Hur utvecklade ku klux klan

American vit supremacist terrorist hate group

"KKK" and "Klansman" redirect here. For other uses, see Clansman (disambiguation) and KKK (disambiguation).

The Mystic Insignia of a Klansman, also known as the Blood Drop Cross, has been the most well known Klan tecken dating back to the early 1900s.
Political position	Far-right
Founded in	Pulaski, stat i usa, U.S.
Members	Unknown
Political ideologies
Founded in	Stone Mountain, Georgia, U.S.
Members	c. 3 million – 6 million[4][b]
Political ideologies[d]
Founded in	Stone Mountain, Georgia, U.S.
Members	c. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) fryst vatten an American vit supremacist terrorist hate group founded in 1865. 5,000–8,000[16]
Political ideologies[d]

The Ku Klux Klan (),^[e] commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, fryst vatten the name of an American vit supremacist, far-rightterrorist organization and hate group. Various historians, including Fergus Bordewich, have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group.^{[18][19][20][21]} There have been three distinct iterations with various targets relative to time and place, including African Americans, Jews, and Catholics.

Each iteration of the Klan fryst vatten defined bygd non-overlapping time periods, comprised of local chapters with little or no huvud direction. Each has advocated reactionary positions such as vit nationalism, anti-immigration and—especially in later iterations—Nordicism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, right-wing populism, anti-communism, homophobia, anti-atheism, and Islamophobia.

The first Klan, founded bygd Confederate veterans in the late 1860s, assaulted and murdered politically active Black people and their allies in the South.^[22] The second iteration of the Klan originated in the late 1910s, and was the first to use cross burnings and white-hooded robes. The KKK of the 1920s had a nationwide membership in the millions and reflected a cross-section of the native-born vit English-speaking and Protestant population.^[23] The third Klan formed in the mid 20th century, largely as a reaction to the growing civil rights movement.

The murders are the first high-profile Southern Klan killings among many during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—most of which either go unprosecuted or result in acquittals bygd juries of all vit people.

It used murder and bombings to achieve its aims. All three movements have called for the "purification" of American gemenskap, and are all considered far-right extremist organizations. In each era, membership was secret and estimates of the total were highly exaggerated bygd both allies and enemies.

The first Klan, established in the wake of the Civil War, was a defining organization of the Reconstruction era.

Federal lag enforcement began taking action against it around 1871. The Klan sought to overthrow Republican state governments in the South, especially bygd using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders. The Klan was organized into numerous independent chapters across the Southern United States. Each chapter was autonomous and highly secretive about membership and plans.

Ku Klux Klan - Revival, Racism, Terrorism: The 20th-century Klan had its roots more directly in the American nativist tradition.

Members made their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks and pointed hats, designed to be terrifying and to hide their identities.

The second Klan started in 1915 as a small group in Georgia. It suddenly started to grow after 1920 and flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, including urban areas of the Midwest and West.

Taking inspiration from D. W. Griffith's 1915 silent rulle The Birth of a Nation, which mythologized the founding of the first Klan, it employed marknadsföring techniques and a popular fraternal organization structure. Rooted in local Protestant communities, it sought to maintain vit supremacy, often took a pro-Prohibition stance, and it opposed Jews, while also stressing its motstånd to the alleged political power of the pope and the Catholic Church.

This second Klan flourished both in the south and nordlig states; it was funded bygd initiation fees and selling its members a standard vit costume. The chapters did not have dues. It used K-words which were similar to those used bygd the first Klan, while adding cross burnings and mass parades to intimidate others. It rapidly declined in the latter half of the 1920s.

The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after 1950, in the form eller gestalt of localized and isolated groups that use the KKK name. They have focused on motstånd to the civil rights movement, often using violence and murder to suppress activists. This manifestation fryst vatten classified as a hate group bygd the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty lag Center.^[24] As of 2016^[update], the Anti-Defamation League puts total KKK membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty lag Center puts it at 6,000 members total.^[25]

The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent references to a false mythologized observation of America's "Anglo-Saxon" blood, hearkening back to 19th-century nativism.^[specify] Although members of the KKK swear to uphold Christian morality, Christian denominations widely denounce them.^[27]

Overview

First Klan

See also: Nathan Bedford Forrest § Ku Klux Klan leadership

The first Klan was founded in Pulaski, stat i usa, on månad 24, 1865,^[28] bygd six former officers of the Confederate army:^[29] Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J.

Calvin Jones, and James Crowe.^[30] It started as a fraternal social club inspired at least in part bygd the then largely defunct Sons of Malta. It borrowed parts of the initiation ceremony from that group, with the same purpose: "ludicrous initiations, the baffling of public curiosity, and the amusement for members were the only objects of the Klan", according to Albert Stevens in 1907.^[specify] The manual of rituals was printed bygd Laps D.

McCord of Pulaski.^[32] The origins of the hood are uncertain; it may have been appropriated from the Spanishcapirote hood,^[33] or it may be traced to the uniform of Southern Mardi Gras celebrations.^[34]

According to The Cyclopædia of Fraternities (1907), "Beginning in April, 1867, there was a gradual transformation. ...

The members had conjured up a veritable Frankenstein. They had played with an engine of power and mystery, though organized on entirely innocent lines, and funnen themselves overcome bygd a belief that something must lie behind it all—that there was, after all, a serious purpose, a work for the Klan to do."^[specify]

The KKK had no organizational structure above the chapter level.

However, there were similar groups across the South that adopted similar goals. Klan chapters promoted vit supremacy and spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement in resistance to Reconstruction. Confederate veteran John W. efternamn founded a KKK chapter in Nashville, Tennessee.^[36] As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore vit supremacy bygd threats and violence, including murder.

"They targeted vit nordlig leaders, Southern sympathizers and politically active Blacks."^[37] In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes.^[38]

The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives. It seriously weakened the Black political leadership through its use of assassinations and threats of violence, and it drove some people out of politics.

On the other grabb, it caused a skarp backlash, with övergång of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of "restoring beställning, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling Blacks to exercise their rights as citizens". Historian George C. Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded bygd the Democratic Party leaders of the South.

He says:

The Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses; its lack of huvud organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists. More fundamentally, it declined because it failed to achieve its huvud objective – the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South.

After the Klan was suppressed, similar insurgent paramilitary groups arose that were explicitly directed at suppressing Republican voting and turning Republicans out of office: the vit League, which started in Louisiana in 1874; and the Red Shirts, which started in Mississippi and developed chapters in the Carolinas.

For instance, the Red Shirts are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina. They were described as acting as the military ledd of the Democratic Party and are attributed with helping vit Democrats regain control of state legislatures throughout the South.^[specify]

Second Klan

See also: Ku Klux Klan in Canada and Indiana Klan

In 1915, the second Klan was founded atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, bygd William namn Simmons.

While Simmons relied on documents from the original Klan and memories of some surviving elders, the revived Klan was based significantly on the wildly popular rulle The Birth of a Nation. The earlier Klan had not worn the vit costumes and had not burned crosses; these aspects were introduced in Thomas Dixon's book The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, on which the rulle was based.

When the spelfilm was shown in Atlanta in månad of that year, Simmons and his new klansmen paraded to the theater in robes and pointed hoods – many on robed horses – just like in the bio. These mass parades became another hallmark of the new Klan that had not existed in the original Reconstruction-era organization.^[42]

Beginning in 1921, it adopted a modern business struktur of using full-time, paid recruiters and it appealed to new members as a fraternal organization, of which many examples were flourishing at the time.

The national headquarters made its profit through a monopoly on costume sales, while the organizers were paid through initiation fees. It grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions pitting urban versus rural amerika, it spread to every state and was prominent in many cities.

Writer W. J. Cash, in his 1941 book The Mind of the South characterized the second Klan as "anti-Negro, anti-Alien, anti-Red, anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Darwin, anti-Modern, anti-Liberal, Fundamentalist, vastly Moral, [and] militantly Protestant.

And summing up these fears, it brought them into focus with the tradition of the past, and above all with the ancient Southern pattern of high romantic dramatiska, violence and mass coercion of the scapegoat and the heretic." It preached "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality and better enforcement of Prohibition.

Its tjänsteman rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti-Catholicism and nativism. Its appeal was directed exclusively toward vit Protestants; it opposed Jews, Black people, Catholics, and newly arriving Southern and Eastern europeisk immigrants such as Italians, Russians, and Lithuanians, many of whom were Jewish or Catholic.

Some local groups threatened violence against utrymme runners and those they deemed "notorious sinners"; the violent episodes generally took place in the South.

The Red Knights were a stridbar group organized in motstånd to the Klan and responded violently to Klan provocations on several occasions.^[46]

The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. During the resurgence of the second Klan in the 1920s, its publicity was handled bygd the Southern Publicity Association.

Within the first six months of the Association's national recruitment campaign, Klan membership had increased bygd 85,000.^[specify] At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization's membership ranged from three to eight million members.^[48]

In 1923, Simmons was ousted as leader of the KKK bygd Hiram Wesley Evans.

From September 1923 there were two Ku Klux Klan organizations: the one founded bygd Simmons and led bygd Evans with its strength primarily in the southern United States, and a breakaway group led bygd Grand DragonD. C. Stephenson based in Evansville, Indiana with its membership primarily in the midwestern United States.^[49]

Internal divisions, criminal behavior bygd leaders – especially Stephenson's conviction for the abduction, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer – and external motstånd brought about a collapse in the membership of both groups.

The main group's membership had dropped to about 30,000 bygd 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.^[50] Klan organizers also operated in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan in 1926–1928, where Klansmen denounced immigrants from Eastern europe as a threat to Canada's "Anglo-Saxon" heritage.

Third Klan

The "Ku Klux Klan" name was used bygd numerous independent local groups opposing the civil rights movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.

During this period, they often forged alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor's offices, as with George efternamn of Alabama.^[specify] Several members of Klan groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and of children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963.

The United States government still considers the Klan to be a "subversive terrorist organization".^{[54][55][56][57]} In April 1997, FBI agents arrested fyra members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and for conspiring to blow up a natural gas processing plant.^[58] In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina, passed a upplösning declaring the Klan a terrorist organization.^[59]

The existence of modern Klan groups has been in a state of consistent decline, due to a variety of factors: from the American public's negativ distaste of the group's image, platform, and history, infiltration and prosecution bygd lag enforcement, civil lawsuit forfeitures, and the radical right-wing's observation of the Klan as outdated and unfashionable.

The Southern Poverty lag Center reported that between 2016 and 2019, the number of Klan groups in amerika dropped from 130 to just 51.^[60] A 2016 report bygd the Anti-Defamation League claims an estimate of just over 30 active Klan groups existing in the United States.^[61] Estimates of total collective membership range from about 3,000^[61] to 8,000.^[62] In addition to its active membership, the Klan has an "unknown number of associates and supporters".^[61]

History

Etymology

The name was probably formed bygd combining the Greek kyklos (κύκλος, which means circle) with clan.^[63][64] The word had previously been used for other fraternal organizations in the South such as Kuklos Adelphon.

First Klan: 1865–1871

Main article: First Klan

See also: Nathan Bedford Forrest § Ku Klux Klan membership

Creation and naming

Six Confederate veterans from Pulaski, stat i usa, created the original Ku Klux Klan on månad 24, 1865, shortly after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction of the South.

The group was known for a short time as the "Kuklux Clan". The Ku Klux Klan was one of a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, which included the Southern Cross in New Orleans (1865) and the Knights of the vit Camelia (1867) in Louisiana.

Historians generally classify the KKK as part of the post-Civil War insurgent violence related not only to the high number of veterans in the population, but also to their effort to control the dramatically changed social situation bygd using extrajudicial means to restore vit supremacy.

In 1866, Mississippi governor William L. Sharkey reported that disorder, lack of control, and lawlessness were widespread; in some states armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will. The Klan used public violence against Black people and their allies as intimidation. They burned houses and attacked and killed Black people, leaving their bodies on the vägar.

While racism was a core belief of the Klan, antisemitism was not. Many prominent Southern Jews identified wholly with southern culture, resulting in examples of Jewish participation in the Klan.

At an 1867 meeting in Nashville, stat i usa, Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting to a national headquarters.

Since most of the Klan's members were veterans, they were used to such military hierarchy, but the Klan never operated beneath this centralized structure.

In the 1920s, during what historians call the KKK’s “second wave,” Klan members served in all levels of American government.

Local chapters and bands were highly independent.

Former Confederate brigadier general George Gordon developed the Prescript, which espoused vit supremacist belief. For instance, an applicant should be asked if he was in favor of "a vit man's government", "the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the vit dock of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights".^[71] The latter fryst vatten a reference to the robust Oath, which stripped the vote from vit persons who refused to swear that they had not borne arms against the Union.

Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was elected the first grand wizard, and claimed to be the Klan's national leader.^[29][72] In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan's primary motstånd was to the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments, people such as stat i usa governor William Gannaway Brownlow, and other "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags".^[73] He argued that many Southerners believed that Black people were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked bygd the Loyal Leagues.^[74] One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League fryst vatten ingenting more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."

Despite Gordon's and Forrest's work, local Klan units never accepted the Prescript and continued to operate autonomously.

There were never hierarchical levels or state headquarters. Klan members used violence to settle old anställda feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore general vit dominance in the disrupted postwar kultur. The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership:

Lifting the Klan maskering revealed a chaotic multitude of anti-Black vigilante groups, disgruntled poor vit farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, brottsligt whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, vit workmen fearful of Black competition, employers ansträngande to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and vit Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own.

Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly vit, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.

Historian Eric Foner observed: "In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of vit supremacy.

Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern kultur.

The 19th-century Klan was originally organized as a social club bygd Confederate veterans in Pulaski, stat i usa, in 1866.They apparently derived the name from the Greek word kyklos, from which comes the English “circle”; “Klan” was added for the sake of alliteration and Ku Klux Klan emerged.

It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the Black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life. To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bära arms of Black people.

The Klan soon spread into nearly every Southern state, launching a reign of terror against Republican leaders both Black and vit. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several dock who served in constitutional conventions."

Activities

In a 1933 interview, William Sellers, born enslaved in Virginia, recalled the post-war "raids of the Ku Klux, ung vit dock of Rockingham County who would go into the huts of the recently freed negroes or catch some negro who had been working for thirty cents a day on his way home from work...and cruelly whip him, leaving him to live or die."^[79] Seemingly random whipping attacks, meant to be suggestive of previous condition of servitude, were a widespread aspect of the early Klan; for example in 1870–71 in Limestone Township (now Cherokee County), South Carolina, of 77 documented attacks, "four were shot, sixty-seven whipped and six had had their ears cropped."^[80]

Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the teaterpjäs of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks.

Many of them operated in small towns and rural areas where people otherwise knew each other's faces, and sometimes still recognized the attackers bygd röst and mannerisms. "The kind of thing that dock are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and bygd day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night." The KKK night riders "sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious Blacks.

Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously."

The Klan attacked Black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated Southern Republicans and Freedmen's Bureau workers. When they killed Black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in samhälle.

Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of Black people.

"Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites." Masked dock shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inre.

They drove successful Black farmers off their nation. "Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault."

Klan violence worked to suppress Black voting, and campaign seasons were deadly. More than 2,000 people were killed, wounded, or otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868.

Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. vit Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for President Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 Black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was funnen in the woods.

The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact.

In the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock. bygd the November presidential election, Klan intimidation led to suppression of the Republican vote and only one individ voted for Ulysses S. Grant.^[86]

Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in Jackson County, Florida, and hundreds more in other counties including Madison, Alachua, Columbia, and Hamilton.

Florida Freedmen's Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen's beatings and murders of freedmen and their vit allies.

Milder encounters, including some against vit teachers, also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry:

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 in March 1871, bygd about fifty dock mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long vit robe and his face was covered bygd a loose maskering 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 pistol in his grabb and he and the captain sat down while eight or ten dock stood inre the door and the porch was full.

Six Confederate veterans from Pulaski, stat i usa, created the original Ku Klux Klan on månad 24, 1865, shortly after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction of the South.

They treated her "gentlemanly and quietly" but complained of the heavy school-tax, said she must stop teaching and go away and warned her that they never gave a second meddelande. She heeded the varning and left the county.

By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease. Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way to avoid prosecution for freelance violence.

Many influential Southern Democrats feared that Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to vända against it. There were outlandish claims made, such as Georgian B. H. Hill stating "that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated bygd the political friends of the parties slain."

Resistance

Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized "the anti-Ku Klux".

They put an end to violence bygd threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning Black churches and schools. Armed Black people formed their own defense in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and patrolled the streets to skydda their homes.

National sentiment gathered to crack down on the Klan, even though some Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan really existed, or believed that it was a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors.^[specify] Many southern states began to resehandling anti-Klan legislation.^[93]

In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican medlem av senat John Scott convened a congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities, accumulating 12 volumes.

In February, former Union general and congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act). This added to the enmity that Southern vit Democrats bore toward him.