lost South. Founded in Pulaski, Tennessee by Army Veterans. The original purpose was to perform satirical shows and some kind of commemorative ceremony. From 1866 to 1867, members of the organization began to disrupt black prayer meetings and break into black houses at night to steal guns. Some of these operations bear the shadow of previous self-defense police groups such as the "Yellow Jackets" and "Red Hoods" in Tennessee. In 1867, the Ku Klux Klan held a convention in Nashville and issued a charter drafted by former Confederate Army Brigadier General George Gordon, beginning to develop into a national organization. A few weeks later, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate army general who had been involved in the slave trade, was elected as the first national leader.

The Klan's main goal was to fight against Constitutional Reconstruction. After the Civil War, the Southern states experienced dramatic social and political changes. Local whites saw this as a threat to their racial superiority and attempted to resist the change. As Congress passed statutes to achieve racial equality, the Democratic Party, which represented white southerners, was unable to legislate to maintain the whites' status as they had been. In addition, the Klan also hoped to control the political and social status of freed slaves. These mainly include restrictions on black people's rights to education, economic development and voting rights. As a result, violence became the best means for the Ku Klux Klan to achieve its goals. However, the Klan's violence was not limited to African Americans. Southern Communists also often became innocent victims. As a result, the Ku Klux Klan became a violent tool of the Democratic Party. In addition, with the end of the rule of the Confederate government, local Caucasian whites restored their social status and began to implement apartheid policies.

In a newspaper interview, Forrester claimed that the Ku Klux Klan had 550,000 male members nationwide, and that although he did not belong to the organization himself, he strongly supported the organization and was able to Gathered 40,000 KKK members within days. He also claimed that the biggest enemies of the Ku Klux Klan were not black people, but "men with baggage bags" (an allusion to Northerners who migrated to the South after the Civil War) and "scoundrels" (an allusion to the Nazis and white Klansmen from the South). ). In fact, this statement is not entirely a lie. The Ku Klux Klan also targeted the white groups mentioned above, especially teachers who came to the South with the Freedmen's Committees after the war. Many of these teachers had been active abolitionists before the war and were active in the Underground Railroad movement. Many southerners believed that local blacks were instigated by these northerners to vote for the Communist Party.

In fact, the national organization led by Forrester did not have much binding force on local Klan members, who had a high degree of autonomy. One Klan official declared, "The so-called Director General is in name only, and I have no authority whatsoever over the young men who have taken the most active part in violent activities such as revenge and lynching that go beyond the purposes of the Klan." In 1869, Forrest declared that "the activities of the organization have exceeded their original great patriotic purposes and have become criminal acts endangering public safety" and ordered the disbandment of the Ku Klux Klan. However, the order had little effect because local organizations lacked trusted communication channels. As a result, many Klan organizations continued to operate in various locations despite the lack of a central authority. As with Forrester's public denial of his Klan membership, many believed the order was simply to protect himself from legal punishment.

In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant issued the "Ku Klux Klan and Execution Act" declaring the party an illegal organization and authorizing the government to forcibly ban the organization's activities. Hundreds of Klansmen were fined or jailed, and the writ of habeas corpus was restricted in parts of South Carolina. These operations were successful, and the Klan almost disappeared from South Carolina. In 1882, the Ku Klux Klan Act was deemed unconstitutional. The Klan was gone, but they also achieved some of their goals, such as denying black people their political rights.

The Second Ku Klux Klan

The Second Ku Klux Klan was founded during World War I and is generally believed to be associated with President Woodrow Wilson and Griffey It is closely related to the famous film "The Birth of a Nation" directed by Si. After watching the film, President Wilson commented, "This is like a history written in lightning. My only regret is its perfect truth." The film is based on two novels by Thomas Dixon. Adapted from "The Clansman" and "Spots of the Jaguar". The original author hopes to "revolutionarily change the minds of Northerners by recreating a beautiful history of the Democratic Party." The film describes the area where the Ku Klux Klan was successful as the Midwest, when in fact it should be the American South. After watching this film, many white people at the bottom of society believe that their poverty is caused by black or Jewish bankers. This propaganda method is similar to that of Nazi Germany. This film led to the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan across the United States. At test screenings in Los Angeles, actors dressed as Klansmen were hired as publicists, and later at the official premiere in Atlanta, regrouped Klansmen took to the streets to cheer. In some places, enthusiastic Southern spectators even fired at the stage screen.

During this year, another important event that led to the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan was the lynching of Jewish factory owner Leo Frank. Local newspapers at the time reported a sensational news: In a Jewish-run factory, owner Leo Frank committed a sex crime and murdered his employee Mary Pagan. Frank was convicted of murder in a questionable trial in Georgia (because of the violent crowd that gathered in the courtroom, the defendant and defense attorneys were not present when the jury announced the verdict). Frank's appeal was also dismissed (with Superior Court Judge Oliver Wendell Helms dissenting because he considered the trial inconsistent with due process). The consul commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment, but a group of men calling themselves the "Knights of Marie Pagan" kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him. Ironically, evidence in the murder case revealed that the real murderer was a black man with a criminal record, Kim Cornley, a janitor at the factory who was found washing a blood-stained shirt after the murder. clothing.

For many Southerners who believed in Frank's guilt, the case had an unusual connection to "The Birth of a Nation." Because they associated the victim Pagan with the female character Flora in the film who jumped off a cliff to avoid being raped by a black man. After this incident, the Klansmen, who regrouped, added "anti-Semitic," "anti-Catholic," and "anti-immigrant" to their demands.

The Frank trial was exploited by Georgia politician and publisher Thomas Watson, a magazine editor who later became a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and was elected to the Senate. In 1915, some elderly Ku Klux Klan members and members of the "Mary Pagan Knights" organization held an inaugural meeting on a mountaintop to announce the birth of the new Ku Klux Klan.

The New Klan was simultaneously a for-profit organization and also involved in fraternal organizations that were popular at the time. The difference from the early Ku Klux Klan is that the background of the old Ku Klux Klan is the American Democratic Party and southern states, while the members of the new Ku Klux Klan come from both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party (the proportion of the latter is slightly lower), and their influence is Throughout the United States and even in some states, it has had a huge impact on politics.

After this, the New Klan fell into disarray due to its involvement in the rape and murder of David Stephenson. Stephenson, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan (known as the Grand Dragon) in Indiana and 14 other states, was accused in a sensational case of raping and murdering a young female teacher, Madge Oberholtzer. (The victim was beaten so many times by Stephenson that she was heard saying she had been "bitten by a 'man-eater'"). In the 1930s, the second generation of the Ku Klux Klan began to decline and disbanded in 1944. Since then, the name Ku Klux Klan has been used by a number of independent groups.

From the 1920s to the 1930s, a faction of the Ku Klux Klan called the Black Legion was very active in the Midwestern United States. Unlike the Klansmen who usually wore white robes, they wore black pirate outfits. The Black Legion is the most violent and bloody organization of the Ku Klux Klan. They are notorious for attacking and assassinating communists or socialists.

American folklorist and writer Stetson Kennedy went deep into the Ku Klux Klan to investigate after World War II, and provided information about the organization and even some secret codes to the "Superman" radio program team. Finally, the program launched a Special program introducing the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy attempted to demystify the Klan, and his interpretation of Klan rituals and codes had a negative impact on the group's popularity.

In some incidents, Klan targets began to fight back. In 1958 in North Carolina, members of the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses at the home of two Lumbee Indians who had befriended white people and held a night rally of the Ku Klux Klan nearby. As a result, they found themselves surrounded by hundreds of Indians with weapons in their hands. . A shootout ensued, and the Klansmen were forced to retreat.

Several organizations that used the name of the Ku Klux Klan after World War II were identified as resistance to the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. In 1963, two Ku Klux Klan members bombed a church in Alabama where a civil rights organization was holding a gathering. This incident resulted in the deaths of four young girls and aroused great public outrage. In the end, this actually promoted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1964, the FBI launched a "counterintelligence plan" in an attempt to infiltrate and destroy the Ku Klux Klan organization. The program's significance in the civil rights movement was multifaceted. This is because during the operation, intelligence personnel used methods such as infiltration, disinformation, and violence against violence, which were not only used against far-left and far-right organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Weathermen, but were also used to Against nonviolent organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Martin Luther King Jr. This duality is most typically seen in the murder of Viola Lewiso. Lewiso, a white woman from the South, set out from her home in Detroit with four other members to attend a civil rights movement meeting in the South. Lewisot was shot to death in a car on the highway by four Klansmen, one of whom was an undercover FBI agent. After the tragedy, the FBI spread rumors that the victim was a communist and had abandoned his child in order to have sex with members of the black civil rights movement. Despite the duplicity of the above-mentioned FBI operations, Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the Klan in 1979, publicly stated that the counterintelligence program was very successful in destroying the Klan organization. Two rival factions within the Ku Klux Klan accused each other of being undercover agents for the FBI, and eventually it was discovered that Bill Wilkinson, the leader of one of the Ku Klux Klan Knights, was actually working for the FBI.

During this period, resistance to the Ku Klux Klan also began to expand. Thompson reported that during his time with the Ku Klux Klan, his car was shot at and he was publicly yelled at by black children. A Ku Klux Klan rally was also disrupted by black soldiers at a nearby military base. Klan operations were often met with hostile protests, which sometimes included violence.

The Ku Klux Klan's disadvantage in court cases has spurred a continued search for judicial means to combat its growth. For example, the lynching of Michael Donald in 1981 led to a judicial trial, which ultimately led to the collapse of the United Ku Klux Klan of America. Thompson pointed out that many Klan leaders who did not care about criminal arrest had to curb their behavior to save the cost of fighting such legal cases when faced with multi-million-dollar civil damages cases filed by the Southern Law Center. However, litigation was also a method used by the Ku Klux Klan. For example, Thomson's book was forced to be canceled due to a defamation lawsuit filed by the Ku Klux Klan.

Thereafter, the Ku Klux Klan can also transform into organizations targeting other groups of color, such as Christian Identity, Neo-Nazis, and Skinheads.

The Second Ku Klux Klan was once famous, and its influence expanded from the South to the Midwest, as well as northern states, and even reached Canada. In its heyday, most organizations moved to the Midwestern states. Through many elected local politicians, the Klan controlled government in states such as Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. Its publications even claimed that the Communist Party and the party's former president Warren Harding were also members of the Ku Klux Klan, but so far there has been no formal evidence to prove this. Representatives of the Ku Klux Klan played such an important role at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York that the convention became known as the "Klan-fabricated convention." The convention ended with a confrontation between William McAdoo, who had a background in the Ku Klux Klan, and Al Smith, the Catholic mayor of New York. After several days of negotiations and debate, the two candidates chose to compromise and reconcile. Ku Klux Klan representatives reversed course on a Democratic forum platform that would have banned the group's activities. On July 4, 1924, thousands of Ku Klux Klan members gathered in New Jersey and burned crosses and effigies of Smith to celebrate their victory over the Forum platform.

At its peak in 1920, the Ku Klux Klan had more than 4 million members, including many politicians. In 1924, Harry Truman paid $10 to join the Ku Klux Klan, but at a meeting, Klan cadres asked Truman not to hire any officials with Catholic backgrounds if he was re-elected as county judge. But Truman declined the request because many of his comrades were Catholic. Eventually he was forced to quit the organization and his membership fee was refunded. (After Truman became the President of the United States, he did a lot to protect civil rights, which aroused the jealousy of many Ku Klux Klansmen). In Saskatchewan, Canada, the Ku Klux Klan played an important role in the 1929 provincial election. They defeated the Liberal government and gave James Anderson's Conservatives control of the provincial government for the next five years. Another former Klan with national influence in the United States was Democratic Senator and later Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who later severed ties with the organization. Early in Black's political career, he defended a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the assassination of Catholic priest James Coyler in Alabama and ended up with a jury controlled by the Klan. not guilty verdict. David Duke served as the national leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan until 1978. He also served as a Republican state legislator in Louisiana before breaking away from the Ku Klux Klan in 1880. West Virginia Democratic Senator Robert Bode also joined the Ku Klux Klan in his 20s and earned the title of Kleagle. In 1958, the 41-year-old Bode also defended the Ku Klux Klan in the Senate election. He later said that joining the Ku Klux Klan was the greatest mistake of his life.

Contemporary Ku Klux Klan

Although the Ku Klux Klan is often mentioned in American politics as a far-right organization, today the Ku Klux Klan only exists in scattered forms. , and its supporters probably will not exceed thousands. In the report "Extremism in the United States" published in 2002, the Jewish organization "Anti-Defamation League" believed that "Today, organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan no longer exist in the United States. There are only some scattered, regional and small-scale organization, and they are declining." However, they also suggest that the group's supporters still seek to legitimize the Klan's tenets and are unlikely to disappear quickly.

Some of the larger Klan organizations currently operating include:

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Church of America

Ku Klux Klan Empire of America< /p>

White Camelia Knights

There are also many small groups.

In 2003, relevant organizations estimated that there were still about 5,500 to 6,000 Ku Klux Klan members in the United States. They belonged to about 158 ??scattered organizations, two-thirds of which were in the former states of the American Confederacy. . The remaining one-third is mainly found in the Midwestern United States.

Currently, individuals who identify themselves as Klansmen do not disclose their identities. They often use "AYAK" (Are you a Klansman?) to secretly identify themselves to another possible member. If the other party is also a member of the Ku Klux Klan, they will often answer "AKIA" (A Klansman I am).

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also provides legal assistance to various organizations of the Ku Klux Klan to ensure that they are protected by the freedom of speech stipulated in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.