The Ku Klux Klan (1866-1960)

Introduction

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a white supremacist organization created to harass, intimidate, and murder black men and women in order to maintain white power. The Klan has historically targeted blacks who were willing to stand up for their rights, such as those who expressed their desire to vote and to achieve legal equality (Trelease, 2007).

After 244 years of slavery, the Civil War, backed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ended the nightmare for millions of enslaved African descendants. After the war, Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 1877, was a move to create a more inclusive democracy in the country by bringing within the protection of the laws millions of newly liberated Africans (Lay, 2007).

This protection was guaranteed through two constitutional amendments—the Fourteenth Amendment, which made Africans citizens, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African males the right to vote. These social changes were not without some negative ramifications, however (Chalmers, 2006).

Discussion

The years between Reconstruction and World War I were again turbulent as the United States closed its frontier and industrialized rapidly and ruthlessly. The closing of the frontier and the opening of industrial jobs to unskilled labor were factors in the shift from traditional immigration patterns. New immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—Jews and Catholics as well—revived the nativist impulse (Trelease, 2007). While elite and middle class reformers battled in the press and the courts to control the new immigration, there was no need for violence. The KKK slumbered until 1915.

Then, the United States was wallowing in a resurgent racism that had begun in the 1890s, formalized by Plessy v. Ferguson. William J. Simmons, who had read Thomas Dixon's The Ku Klux Klan (1905) and watched D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation reformed the Klan in that year. Simmons's main opponent was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which rejected the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington, which had dominated years of the nadir of race relations. World War I brought out a decline in lynching (Lay, 2007). The end of the war saw a massive increase, with more than 70 black lynching victims, including 10 in uniform. World War I produced a “New Negro,” less subservient and disinclined to accommodate to racism (Chalmers, 2006). From 1919 to 1922, another 239 lynchings occurred, and unpunished white-on-black violence increased.

The KKK after World War I incorporated a strong nativist ...