This paper will discuss and will try to tackle the issue on two well known citizen’s group in the United States which are the Black Panther Movement and the Ku Klux Khan. It will attempt to compare and to highlights the differences, similarities and goals of these two organizations. This paper will also argue that
The Black Panther Party (originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a revolutionary, Black nationalist organization in the United States founded by and Forming in October 1966, the party grew to national prominence in the United States and is an iconic representative of the counterculture revolutions of the 1960s. The group was founded on the principles of its Ten-Point Program, which called for greater autonomy of black Americans and correction of the injustices of racism.
The group’s political goals are often overshadowed by their confrontational and uncompromising views and approach toward agents of law enforcement, who the Black Panthers saw as the linchpin of racism that could only be overcome by a willingness to take up armed self-defense.
The Black Panther Party fell apart in the early 1970s under the weight of both internal feuding and the external pressures of federal, state, and local law enforcement’s campaign to undermine the organization with black propaganda, infiltration by agents provocateur and outright assassination ).
Contents
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1 Formation and influences
1.1 Origin of the name
1.2 Ten-Point Program and Platform
2 Theory
2.1 Nationalism, internationalism, and “intercommunalism”
3 Action
3.1 Self-defense
3.2 Survival programs
3.3 Political activities
3.4 COINTELPRO & conflict with law enforcement
4 Political and Legal Support
5 Decay and disintegration
6 Famous Black Panther Party members
7 See also
7.1 Groups and Trends
7.2 Events
8 External links
9 References
Formation and influences
Black Panthers on cover of the party’s newspaper, dated November 1, 1969
The core of the organization at its inception in 1966 were close friends and in the city of Oakland, California. The three had witnessed a radical ferment in the United States and the Bay Area specifically, which led them to take part in protests against the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights Movement.
Similar to most of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, these three friends grew dissatisfied by the doctrine of nonviolence as espoused by mainstream civil rights leaders . and The latter’s views of integration — achieving equal rights under the present social system rather than specifically aiming to move beyond that system — struck these more militant youth as reformist.
Instead they looked to model themselves instead along the lines of black nationalism preached by Malcolm X and to infuse it with the further discipline and political education espoused in radical Marxism and Maoism. The group was also influenced by civil rights leaders that broke from the doctrine of nonviolence, such as the Deacons for Defense and Justice and the exiled former NAACP chapter president Robert F. Williams’s book, Negroes with Guns.
Contemporaneous to this rise in America’s domestic radicalism was a rising tide of Marxist-Leninist Third World national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, giving rise to the New Left and the New Communist Movement. Seale, Newton, and Aoki held a great interest in the philosophies of various Third World revolutionaries, including and
After doing a stint in prison for assault, Huey Newton returned to the campus of Oakland City College where he had matriculated. He became fed up with the inertia of the “Afro-American Association,” the student group to which he and Seale had belonged. Seale and Newton discussed the need for real militancy in the face of the oppressive social system of capitalism. The two came to an agreement over the specifics, and the 10 Point Program and Platform was born.
Origin of the name
A number of explanations for the origin of the name “Black Panthers” have been suggested. The most authoritative and likely version is that it came through then of SNCC and unaware of Newton and Seale’s group. At the time of the Black Panther Party’s formation in Oakland, had been organizing a voter registration drive in the African American community of Lowndes County, Alabama. Following the success of the Mississippi Freedom Party, the organizers worked to create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization as an independent party.
Alabama law required the party to have a visual emblem for illiterate voters. The party chose a black panther, mascot of College in Atlanta. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization became the Black Panther party, and soon there were groups named “Black Panthers” sprouting up around the nation. Many were unconnected with the SNCC, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was not officially connected to any of the other parties or to SNCC.
According to learned of the Lowndes County Black Panther Party, in October 1966 through a mailing from a Mississippi black freedom group. After showing it to Newton, the two agreed that the symbol was right for their own as-yet-unnamed group.
Ten-Point Program and Platform
The Party’s main organizational document was its Ten-Point Program and Platform. This was a list of the Party’s demands for both the survival and advancement of blacks in the United States, provided alongside an explanatory text. The distribution and popularization of the Ten Point Program and Platform in black population centers was considered by the Party to be a major component of its propaganda, education and recruitment efforts.
The first Black Panther Ten-Point Program and Platform is dated to October 1966. It subsequently underwent revision, with a second version adopted in March 1972. The Ten-Point Program and Platform became an inspiration to contemporary leftist groups. The White Panther Party, Young Lords Party, and the each released their own programs in much the same style and tone.
Theory
With the death of Malcolm X in 1965, the Black Panther Party was founded with an aim toward furthering the revolutionary movement for black liberation on a mass basis. The party rejected the integrationist stance of King, and made it clear from the beginning that it sought no compromise with the (white) power structure.
The Black Panthers focused their rhetoric on revolutionary class struggle, taking many pages from Maoism. The party did turn to the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao to inform the manner in which it should organize, as a revolutionary cadre organization. In consciously working toward such a revolution, they considered themselves the vanguard party, “committed to organizing support for a socialist revolution.”
However, the party did not fully agree with analysis of the lumpenproletariat. felt that this class lacked the political consciousness required to lead a revolution. Newton, on the other hand, was inspired by his reading of post-colonial theorist and his belief that the lumpen was of utmost importance, saying about these “brothers off the block” that, “If you didn’t relate to these cats, the power structure would organize these cats against you.”
Nationalism, internationalism, and “intercommunalism”
As it was chiefly a party of the black masses, the leadership of the Black Panthers were characterized by internal contradictions on the type and kind of black nationalism it wished to embrace.
In his book Sieze the Time Bobby Seale spoke directly about the evolution of the Panthers’ politics, saying “At first we were Black Nationalists,” then going on to point out how, that upon realizing that more than blacks were oppressed in the United States, they became internationalist. Newton, Seale, and their supporters within the party eventually came to reject cultural nationalists as “black racists” and dubbed those nationalists’ brand of cultural nationalism as narrow and bourgeois “pork-chop nationalism”. Alluding to the black nationalist United Slaves and Black Panther said, “[]political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun.” (“Political power flows from the barrel of a gun” is an early quote by .)
Newton and Seale attempted to work in coalition with organizations representing oppressed communities in the United States (many of which took inspiration from the Black Panthers), as well as with white radical groups with whom they felt they had common interests. These included the Puerto Rican Young Lords of New York and the white Appalachian Young Patriots with whom the Panthers formed the first Rainbow Coalition in 1969. Other groups with whom the Panthers worked with included the predominantly white youth movements Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Youth International Party (Yippies); the Chicano Brown Berets; the pacifist California Peace and Freedom Party; and the post-Stonewall riot formed group, the Gay Liberation Front.
In speech at College 1970, he summed up this approach as “Intercommunalism.” That is to say that the Party recognized that all over the world there were “oppressed communities”, many of whom shared a common oppressor. That these communities should be united across national boundaries to overthrow that common oppressor.
However, Newton’s approach toward combating all forms of oppression rather than simply anti-black oppression caused friction to form between him and Panthers such as and Indicative of this was Carmichael’s embrace of the slogan of “Black Power” , in contrast to Newton and Seale’s embrace of the slogan ‘Power to the People’ which they believed was of a more internationalist and Marxist character.
While acting as a representative of the Black Panthers, often promoted a sexist and homophobic perspective. In his book, “Soul on Ice,” Cleaver indicates that, at one point in his life, he viewed the rape of white women as “an insurrectionary act.” He later attacked black author for his well-known homosexuality and relationships with white men.
These differences of opinion took their toll on Newton’s control of the party, especially while he served a sentence in prison, and eventually these cracks grew into a full-blown split between a main, Western U.S.-based faction supporting Newton, and a breakaway, Eastern U.S.-based faction that supported Cleaver. (See Decay and disintegration below)
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Action
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Self-defense
One of the central aims of the BPP was to stop the rampant abuse perpetrated by racist elements within local police departments. When the party was founded in 1966, only 16 of the 661 Oakland Police Department officers assigned to black neighborhoods were African American.[6] This situation was not unique to Oakland, California. The 1965 Watts Riot occurred due to the brutality of the predominantly-white Los Angeles Police Department and several southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama had police forces that openly worked with the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan. Throughout the 1960s, race riots broke out in impoverished African American communities subject to policing by disproportionately white police departments.
The BPP sought to oppose police brutality through neighborhood patrols (an approach since adopted by groups such as Copwatch). Police officers were frequently followed by armed Black Panthers who sought at times to aid African American victims of brutality and perceived racial prejudice.
Both Panthers and police often died as a result of violent confrontations. By 1970, 34 Panthers had died as a result of police raids, shoot-outs and internal conflict. [7]
Between 1966-1972 when the party was most active, several departments hired significantly more African American police officers. Some of these black officers played prominent roles in shutting down the Panther’s activities. In Chicago in 1969 for example, Panthers and were both killed as they slept by Sergeant an African American police officer in the Chicago Police Department. In cities such as New York City, black police were used to infiltrate Panther meetings. By the party’s 1972 disbanding, almost every major police department was fully integrated.
Survival programs
Inspired by advice to revolutionaries in the Little Red Book, Newton called on the Panthers to “serve the people,” and to make “Survival programs” a priority within its Branches. The most famous and successful of their programs was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, initially run out of a San Francisco church. This program fed thousands of children throughout the party’s history.
Other Survival programs included free services including the distribution of clothing, classes on politics and economics, medical clinics, lessons on self-defense and first aid, transportation to upstate prisons for family members of inmates, an emergency response ambulance program, drug and alcohol abuse rehabilitation, and testing for sickle-cell disease. The Panthers tested more than 500,000 African-Americans for this disease before it was recognized by medical establishments as one that affected the black community almost exclusively.
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Political activities
The Party briefly merged with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, headed by the fiery (later Kwame Toure).
In 1967 the party organized a march on the California state capitol to protest the state’s attempt to outlaw carrying loaded weapons in public. Participants in the march carried rifles.
In 1968 BPP Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver ran for Presidential office on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket with child psychologist Dr. as his running mate.
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COINTELPRO & conflict with law enforcement
In August 1967, the FBI initiated COINTELPRO was created to “neutralize” what the FBI called “Black Nationalist Hate Groups”. The goals of the program were to prevent the unification of militant Black Nationalist groups and to weaken the power of their leaders in order to reduce that probability, as well as discredit the groups to reduce their support and growth. The initial targets included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Nation of Islam. Leaders who were targeted included and
In September of 1968, FBI Director described the Black Panthers as “The greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and within the year the Black Panther Party had become the primary focus of COINTELPRO, becoming the target of 233 out of a total of 295 authorized “Black Nationalist” COINTELPRO actions.
Although COINTELPRO was commissioned to prevent violence, many of the tactics of the FBI organization were intended to foster violence. The most telling example was the FBI’s efforts to “Intensify the degree of animosity” between the Black Panthers and the Chicago gang, the Blackstone Rangers. These included sending an anonymous letter to the Ranger’s gang leader claiming that the Panthers were threatening his life, a letter with the stated intent to induce “reprisals” against Panther leadership. In Southern California similar actions were taken to exacerbate what was characterized as a “gang war” between the Black Panther Party and an organization called the United Slaves. Shootings and beatings involving these two groups led to the deaths of at least four Black Panther Party members, and FBI agents claimed credit for some of the violence between the two groups.
It should be noted that Deputy Associate Director of the FBI’s Intelligence Division, claimed that COINTELPRO operations did not intend to foster violence nor to harm individual members of the organizations targeted. However the final report of Senate “Church Committee” which investigated the actions of COINTELPRO in 1975 and 1976 did not agree with Adams, and purported to demonstrate that the FBI “itself engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest.”
On January 17, 1969, Los Angeles Panther Captain and Deputy Minister were killed in Campbell Hall on the UCLA campus, in a gun battle with members of United Slaves, a rival black nationalist group, stemming from a dispute over who would control UCLA’s black studies program. Another shootout between the two groups on March 17 led to further injuries. It was alleged that the FBI had made contacts with US in an alliance against the Panthers.
One of the most notorious of such actions involved a Chicago Police raid of the home of talented and charismatic Panther organizer on December 4, 1969. The raid had been orchestrated by the police in conjunction with the FBI, and the FBI was complicit in many of the actions involved. The people inside the home had been drugged by an FBI informant, and were all asleep at the time of the raid. Hampton was shot and killed, as was the guard, The others in the home were then dragged into the street and beaten and subsequently charged with assault. These charges were later dropped.
In May 1969,, a twenty-four year old member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther party, was tortured and murdered because party members suspected him of being a police informant. A number of party members had taken part, and three party officers eventually admitted guilt. Party supporters alleged that the man who identified as an informer and subsequently ordered his execution, was in fact an agent provocateur in the employment of the FBI.
Political and Legal Support
Support for the Panthers became widespread and was characterized by the now famous clenched-fist salute at the 1968 Olympics by two medalists during the playing of the American national anthem.
The Black Panthers attracted a wide variety of left-wing revolutionaries and political activists. Among others, the party was supported by former Magazine editor, , before he renounced socialism and gradually drifted to the political right. Decades later, upon the death of Huey Newton (who died in a shoot-out with rival gangsters), he would remark, “He (Newton) killed a lot of people.” According to Horowitz, the Black Panthers once murdered a young, white female activist named , whom he had introduced to the Party and who was representing it. After raping her, Horowitz claims, the members beat the woman to death with baseball bats.[12]
Decay and disintegration
While part of the organization was already participating in local government and social services, another group was in constant conflict with the police. For some of the Party’s supporters, the separation between political action, criminal activity, social services, access to power, and grass-roots identity became confusing and contradictory as the Panther’s political momentum was bogged down in the criminal justice system.
A significant split in the BPP occurred over disagreements within the Panther leadership about how to confront these challenges. Some Panther leaders such as and favored a focus on community service coupled with self-defense while others, such as ,embraced a more confrontational strategy. A schism was made inevitable when Cleaver publicly criticized the Party as adopting a “reformist” rather than “revolutionary” agenda and called for Hilliard’s removal. Cleaver was expelled from the Central Committee but went on to lead a splinter group, the Black Liberation Army, which had previously existed as an underground paramilitary wing of the Party.
The Party eventually fell apart due to rising legal costs and internal disputes exacerbated by COINTELPRO.
In 1989, a group calling themselves the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) was formed in Dallas, TX. Ten years later, the NBPP became home to many former Nation of Islam members when the chairmanship was taken by . Members of the original Black Panther Party have been publicly and adamantly critical of the ‘new’ party. For example, the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation insists that there “is no new Black Panther Party”. A new National Alliance of Black Panthers was formed on July 31, 2004, inspired by the grassroots activism of the original organization, but not otherwise related. Its chairwoman is
Ku Klux Klan refers to three entirely different movements in the United States. It refers to two influential organizations (in the 1860s and 1920s), as well as to small groups in recent years. The first KKK in the South in the late 1860s advocated white supremacy, and had a history of physically attacking or threatening its political opponents. The second KKK was a nationwide affair in the mid 1920s that focused on anti-Catholicism, nativism, and anti-Semitism. Today, the small KKK that exists in separated local units is considered an extreme hate group; the accusation that someone supports Klan programs results in highly negative attacks from mainstream media and political and religious leaders. The name, and many of its terms, are fake Greek, and were invented by the founders (some of whom had studied Greek).
Contents
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1 Overview
2 The first Klan
2.1 Creation
2.2 Activities
2.3 Decline and suppression
3 The second Klan
3.1 Creation
3.2 Activities
3.3 Political influence
3.4 Decline
4 Later Ku Klux Klans
4.1 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
5 The Ku Klux Klan today
6 Ku Klux Klan vocabulary
7 The Ku Klux Klan in popular culture
8 See also
9 Notes
10 References
10.1 First KKK 1860s
10.2 Second KKK 1920s
10.3 Recent KKK
11 External links
Overview
Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally in 1922.
The Klan’s first incarnation began in late 1865 or early 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee. It was founded as a Confederate veteran’s organization, but quickly its main purpose became to resist Reconstruction after the American Civil War, and it focused as much on intimidating “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” as on putting down the Freedmen. It quickly adopted violent methods, and was involved in a wave of killings of Republican voters in 1868. A rapid reaction set in, with the Klan’s leadership disowning the violence, and Southern elites seeing the Klan as an excuse for Federal troops to continue their activities in the South. The organization was in decline from 1868 to 1870, and was destroyed in the early 1870s by President vigorous action under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act). The first Klan was never well 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, and that was greatly enhanced by its outlandish costumes and its theatricality. As historian Elaine Frantz Parsons discovered [Parsons p 816]:
“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.”
founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915.
In 1915, founded a totally new group using the same name and costumes. It did not grow until the early 1920s; it then had a huge nationwide boom in membership. By 1924, it was in retreat and, by 1928, had dwindled to less than 5% of its original membership. This second Klan fought to maintain the dominance of moralistic white Protestants over sinners–especially bootleggers, adulterers, Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. The second KKK operated openly, and at its peak, in the 1920s, claimed millions of members in the South and Midwest. Many politicians at all levels of government were members, and, at its height, opponents claimed that it had secretly influenced some state governments, including Oregon and Indiana. Scandals involving violence destroyed its popularity in the late 1920s, and, by 1928, the Klan was orders of magnitude smaller and weaker.
The name “Ku Klux Klan” has since been used by many different unrelated groups, including many who opposed the civil rights movement and desegregation in the 1960s. Today, dozens of organizations with chapters across the United States and other countries use all or part of the name in their titles, but their total membership is estimated to be only a few thousand individuals.
The first Klan
A cartoon threatening that the KKK would lynch carpetbaggers, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, 1868.
Creation
The original Ku Klux Klan was created in 1865 meeting in a law office by six Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee. The name was fake Greek. It was, at first, a humorous social club centering on practical jokes and hazing rituals From 1866 to 1867, various local units began breaking up black prayer meetings and invading black homes at night to steal firearms. Some of these activities may have been modeled on previous Tennessee vigilante groups such as the Yellow Jackets and Redcaps.
A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic Party as continuations of the Confederacy.
In an 1867 convention held in Nashville, the Klan was formalized as a national organization under a “Prescript” written by, a former Confederate brigadier general. The Prescript states as the Klan’s purposes
· First: To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of the Confederate soldiers.
· Second: To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States…
· Third: To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity with the laws of the land.
In a word, the Klan’s purpose was to resist the Congressional Reconstruction. The word “oppressed,” for example, clearly refers to oppression by the Union Army, and “peers” implies that white Southern property holders should be protected from carpetbaggers, scalawags, and “uppity” freedmen. During Reconstruction, the South was undergoing drastic changes to its social and political life. Southern Whites saw this as a threat to their supremacy as a race and sought to end this process.
Confederate General; later, first Grand Wizard of the first Klan
The Prescript also includes a list of questions to be asked of applicants for membership, which confirms the focus on resisting Reconstruction and the Republican Party. The applicant is to be asked whether he was a Republican, a Union Army veteran, or a member of the Loyal League; whether he is “opposed to Negro equality both social and political;” and whether he is 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.”
According to one oral report, Gordon went to former slave trader and Confederate General in Memphis and told him about the new organization, and, a few weeks later, was selected as Grand Wizard, the Klan’s national leader.
Activities
The Klan sought to control the political and social status of the freedmen. Specifically, it attempted to curb black education, economic advancement, voting rights, and the right to bear arms. However, the Klan’s focus was not limited to African Americans; Scalawags and Carpetbaggers (white Republicans) also became the target of intimidation tactics, and a wave of killing of hundreds of blacks in 1868, was primarily a political purge rather than a racial conflict. In some cases the violence achieved its purpose; in other counties the intimidation failed. The Republicans, organized Union Leagues, created their own armed defensive squads and fought back. Probably thousands were killed on both sides.
An 1868 proclamation by demonstrates several of the issues surrounding the Klan’s violent activities.
· Many blacks were veterans of the Union Army, and were armed. From the beginning, one of the original Klan’s strongest focuses was on confiscating firearms from Blacks. In the proclamation, Gordon warned that the Klan had been “fired into three times,” and that if the Blacks “make war upon us they must abide by the awful retribution that will follow.”
· Gordon also stated that the Klan was a peaceful organization. Such claims were common ways for the Klan to attempt to protect itself from prosecution.
· Gordon warned that some people had been carrying out violent acts in the name of the Klan. It was true that many people who had not been formally inducted into the Klan found the Klan’s uniform to be a convenient way to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence. However, it was also convenient for the higher levels of the organization to disclaim responsibility for such acts, and the secretive, decentralized nature of the Klan made membership fuzzy rather than clear-cut.
By this time, only two years after the Klan’s creation, its activity was already beginning to decrease and, as 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.[5] went so far as to claim “that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain.”[6]
Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family.
In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men, and that although he himself was not a member, he was “in sympathy” and would “cooperate” with them, and could himself muster 40,000 Klansmen with five days’ notice. He stated that the Klan did not see blacks as its enemy as much as the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments like Tennessee governor , and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. There was an element of truth to this claim, since the Klan did go 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.”[8]
Decline and suppression
Forrest’s national organization, in fact, 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. Due to 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.” 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.”
Gov. of North Carolina attempted to use the state militia against the Klan, and was voted out of office.
Although the Klan was being used more and 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 extremely unlikely to vote for conviction. In many states, there were fears that the use of black militiamen would ignite a race war.When Republican governor of North Carolina called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, the result was a backlash that lost him the upcoming election.
wrote the 1871 Klan Act.
Meanwhile, many Democrats at the national level were questioning whether the Klan even existed, or had been imagined by nervous Republican governors in the South.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 former Union general of Massachusetts (who was widely reviled by Southern whites) introduced federal legislation modeled on it. 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, which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.
In 1871, President signed 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. 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 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 Ackerman. 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 although in some areas similar activities, including intimidation and murder of black voters, continued under the auspices of local organizations such the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs. Even though the Klan no longer existed, it had achieved many of its goals, such as denying voting rights to Southern blacks.
In 1882, long after the end of the first Klan, the Supreme Court ruled in United States vs. that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional, saying that Congress’s power under the fourteenth amendment did not extend to private conspiracies. However, the Force Act and the Klan Act have been invoked in later civil rights conflicts, including the 1964 murders of ; the 1965 murder of and Bray vs. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, 1991, which became an issue in the 2005 debate on the confirmation of John G. Roberts, Jr.’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
The second Klan
Creation
Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation.
Most historians identify the Second KKK with the 1920s, but some go back a few years. In 1915 the film The Birth of a Nation glorifyed the first Klan and made some of its costumes and rituals common knowledge.
The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan, which by then was a fading memory. Griffith’s film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard’s Spots, both by
The burning cross is a symbol used by the Klan to create terror. Cross burning is said to have been introduced by the founder of the second Klan in 1915.
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Activities
The new KKK was a small operation with fewer than 2000 members until 1920, when it devised a new strategy of growth in which organizers would form chapters and collect large initiation fees that they shared with state and national headquarters. In keeping with its origins in the lynching, the reorganized Klan had a new anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant slant. This was consistent with the new Klan’s greater success at recruiting in the U.S. Midwest than in the South. The second KKK also preached moral regeneration and purification, attacking foreign elements for degrading American morality. The Klan was successful in recruiting throughout the country and in Canada, but the membership turned over rapidly, and since the Klan was a secret society, it is difficult to determine accurate membership numbers.
This Klan was operated as a profit-making venture by its leaders, and participated in the boom in fraternal organizations at the time. Organizers signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and bought KKK costumes. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials. When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a huge rally, often with burning crosses and perhaps a ceremonial presentation of a Bible to a local Protestant minister. He left town with all the money. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations, occasionally bringing in speakers. The state and national officials had little or no control over the locals and rarely or never attempted to forge them into political activist groups. In Alabama, Feldman has shown that the KKK was not a mere hate group; it showed a genuine desire for political and social reform. Alabama Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other “progressive” measures. By 1925 the Klan was powerful political force in the state, as powerful figures like manipulated the KKK membership against the power of the “Big Mule” industrialists and Black Belt planters who had long dominated the state. In 1926 , a former chapter head, won the governor’s office with KKK members’ support. He led one of the most progressive administrations in the state’s history, pushing for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. At the same time KKK vigilantes—thinking they enjoyed governmental protection–launched an wave of physical terror across Alabama in 1927, targeting both blacks and whites. The conservative elite counterattacked. The major newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan as violent and unAmerican. Sheriffs cracked down on Klan violence. The counterattack worked; the state voted for in 1928, and the Klan’s official membership plunged to under six thousand by 1930.
Sheet music to “We Are All Loyal Klansmen,” 1923.
Political influence
In 1922 (1881-1966) of Texas took control of the national organization as “imperial wizard” and kept it until 1939.
The second Ku Klux Klan rose to great prominence and spread from the South into the Midwest region and Northern states and even into Canada. At its peak, Klan membership may have been in the millions, but the numbers were always exaggerated by both Klan leaders and opponents. The Klan claimed that President had joined, but historical research has raised doubts about the claim. A number of notable figures in national politics were Klan members in their youth, including Supreme Court justice . As discussed in Notable Ku Klux Klan members in national politics, admitted to paying the membership fee to join the Klan, but then backed out. In the 1920s the Klan claimed credit for electing many people, but in many cases there is no clearcut evidence either way. Senator of Texas, for example, was claimed by the Klan, but he always avoided the issue.
The first Klan was Democratic and Southern, but this Klan, while it still boasted members from the Democratic Party, was Democratic in the South but more Republican in the North. It was popular throughout the country and in parts of Canada, particularly in Saskatchewan where it played a crucial role in bringing to power the Conservative government of However, no prominent national politician in Canada or the US acknowledged membership in the Klan.
Some historians, as well as the Klan itself, state that the Klan had vast influence in many state governments, including Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon in addition to some of the Southern legislatures. However, it may often be impossible to reach clear conclusions, since Klan membership was typically secret, and even in cases where known Klansmen were in government, there is no way to prove whether or not a particular action was taken at the behest of the Klan.
Klan influence was particularly strong in Indiana, where Republican Klansman was elected governor in 1924. By then, more than 40 percent of the native-born white males in Indianapolis claimed membership in the Klan. Klan-backed candidates took over the City Council, the Board of School Commissioners, and the Board of County Commissioners.
Klansmen in Anaheim, California, 1924.
However, some historians are skeptical of the level of Klan control, and in many cases it may be difficult to prove anything beyond the fact that a large number of state or local elected officials were Klansmen. In one well-known example, the Klan decided to make Anaheim, California, into a model Klan city. In 1924, the Klan secretly managed to get four of its members elected to the five-member Board of Trustees. Nine of the ten members of the police force were also Klansmen. The four Klan trustees served for nearly a year, until they were publicly exposed, and voted out in a recall election in which 95% of the population participated.
Some historians believe the state Klan leaders were primarily interested in collecting money from the organizing drives. The opponents of the Klan consistently argued that they were politically dangerous. Some historians studying the state-by-state situations conclude that the Klan exerted little or no influence on state legislation, with the possible exception of laws in Oregon designed to banish Catholic parochial schools. No major newspaper supported the Klan; indeed, most newspapers strongly opposed it as hostile to American values of an open, democratic society. During the 1920s, no major national politician acknowledged he was a member of the Klan. (Some young men who later became national figures did belong briefly, such as )
The Ku Klux Klan supported prohibition. Alcohol was viewed as an “un-American” vice practiced by immigrants, many of whom belonged to the Catholic Church and other religions.
In 1923, “Bloody Williamson” in southern Illinois was the scene of pitched battles between rum-running gangsters and Klansmen. The Klan essentially took over Williamson County, Illinois, forcing elected government officials out of office, to be replaced by unelected “Kluxers”, as they were called in Illinois. Federal officials apparently deputized the Klan. Large mobs went door to door, searching houses for stocks of bootleg alcohol. This led to the “Klan War” in which local gangsters eventually overpowered the Klan and allowed the restoration of lawfully elected government () that they controlled.
The Klan was an issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. The convention initially pitted California Senator , a dry (supporter of prohibition) against New York Governor a Catholic and outspoken wet (opponent of prohibition). The issue was a resolution denouncing the Klan by name, versus a generic denunciation of un-American activities. No leading delegate claimed Klan membership. After days of stalemate both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise candidate and the plank condemning the Klan by name lost only by a very close vote.
1926
Decline
In many cases, the second Klan’s efforts at the local had only short-lived effects, the organizers left town when their main drive was completed. During this period, the Klan was also left with almost no infrastructure or budget. The final collapse took place in different states at different times. The most spectacular episode was a scandal involving , the Grand Dragon of Indiana and fourteen other states, who was convicted of the rape and murder of in a sensational trial in 1925. The Klan had promoted itself as the enforcer of morality, so the scandals permanently destroyed its main attraction to people.
As a result of these scandals, the Klan withered away. Grand Wizard Hiram Evans sold the organization in 1939 to an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta doctor, but they were unable to staunch the exodus of members. The Klan’s image was further damaged by Colescott’s association with Nazi-sympathizer organizations, the Klan’s involvement with the 1943 Detroit Race Riot, and efforts to disrupt the American war effort during World War II. In 1944, the IRS filed a lien for 5,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944. The name Ku Klux Klan then began to be used by a number of independent groups. The following table shows the decline in the Klan’s estimated membership over time.[26] (The years given in the table represent approximate time periods; years after 1944 represent the total for all groups using the Klan name.)
Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1928.
Folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan after World War II and provided information, including secret code words, to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in a series of four episodes in which Superman took on the Klan. Kennedy intended to strip away the Klan’s mystique, and the trivialization of the Klan’s rituals and code words likely did have a negative impact on Klan recruiting and membership.
Later Ku Klux Klans
Following the demise of the second era KKK, there were three periods of resurgence, dubbed by some scholars and Klan participants as the third through sixth era Klans.
After World War II, the Klan’s victims began to fight back. In a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans who had associated with white people, and then held a nighttime rally nearby, only to find themselves surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed in what is known as The Battle of Hayes Pond.
In 1966, was preaching Black Power methods to African American communities across Mississippi. He stated that the only way to end terror by whites, such as the Klan, was to meet them with armed resistance. As a result, several Blacks had their guns ready when the Klan came to harass their communities, and that caused the Klan to leave some communities once and for all.
A new focus of the postwar Conservative Klan was to resist the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In 1963, two Klan members carried out the bombing of a church in Alabama that had been used as a meeting place for civil rights organizers. Four young girls were killed, and outrage over the bombing helped to build momentum for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Klan used threats, intimidation, and murder to disrupt voter registration drives in the South, and to prevent registered black voters from voting. The Klan was involved in the 1964 murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi, and also murdered , a Southern-raised white mother of five who was visiting the South from her home in Detroit to attend a civil rights march.
1949.
In 1964, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Klan. COINTELPRO occupied a curiously ambiguous position in the civil rights movement, since it used its tactics of infiltration, disinformation, and violence against violent far-left and far-right groups such as the Klan and the , but simultaneously against peaceful organizations such as Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This ambivalence was shown dramatically in the case of the murder of , who was shot on the road by four Klansmen in a car, of whom one was an FBI informant. After she was murdered, the FBI spread false rumors that she was a communist, and that she had abandoned her children in order to have sex with black civil rights workers. Regardless of the FBI’s ambivalence, , a newspaper reporter who infiltrated in the Klan in 1979, reported that COINTELPRO’s efforts had been highly successful in disrupting the Klan; rival Klan factions both accused each other’s leaders of being FBI informants, and one leader, of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was, in fact, later revealed to have been working for the FBI.
Violence at a Klan march in Mobile, Alabama, 1977.
Once the century-long struggle over black voting rights in the South had ended, the Klans shifted their focus to other issues, including affirmative action, immigration, and especially busing ordered by the courts in order to desegregate schools. In 1971, Klansmen used bombs to destroy ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, and charismatic Klansman David Duke was active in South Boston during the school busing crisis of 1974. also made efforts to update its image, urging Klansmen to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.” Duke was leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from 1974 until he resigned from the Klan in 1978. In 1980, he formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a far-right white nationalist political organization. He was elected to the Louisiana State House of Representatives in 1989 as a Republican, even though the party threw its support to a different Republican candidate. In 1979, the Greensboro Massacre occurred in which five members of the Communist Workers Party were shot and killed while participating in an anti-Klan demonstration. The CWP had been active trying to organize black workers in Greensboro, North Carolina.
An inflammatory cartoon that was used as evidence in the civil trial resulting from murder.
In this period, resistance to the Klan became more common. Jerry Thompson reported that in his brief membership in the Klan, his truck was shot at, he was yelled at by black children, and a Klan rally that he attended turned into a riot when black soldiers on an adjacent military base taunted the Klansmen. Attempts by the Klan to march were often met with counterprotests, and violence sometimes ensued.
Vulnerability to lawsuits has encouraged the trend away from central organization, as when, for example, the lynching of in 1981 led to a civil suit that bankrupted one Klan group, the United Klans of America. related how many Klan leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series of multimillion-dollar lawsuits brought against them as individuals by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a result of a shootout between Klansmen and a group of African Americans, and curtailed their activities in order to conserve money for defense against the suits. Lawsuits were also used as tools by the Klan, however, and the paperback publication of Thompson’s book, My Life in the Klan, was canceled because of a libel suit brought by the Klan.
Klan activity has also been diverted into other racist groups and movements, such as Christian Identity, neo-Nazi groups, and racist subgroups of the skinheads.
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
The lynching of 1981.
“Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” has been part of the title of at least ten organizations patterned on the original KKK. The most prominent of these was the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., which was founded in November 1915 by and disbanded in 1944 by At its peak, this organization had around three to five million members.
The most militant Klan group was “The White Knights of Mississippi” led by Imperial Wizard . Though not the largest, they were by far the most violent. They were responsible for many bombings, church burnings, beatings, and murders, including the killing of three civil rights workers, and Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff , along with of Meridian, Mississippi and several other members of the Klan, murdered the three young men, who were all members of C.O.R.E, (Congress Of Racial Equality) by shooting them and burying their bodies in a dam outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. was convicted of these murders in 2005, 40 years after they occured. Price and Roberts are now deceased.
In 1989, The White Knights of Mississippi went national, and appointed Professional Wrestler , who was also known as Johnny Angel as it’s new national Imperial Wizard, to succeed appeared on many talk shows including , in an effort to build a new modern image for the Ku Klux Klan. It was thought that Clary could build membership in the Klan due to his celebrity status as a professional wrestler. tried to unify the various chapters of the Klan in a meeting held in the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, Pulaski, Tennessee, only to have it fall apart by infighting which occured when the Klan came together. girlfriend was revealed to be an F.B.I informant, which resulted in mistrust ofamong the different Klan members. Clary resigned from the Klan and later became a born again Christian and a civil rights activist.
In 2005, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Knights Party) was headed by National Director Pastor , and based in Zinc, Arkansas. It is the biggest Klan organization in America today. The sixth era Klan continues to be a racist group, for example
group in the past produced such Klan stars as David Duke, but it is now continuing a long, slow decline. In 1991, said that he foresaw imminent respectability for the Klan: “You take Exxon. They had an identity thing to overcome after that oil spill. Well, the Klan has an image problem to overcome, also.”
The Ku Klux Klan today
KKK: the Nazi salute and Holocaust denial
Although often still discussed in contemporary American politics as representing the quintessential “fringe” end of the far-right spectrum, today the group only exists in the form of a number of very isolated, scattered “supporters” that probably do not number more than a few thousand. In a 2002 report on “Extremism in America”, the Anti-Defamation League wrote “Today, there is no such thing as the Ku Klux Klan. Fragmentation, decentralization and decline have continued unabated.” However, they also noted that the “need for justification runs deep in the disaffected and is unlikely to disappear, regardless of how low the Klan’s fortunes eventually sink.”
In some Klan units, anti-Catholicism has been dropped as a core principle; and, in some cases, Klan units have adopted neo-Nazism or Christian Identity as core ideological beliefs.
Today the only known former member of the Klan to hold a Federal office in the United States is Senator (D-WV), who says he “deeply regrets” his roles as “Exalted Cyclops” and “Kleagle,” or recruiter, for his local Klan in the 1940′s. During his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1958, when Byrd was 41 years old, Byrd defended the Klan. He argued that the KKK had been incorrectly blamed for much of the violence in the South.
Californian musical sisters also perform at modern Ku Klux Klan rallies.
Some of the larger KKK organizations currently in operation include:
· Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan[31]
· Imperial Klans of America
· Knights of the White Kamelia
There is a vast number of smaller organizations
In 2005, there were an estimated 3,000 Klan members, divided among 158 chapters of a variety of splinter organizations, about two-thirds of which were in former Confederate states. The other third were primarily in the Midwest region.
The American Civil Liberties Union has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK in defense of their First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, and marches, and their right to field political candidates.
In a July 2005 incident, a Hispanic man’s house was burned down in Hamilton, Ohio, after accusations that he sexually assaulted a nine-year-old white girl. Klan members in Klan robes showed up afterward to distribute pamphlets.
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Ku Klux Klan vocabulary
The Klan had its own vocabulary, comprised of words mainly beginning with the letters Kl. The word Ku Klux is derived from the Greek kuklos, which means “circle” . Membership in the Klan is secret, and like many fraternal organizations, has signs members can use to recognize one another. A member may use the acronym AYAK (Are you a Klansman?) in conversation to surreptitiously identify himself to another potential member. The response AKIA (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.
The Klan has coined many secret words beginning with “KL” including:
· Klavern: local chapter
· Kleagle: recruiter
· Klecktoken: initiation fee
· Kligripp: secretary
· Klonvocation: gathering
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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