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An extremist right-wing secret society in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan was originally founded in the southern states after the Civil War to oppose social change and black emancipation by violence and terrorism. Although disbanded twice, it reemerged in the 1950s and 1960s and continues at a local level. Members disguise themselves in white robes and hoods, and often use a burning cross as a symbol of their organization.
Ku Kluxer; Ku Klux Klansman pl. -men
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
For more information on Ku Klux Klan, visit Britannica.com.
A Reconstruction-era terrorist group founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan has been resurrected in a variety of forms from that time to the present; it is one of the powerful, enduring symbols of violent white supremacy and bigotry in American history.
Initially a fraternal organization for a small group of Confederate veterans, the Reconstruction-era Klan quickly turned in a violent, overtly political direction. Like similar groups that appeared across the South in 1866 and 1867 (the Knights of the White Camellia, for example), the Klan used violence and the threat of violence to thwart perceived challenges to white supremacy and Democratic rule. Its mayhem was intended, among other purposes, as a means of controlling black labor, reinforcing social deference to whites, disciplining perceived instances of interracial sexual relationships, and punishing any whites sympathetic to or working on behalf of the Republican Party. Most often, the Klan's victims were African American community leaders—ministers, teachers, politicians, former or current soldiers, or anyone else who clearly held a place of special importance among the former slaves. Murders, floggings, beatings, and sexual assaults carried out against these leaders often achieved the intended goal not only of undermining Reconstruction government, but also of demoralizing the wider black community. Klan terror erupted on a vast scale during the election year of 1868, leading to more than two thousand political assassinations and murders in the former Confederate states, often carried out with the approval or even direct support of local Democratic leaders. "Run nigger, run, or the Kuklux will catch you," warned one Democratic newspaper in Alabama (Trelease, White Terror, p. 63). The violence completely eliminated Republican opposition in some areas of the South. Similar waves of Klan activity in 1870 and 1872 led to a series of congressional acts that gave the federal government historic new authority to enforce civil rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The most significant of these were the Enforcement Act of 1870 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The Klan faded from the scene after Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, but remained a vivid symbol of barbarous racial violence in the minds of African Americans—and an equally powerful emblem for many whites of what they saw as a just struggle against the tyranny of Reconstruction and "black rule."
By the early twentieth century, idealized images of the Klan as savior of white civilization had become a mainstay of scholarly and popular representations of the Reconstruction era. Thomas Dixon's best selling, turn-of-the-century novels The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman told the story of heroic Klansmen with melodramatic flair. In 1915, the motion picture visionary D. W. Griffith used The Clansman as the basis for his sweeping epic, Birth of a Nation.
In that same year, previously unsuccessful fraternal organizer William J. Simmons capitalized on the enormous popularity of Griffith's film by launching a new Klan movement. For five years the "second" Klan barely survived, maintaining a small membership in Georgia and Alabama. In 1920, however, in the wake of extensive postwar labor and racial strife and the onset of national Prohibition, it began a five-year period of enormous, nationwide popularity. The revived Klan was based on romantic images of the original, but ultimately was a very different organization. While the first Klan had little formal structure or leadership outside of individual communities, the second had a highly developed organization, with a hierarchy of local, state, and national leaders, public relations advisers, a string of newspapers, and a marketing operation that sold official uniforms and other paraphernalia. Using recruiting agents—who earned a 25 percent commission on each ten-dollar initiation fee—and holding mass public ceremonies, parades, and social events to attract widespread attention, the second Klan enrolled perhaps as many as five million male and female members (women joined a separate organization, Women of the Ku Klux Klan). Its largest state memberships and greatest local influence came outside the South, in the Midwest and the West. The Indiana Klan enrolled approximately 25 percent of all native-born white men in the state; at least one half million men and women became Klan members in Ohio.
The goals and tactics of the second Klan also differed markedly from those of the first. While the original movement used terror to confront the significant challenge to white supremacy that came with Reconstruction, the Klan of the 1920s faced no such threat and was focused instead on upholding a more general sense of white, Protestant hegemony within American society. The perceived threat came from Catholics, Jews, immigrants, African Americans, Prohibition-related lawlessness, gambling, prostitution, immoral popular culture and personal behavior, and a sense of decline in religion, "pure womanhood," and the family. Vigilante violence did occur in association with the new Klan, most often in the South, targeted in some instances, of course, against African Americans. But more often, when violence did occur, it was directed against fellow white Protestants as punishment for drinking, gambling, adulterous behavior, or other perceived moral lapse. Mob violence was also directed against the Klan, particularly in northern and midwestern cities where ethnic minorities vastly outnumbered native, white Protestants and Klan parades and demonstrations were not well received. The main thrust of the second Klan movement, however, was to elect its members and supporters to public office. Promising to uphold traditional values and enforce the law—Prohibition in particular—the Klan won control of mayor's offices, city councils, school boards, sheriff and district attorney offices, and judgeships in many communities across the nation. It gained complete control of state politics for a time in Indiana, Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Alabama, and was an important political force in almost every state outside the Northeast. The second Klan began to lose its momentum by 1925 when Klan politicians proved as incapable as other elected officials of halting Prohibition-related vice and other unwanted conditions. Membership dropped precipitously after a series of scandals, the most famous involving Indiana Klan leader D. C. Stephenson, who was convicted of second-degree murder after committing a brutal sexual assault against an Indianapolis woman who eventually died from her injuries.
By the end of the 1920s only small pockets of Klan members remained, most of them in the South and devoted primarily to perpetuating the tradition of racial vigilantism. After World War II, support for Klan groups began to increase again as war-related social changes and the rising expectations of African Americans threatened the Jim Crow system. Once the civil rights movement took hold, the spirit of massive white resistance and the leadership of the White Citizens' Council gave birth to a number of independent, regional Klan organizations. Like the Reconstruction-era Klan cells, these new groups operated mainly through terror, committing hundreds of murders, and countless other acts of violence and intimidation, with the goal of stopping the second Reconstruction. In the face of intense media coverage and the persistent courage of civil rights workers, however, Klan violence actually back fired by broadening public sympathy for the cause of racial justice. Klan groups have continued to exist since that time as part of a diverse, sometimes violent right-wing element in American life, although consistently and effectively assailed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups. In one notable instance, one-time Louisiana Klan leader David Duke gained widespread national attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s by proclaiming himself a mainstream conservative Republican, winning election to the state legislature, and falling just short of the governors' office. National party leaders, however, rejected Duke, underscoring the fact that the Klan itself had lost any place of legitimacy or influence in American life.
Bibliography
Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. 3d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987. The original edition was published in 1965.
Jenkins, William D. Steel Valley Klan: The Ku Klux Klan in Ohio's Mahoning Valley. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990.
Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Trelease, Allan W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
The First Ku Klux Klan
The original Ku Klux Klan was organized by ex-Confederate elements to oppose the Reconstruction policies of the radical Republican Congress and to maintain “white supremacy.” After the Civil War, when local government in the South was weak or nonexistent and there were fears of black outrages and even of an insurrection, informal vigilante organizations or armed patrols were formed in almost all communities. These were linked together in societies, such as the Men of Justice, the Pale Faces, the Constitutional Union Guards, the White Brotherhood, and the Order of the White Rose. The Ku Klux Klan was the best known of these, and in time it absorbed many of the smaller organizations.
It was organized at Pulaski, Tenn., in May, 1866. Its strange disguises, its silent parades, its midnight rides, its mysterious language and commands, were found to be most effective in playing upon fears and superstitions. The riders muffled their horses' feet and covered the horses with white robes. They themselves, dressed in flowing white sheets, their faces covered with white masks, and with skulls at their saddle horns, posed as spirits of the Confederate dead returned from the battlefields. Although the Klan was often able to achieve its aims by terror alone, whippings and lynchings were also used, not only against blacks but also against the so-called carpetbaggers and scalawags.
A general organization of the local Klans was effected in Apr., 1867, at Nashville, Tenn. Gen. N. B. Forrest, the famous Confederate cavalry leader, was made Grand Wizard of the Empire and was assisted by ten Genii. Each state constituted a Realm under a Grand Dragon with eight Hydras as a staff; several counties formed a Dominion controlled by a Grand Titan and six Furies; a county was a Province ruled by a Grand Giant and four Night Hawks; the local Den was governed by a Grand Cyclops with two Night Hawks as aides. The individual members were called Ghouls.
Control over local Dens was not as complete as this organization would seem to indicate, and reckless and even lawless local leaders sometimes committed acts that the leaders could not countenance. General Forrest, in Jan., 1869, seemingly under some apprehension as to the use of its power, ordered the disbandment of the Klan and resigned as Grand Wizard. Local organizations continued, some of them for many years.
The Klan was particularly effective in systematically keeping black men away from the polls, so that the ex-Confederates gained political control in many states. Congress in 1870 and 1871 passed legislation to combat the Klan (see force bill). The Klan was especially strong in the mountain and Piedmont areas. In the Lower South the Knights of the White Camelia were dominant. That order, founded (1867) in Louisiana, is reputed to have had even more members than the Ku Klux Klan, but its membership was more conservative and its actions less spectacular. It had a similar divisional organization, with headquarters in New Orleans.
The Second Ku Klux Klan
The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William J. Simmons, an ex-minister and promoter of fraternal orders; its first meeting was held on Stone Mt., Ga. The new Klan had a wider program than its forerunner, for it added to “white supremacy” an intense nativism and anti-Catholicism (it was also anti-Semitic) closely related to that of the Know-Nothing movement of the middle 19th cent. Consequently its appeal was not sectional, and, aided after 1920 by the activities of professional promoters Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Y. Clarke, it spread rapidly throughout the North as well as the South. It furnished an outlet for the militant patriotism aroused by World War I, and it stressed fundamentalism in religion.
Professing itself nonpolitical, the Klan nevertheless controlled politics in many communities and in 1922, 1924, and 1926 elected many state officials and a number of Congressmen. Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Oregon, and Maine were particularly under its influence. Its power in the Midwest was broken during the late 1920s when David C. Stephenson, a major Klan leader there, was convicted of second-degree murder, and evidence of corruption came out that led to the indictment of the governor of Indiana and the mayor of Indianapolis, both supporters of the Klan. The Klan frequently took extralegal measures, especially against those whom it considered its enemies. As was the case with the earlier Klan, some of these measures, whether authorized by the central organization or not, were extreme.
At its peak in the mid-1920s its membership was estimated at 4 million to 5 million. Although the actual figures were probably much smaller, the Klan nevertheless declined with amazing rapidity to an estimated 30,000 by 1930. The Klan spirit, however, was a factor in breaking the Democratic hold on the South in 1928, when Alfred E. Smith, a Roman Catholic, was that party's presidential candidate. Its collapse thereafter was largely due to state laws that forbade masks and eliminated the secret element, to the bad publicity the organization received through its thugs and swindlers, and apparently from the declining interest of the members. With the depression of the 1930s, dues-paying membership of the Klan shrank to almost nothing. Meanwhile, many of its leaders had done extremely well financially from the dues and the sale of Klan paraphernalia.
The Klan after World War II
After World War II, Dr. Samuel Green of Georgia led a concerted attempt to revive the Klan, but it failed dismally as the organization splintered and as state after state specifically barred the order. Southern civil-rights activities during the 1960s gave the Klan a new impetus and led to revivals of scattered Klan organizations. The most notable of these were Mississippi's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Robert Shelton. The newly revived Klan groups were responsible for violent attacks against blacks and civil-rights workers in cities throughout the South, including Jacksonville and St. Augustine, Fla., Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala., and Meridian, Miss. In spite of its efforts, the new Klan was not strong, and by the end of the decade its power and membership had declined to practically nothing. Although a resurgence of support for the Klan was manifest in the surprising popularity in the early 1990s of David Duke of Louisiana, actual membership in Klan organizations is estimated to be in the low thousands.
Bibliography
A. W. Tourgée's Fool's Errand (1880) and T. Dixon's Clansman (1905), on which D. W. Griffith based his famous film The Birth of a Nation, were two popular novels about the original Klan. For other works on the Reconstruction era Ku Klux Klan see W. L. Fleming's edition (1905) of J. C. Lester and D. L. Wilson, Ku Klux Klan; S. F. Horn, Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871 (1939, repr. 1973). The structure of the Klan after World War I is discussed in J. M. Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan (1924); A. S. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics (1962); N. MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry (1994). D. Lowe's Ku Klux Klan: The Invisible Empire (1967) deals with the final period of Klan activity, as does D. M. Chalmer's Hooded Americanism (1968), which also discusses the first and second Klans. See also W. C. Wade, The Fiery Cross (1987); A. W. Tourgee, The Invisible Empire (1989).
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a white supremacist organization that was founded in 1866. With its characteristic white robes and masks, the secret fraternal organization has used acts of terrorism — including murder, lynching, arson, rape, and bombing — to oppose the granting of civil rights to African Americans and others. Deriving its membership from native-born, white Protestant U.S. citizens, the KKK has also been anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic and has opposed the immigration of all those it does not view as "racially pure." Other names for the group have been White Brotherhood, Heroes of America, Constitutional Union Guards, and Invisible Empire.
Origins and Initial Growth
Ex-Confederate soldiers first established the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. They developed the first two words of the group's name from the Greek word kuklos, meaning "group or band," and took the third as a variant of the word clan. Starting as a largely recreational group, the Klan soon turned to intimidating newly freed African Americans. Riding at night, the Klan terrorized and sometimes murdered those it opposed. It adopted its hooded white costume — a guise intended to represent the ghosts of the Confederate dead — to avoid identification and to frighten its victims during its nighttime crimes.
The Klan fed off the post-Civil War resentments of white southerners and attempted to restore that group to political supremacy in the South. The KKK vehemently fought the Reconstruction programs imposed on the South by a Republican Congress. Under Reconstruction, the North sought to restructure southern society on the basis of racial equality. Under this new regime, leading southern whites were disfranchised, while inexperienced African Americans, carpetbaggers (northerners who had migrated to the South following the war), and scalawags (southerners who cooperated with the North) occupied major political offices.
Shortly after the KKK's formation, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave trader and Confederate general, assumed control of the organization and turned it into a militaristic, hierarchical entity. In 1868, Forrest formally disbanded the group after he became appalled by its growing violence. However, the KKK continued to grow, and its atrocities worsened. Drawing the core of its membership from ex-Confederate soldiers, the KKK may have numbered several hundred thousand at its height during Reconstruction.
In 1871, the federal government took a series of steps to counter the KKK and its violence. Congress organized a joint select committee made up of seven senators and fourteen representatives to look into the Klan and its activities. It then passed the Civil Rights Act of 1871, frequently referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made night riding a crime and gave the president the power to suspend habeas corpus and order the use of federal troops in order to put down conspirators by force. The law also provided criminal and civil penalties for people convicted of private conspiracies — such as those perpetrated by the KKK — intended to deny others their civil rights.
Also in 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant relocated troops from the Indian wars on the western plains to South Carolina, in order to put down Klan violence. In October and November of that year, the federal Circuit Court for the District of South Carolina held a series of trials of KKK members suspected of having engaged in criminal conspiracies, but the trials resulted in few convictions.
The Klan declined in influence as the 1870s wore on. Arrests, combined with the return of southern whites to political dominance in the South, diminished its activity and influence.
Resurgence
The KKK experienced a resurgence after World War I, reaching a peak of 3 or 4 million members in the 1920s. David W. Griffith's 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman, served as the spark for this revival. The movie depicted the Klan as a heroic force defending the "Aryan birthright" of white southerners against African Americans and Radical Republicans seeking to build a Black Empire in the South. In particular, the movie showed a gallant Klan defending the honor of white women threatened by lecherous African American men.
William J. Simmons renewed the KKK at a Stone Mountain, Georgia, ceremony in 1915. Later, Christian fundamentalist ministers aided recruitment as the Klan portrayed itself as the protector of traditional values during the Jazz Age.
As its membership grew into the millions in the 1920s, the Klan exerted considerable political influence, helping to elect sympathetic candidates to state and national offices. The group was strong not only in southern states such as Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, but also in Oklahoma, California, Oregon, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Strongly opposed to non-Anglo-Saxon immigration, the Klan helped secure the passage of strict quotas on immigration. In addition to being racist, the group also espoused hatred of Jews, Catholics, socialists, and unions.
By the end of the 1920s, a backlash against the KKK had developed. Reports of its violence turned public sentiment against the group, and its membership declined to about forty thousand. At the same time, Louisiana, Michigan, and Oklahoma passed anti-mask laws intended to frustrate Klan activity. Most of these laws made it a misdemeanor to wear a mask that concealed the identity of the wearer, excluding masks worn for holiday costumes or other legitimate uses. South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia later passed similar laws.
Anti-Civil Rights Involvement
The KKK experienced another, less successful resurgence during the 1960s as African Americans won civil rights gains in the South. Opposed to the civil rights movement and its attempt to end racial segregation and discrimination, the Klan capitalized on the fears of whites, to grow to a membership of about twenty thousand. It portrayed the civil rights movement as a Communist, Jewish conspiracy, and it engaged in terrorist acts designed to frustrate and intimidate the movement's members. KKK adherents were responsible for acts such as the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four young black girls were killed and many others injured, and the 1964 murder of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, in Mississippi. The Klan was also responsible for many other beatings, murders, and bombings, including attacks on the Freedom Riders, who sought to integrate interstate buses.
In many instances, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), then under the control of J. Edgar Hoover, had intelligence that would have led to the prevention of Klan violence or conviction of its perpetrators. However, the FBI did little to oppose the Klan during the height of the civil rights movement.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the Klan had shrunk to under ten thousand members and had splintered into several organizations. However, it increasingly cooperated with a proliferating number of other white supremacist groups, including the Order and Aryan Nations. Like these groups, the KKK put new emphasis on whites as an "oppressed majority" victimized by affirmative action and other civil rights measures.
The Klan's campaign of hatred has spurred opposition from many fronts, including Klanwatch, an organization started by lawyer and civil rights activist Morris Dees in 1980. The group is affiliated with Dees's Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million civil suit against the Alabama-based United Klans of America for the 1981 murder of a nineteen-year-old man. The suit drove that Klan organization into bankruptcy.
The KKK suffered another setback in 1990, when the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that state's Anti-Mask Act (Ga. Code Ann. § 16-11-38) by a vote of 6-1 (State v. Miller, 260 Ga. 669, 398 S.E.2d 547). The case involved a Klan member who had been arrested for wearing full Klan regalia, including mask, in public and had claimed a First Amendment right to wear such clothing. The court ruled that the law, first passed in 1951, protected a state interest in safeguarding the right of the people to exercise their civil rights and to be free from violence and intimidation. It held that the law did not interfere with the defendant's freedom of speech.
See: Jim Crow Laws.
A secret society dedicated to the supremacy of white people in the United States. It began in the South during the time of Reconstruction and attempted to terrorize the many southern blacks and carpetbaggers who had replaced white southerners in positions of power. The Klan gained renewed strength in the 1920s and again in the 1960s but is now very diminished. It has stated that it aims to preserve “pure Americanism.” It has attacked Jews and Roman Catholics, along with immigrants and communists but is still primarily opposed to equal rights for black people and has often engaged in violence against them. Klansmen wear white hoods and robes. Klan leaders have titles such as Grand Dragon, Grand Cyclops, and Imperial Wizard.
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of several past and present organizations in the United States that have advocated white supremacy, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, racism, homophobia, anti-Communism and nativism. These organizations have often used terrorism, violence, and acts of intimidation, such as cross burning and lynching, to oppress African Americans and other social or ethnic groups.
The Klan's first incarnation was in 1866. Founded by veterans of the Confederate
Army, its main purpose was to resist Reconstruction, and it focused as much on
intimidating "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on
putting down the freed
In 1915, a second distinct group was founded using the same name. It was inspired by the newfound power of the modern mass media, via the film The Birth of a Nation and inflammatory anti-Semitic newspaper accounts surrounding the trial and lynching of accused murderer Leo Frank. The second KKK was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure, that paid thousands of men to organize local chapters all over the country. At its peak in the early 1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men.[1] The second KKK typically preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and anti-Semitism, and some local groups took part in lynchings and other violent activities. Its popularity fell during the Great Depression, and membership fell further during World War II because of scandals resulting from prominent members' crimes and its support of the Nazis.
The name "Ku Klux Klan" has since been used by many different unrelated groups, including many who opposed the Civil Rights Act and desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, with members of these groups eventually being convicted of murder and manslaughter in the deaths of civil rights workers and children (such as in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, and the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi). Today, it is estimated that there are as many as 150 Klan chapters with up to 8,000 members nationwide.[2] These groups, with operations in separated small local units, are considered extreme hate groups. The modern KKK has been repudiated by all mainstream media, political and religious leaders.
The original Ku Klux Klan was created after the end of the American Civil War on December 24, 1865, by six educated, middle-class Confederate veterans[3] from Pulaski, Tennessee, who were bored with postwar routine. The name was constructed by combining the Greek "kyklos" (κυκλος,circle) with "clan"[4]
The Ku Klux Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a "reign of terror" against Republican leaders both black and white. Those assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who had served in constitutional conventions."[5]
In an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, an effort was made to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters reporting to county leaders, counties reporting to districts, districts reporting to states, and states reporting to a national headquarters. The proposals, in a document called the "Prescript," were written by George Gordon, a former Confederate brigadier general. The Prescript included inspirational language about the goals of the Klan along with a list of questions to be asked of applicants for membership, which confirmed the focus on resisting Reconstruction and the Republican Party. The applicant was to be asked whether he was a Republican, a Union Army veteran, or a member of the Loyal League; whether he was "opposed to Negro equality both social and political;" and whether he was in favor of "a white man's government," "maintaining the constitutional rights of the South," "the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights," and "the inalienable right of self-preservation of the people against the exercise of arbitrary and unlicensed power."[6]
Despite the work that came out of the 1867 meeting, the Prescript was never accepted by any of the local units. They continued to operate autonomously, and there never were county, district or state headquarters.
According to one oral report, Gordon went to former slave trader and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, and told him about the new organization, to which Forrest replied, "That's a good thing; that's a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the niggers in their place."[7] A few weeks later, Forrest was selected as Grand Wizard, the Klan's national leader. In later interviews, however, Forrest denied the leadership role and stated that he never had any effective control over the Klan cells.
The Klan sought to control the political and social status of the freed slaves. Specifically, it attempted to curb black education, economic advancement, voting rights, and the right to bear arms. However, although the Klan's focus was mainly African Americans, Southern Republicans also became the target of vicious intimidation tactics. The violence achieved its purpose. For example, in the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock, but in the November presidential election, the county cast only one vote for Republican candidate Ulysses Grant.[8]
Klan intimidation was often targeted at schoolteachers and operatives of the federal Freedmen's Bureau. Black members of the Loyal Leagues were also the frequent targets of Klan raids. In a typical episode in Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry[9]
| “ | One of these teachers (Miss Allen of Illinois),
whose school was at Cotton Gin Port in Monroe County, was visited ... between
one and two o'clock in the morning on March, 1871, by about fifty men mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long white robe and
his face was covered by a loose mask with scarlet stripes. She was ordered to get up and dress which she did at once and then
admitted to her room the captain and lieutenant who in addition to the usual disguise had long horns on their heads and a sort of
device in front. The lieutenant had a |
” |
In other violence, Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a single county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties.[10]
An 1868 proclamation by Gordon[11] demonstrates several of the issues surrounding the Klan's violent activities.
By 1868, only two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was already beginning to decrease[14] and, as Gordon's proclamation shows, to become less political and more simply a
way of avoiding prosecution for violence. Many influential southern Democrats were beginning to see it as a liability, an excuse
for the federal government to retain its power over the South.[15] Georgian B.H. Hill went so far as to claim "that some of these
outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain."[16]
In an 1868 newspaper interview,[17] Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men, and that although he was not a member, he was "in sympathy" and would "cooperate" with them, and he could muster 40,000 Klansmen with five days' notice. He stated that the Klan did not see blacks as its enemy so much the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments like Tennessee governor Brownlow's, and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. This was a half truth since one of the main reasons for targeting these white groups was that they were impediments to efforts against the former slaves. The Klan went after white members of these groups, especially the schoolteachers brought south by the Freedmen's Bureau, many of whom had before the war been abolitionists or active in the underground railroad. Many white southerners believed, for example, that blacks were voting for the Republican Party only because they had been hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues. Black members of the Loyal Leagues were also the frequent targets of Klan raids. One Alabama newspaper editor declared that "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."[18]
The first Klan was never centrally organized. As a secret or "invisible" group, it had no membership rosters, no dues, no newspapers, no spokesmen, no chapters, no local officers, no state or national officials. Its popularity came from its reputation, which was greatly enhanced by its outlandish costumes and its wild and threatening theatrics. As historian Elaine Frantz Parsons discovered:[19]
| “ | Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, bored young men, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen. | ” |
Forrest's national organization had little control over the local Klans, which were highly autonomous. One Klan official complained that his own "so-called 'Chief'-ship was purely nominal, I having not the least authority over the reckless young country boys who were most active in 'night-riding,' whipping, etc., all of which was outside of the intent and constitution of the Klan..." Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating that it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace."[20] Because of the national organization's lack of control, this proclamation was more a symptom of the Klan's decline than a cause of it. Historian Stanley Horn writes that "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment."[21] A reporter in Georgia wrote in January 1870 that "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux."[22]
Although the Klan was being used more often as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted
against it. In lynching cases, whites were almost never indicted by all-white coroner's juries, and even when there was an
indictment, all-white trial juries were unlikely to vote for conviction. In many states, there were fears that the use of black
militiamen would ignite a race war.[23] When Republican
Despite this power, there was resistance to Klan terror. "Occasionally, organized groups successfully confronted the Klan. White Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized 'the anti-Ku Klux,' which put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks patrolled the streets of Bennettsville, South Carolina, to prevent Klan assaults."[25]
There was also a national movement to crack down on the Klan, even though many Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan even existed or was just a creation of nervous Republican governors in the South.[26] In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Scott convened a committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. Many southern states had already passed anti-Klan legislation, and in February Congressman (and former Union General) Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts (who was widely reviled by Southern whites) introduced federal legislation modeled on it.[27] The tide was turned in favor of the bill by the Governor of South Carolina's appeal for federal troops, and by reports of a riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.[28]
In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation, the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was used along with the 1870 Force Act to enforce the civil rights provisions of the constitution. Under the Klan Act, federal troops were used rather than state militias, and Klansmen were prosecuted in federal court, where juries were often predominantly black.[23] Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned, and habeas corpus was suspended in nine counties in South Carolina. These efforts were so successful that the Klan was destroyed in South Carolina[29] and decimated throughout the rest of the country, where it had already been in decline for several years. Prosecutions were led by Attorney General Amos Tappan Akerman. The tapering off of the federal government's actions under the Klan Act, ca. 1871–74, went along with the final extinction of the Klan,[30] although in some areas similar activities, including intimidation and murder of black voters, continued under the auspices of local organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs.[31] Even though the Klan no longer existed, it had achieved many of its goals, such as denying voting rights to Southern blacks.
However, it took several more years for all Klan elements to be destroyed. On Easter Sunday, 1873, the bloodiest single instance of racial violence in the Reconstruction era happened during the Colfax massacre. The massacre began when black citizens fought back against the Klan and its allies in the White League. As Louisiana black teacher and legislator John G. Lewis later remarked, "They attempted (armed self-defense) in Colfax. The result was that on Easter Sunday of 1873, when the sun went down that night, it went down on the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes."[32]
In 1882, long after the end of the first Klan, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional, saying that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend to private conspiracies.[33] However, the Force Act and the Klan Act have been invoked in later civil rights conflicts, including the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner;[34] the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo;[35] and Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic in 1991.
In the four and a half decades after the suppression of the first Ku Klux Klan, race relations in the United States remained very bad—the nadir of American race relations is often placed in this era, and according to Tuskegee Institute, the 1890s was the peak decade for lynchings.
