TRUTH about the Ku Klux Klan - KKK - Forgotten History

The Ku Klux Klan, or KKK, is deeply rooted in the post-Civil War history of the United States. They are three of the most familiar words and letters in almost any language, synonymous with hatred, intimidation, and murder. What were the origins of the KKK? Why was it created, and by who? What have prominent historians stated about the rise and fall of the KKK? How did it evolve, and what did that change become? How deeply was the Klan embedded into business, society, and even national politics? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, former soldier, Marine Corps scout, sniper, history professor, historian, book author, and we will answer these questions and other issues on this segment of Forgotten History. The Klan had three evolutions in its history as it evolved and altered its methods, tactics, and expanded its focus. All three movements have called for the purification of American society, and all are considered far-right extremist organizations. During each period of the Klan's existence, the official membership was secret, and estimates of the total numbers of members was unknown, and they were highly exaggerated by both friends and enemies alike. The first Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865, by six former officers of the Confederate Army. They were Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones, and James Crow. It started innocuously, as a fraternal social club inspired at least in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta, perceived as an offshoot combined of the old Knights Templar and Teutonic Knights. The KKK adopted many of the initiation rites and formal ceremonies of those previous organizations with the same purpose of fraternity, solidarity, and most of all political power, which today in hindsight is laughable as well as tragic. The official KKK manual describing these rituals was printed by Laps D. McCord of Pulaski, Tennessee. The Klan also needed a distinguishing uniform, which later in their history would become notorious, robes, and hence they're adopting the Spanish Capirote hood. Former Confederate Brigadier General George Gordon, for whom Fort Gordon, Georgia was named for, developed the prescript, which supported the superiority of white society and culture and adopted and taught white supremacist beliefs. They created the ranking system, and at the top of the KKK was the Imperial Wizard, or the National President. Below this were the Grand Dragons, who governed an individual state called a realm. Then there were the Grand Images, or Deputy Commanders, and then the Grand Cyclops, responsible under the Grand Dragons for establishing and maintaining recruitment standards. Below them were the Clegals, who were managed and who were responsible for recruiting and vetting of new members. The rest of the members were the Klansmen, or the foot soldiers, and enforcers. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was elected the first Imperial Wizard, and stated that he was the Klan's national leader. Forrest was very concerned about the Republican influence growing among the blacks in the South. Despite its apparently well-structured appearance, the Klan had no membership rosters, no named chapters, and no listed local officers, so it was difficult to judge its membership. Due to the heavy response by President Andrew Johnson and the increasing numbers of federal soldiers into the southern states as a result, Forrest called for the Klan to disband in 1869. He stated that it was being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to public peace. Historian Stanley Horne argues that, generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment. Despite Gordon's and Forrest's work, local Klan units never accepted the prescript and continued to operate independently without any form of command and control. Historian George C. Rabel argues that, the Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses, its lack of central organization, and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists. More fundamentally, it declined because it failed to achieve its central objective, the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South. Historian Elaine France Parsons describes the membership, quote, Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of anti-black vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, 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. Another 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 white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction, to destroy the Republican Party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, re-establish 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 bear arms of black people. The Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a reign of terror against Republican leaders, both black and white. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hines, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions. The Klan primarily focused upon suppressing black voters, and a political campaign often turned deadly. More than 2,000 people were killed, wounded, or otherwise injured in Louisiana in the few weeks leading up to the presidential election of November 1868. One example was in St. Landry Parish, which had a registered Republican majority of 1,071. The Klan's efforts proved effective, because after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for General Ulysses S. Grant's opponent, Democrat Horatio Seymour. The KKK also killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them down. In the governor's race in Columbia County, Georgia, 1,222 votes were By the November presidential election, the Klan's intimidation suppressed the Republican vote, and only one person voted for Grant. As a result, the 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus. This means that the traditional right to be brought before court or judge to appeal for bail or challenge an unlawful detention could be suspended, and was in fact suspended by Lincoln during the Civil War. During this period, the Florida Freedmen's Bureau records provided a detailed accounting of Klansmen's beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies, numbering 150 dead in voting intimidations. As a result of these actions, in 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to investigate and prosecute Klan crimes. While racism was a core belief of the Klan, initially anti-Semitism was not. Many prominent Southern Jews identified wholly with Southern culture, resulting in examples of Jewish participation in the Klan until they too were included as targets. The second era of the Klan started in 1915 as a small group in Stone Mountain, Georgia. It expanded membership nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, including urban areas of the Midwest and West, with Kansas being a large Klan stronghold. The various independent Klan organizations often took a position of supporting prohibition and compulsory public education for white children, although blacks were not to be educated if possible, and if they were, only in segregated schools. The Klan received its greatest propaganda boost of its entire history when film director D.W. Griffith released his 1915 silent film, The Birth of a Nation, which took great liberties with the truth surrounding the creation and activities of the first Klan. This was when the Klan was resurrected by William Joseph Simmons in Georgia due to the popularity of the film. Simmons relied on the original founding documents from the original Klan and collected the stories, relying upon the memories of some surviving elders. When the film was shown in Atlanta in December 1915, Simmons and his new Klansmen paraded to the theater in their robes and pointed hoods, even riding on robed horses, imitating those scenes in the film. In the film, the Klan was represented as white knights of the nation's conscience, protecting white virtue and white women from the ravaging sexually aggressive Negro. The public response was very positive as a result, but the film did not mention lynchings, other murders, and voter intimidation. Within the first six months of the association's national recruitment campaign, Klan membership had increased by 85,000 by 1920. By the mid-1920s, the organization's membership ranged from three to eight million members. The Klan also began to become deeply involved in politics, even more so than in the 1860s to 1870s, as they knew that they needed pro-Klan Democratic members in state and federal government to block Republican actions targeting their organization. They needed politicians who would support Jim Crow laws and keep the federal government out of their business. They were described as being the acting military arm of the Democratic Party and were attributed with helping white Democrats regain control of state legislatures throughout the South through voter intimidation and ridiculous literacy and cognitive tests against Black voters. In 1923, Simmons was ousted as leader of the KKK by Hiram Wesley Evans. From September 1923, there were two Klan organizations, the one founded by Simmons and led by Evans in the southern United States, and a separate group led by Grand Dragon D.C. Stevenson based in Indiana, with its membership primarily in the midwestern United States. However, despite their rather successful advances into the political arena, public opinion was against the Klan and membership rapidly declined in the latter half of the 1920s. Infighting from various Klan groups, as well as federal law enforcement opposition, brought about a collapse in the membership of both groups. Membership had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930 and finally faded away in the 1940s. The third incarnation of the Klan was resurrected in the early 1950s in the form of localized and isolated groups that used the KKK brand name locally but had no connected affiliation. They opposed the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, such as when they fought against Brown v. Board of Education and imposed separate but equal as their justification. During this period, they often infiltrated southern police departments, schools, and governor's offices, such as George Wallace of Alabama. Several members of the Klan groups had beaten the Freedom Riders in 1961, murdered civil rights workers such as Medgar Evers by Klansman Byron Della Beckwith in 1963. Some 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, Alabama in 1963 and killing Viola Leozu in 1965. These activities saw the KKK classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The final demise of the original Klan arrived in the form of a senseless murder of 19-year-old black male Michael Donald in 1981 and a trial that made history in Alabama. In 1987, the Klan successfully sued in federal court in a historic seven million dollar verdict against the men involved in the lynching of Donald. But Robert K. Byrd, the democratic leader and longtime senator, was a Klan recruiter in the 1940s. He described the organization as a group of upstanding people, doctors, lawyers, clergy, judges, who he thought could provide an outlet for his talents and ambitions and also supported his opposition to communism. Byrd claimed to have left the KKK in 1946, but encouraged by the grand dragon of his KKK branch and with Klan money, Byrd ran on the democratic ticket for both state and federal offices. The Klan funded him throughout his career. Byrd opposed Brown v. Board of Education, supported Jim Crow laws and separate but equal racial laws. He joined James Strom Thurman Sr., who also helped him in opposing racial equality laws, also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ran with Klan money. Byrd called civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. as a self-seeking rabble-rouser. Both Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden proudly proclaimed Senator Robert K. Byrd to be their mentor. Buildings still carry Byrd's name in exaltation. United States government still considers the Klan to be a subversive terrorist organization. Currently, the Anti-Defamation League puts total KKK membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center claims 6,000 members in total. The Ku Klux Klan became notoriously immortalized by its actions, origins and total creation by the Democratic Party, which supported and funded Klan activities to include political and criminal enterprises. Remember this when you hear people claim that Republicans are fascists. The Republicans were hated and targeted by the Klan, and for good reason. We hope you enjoyed this segment of Forgotten History. Please click like and subscribe for free and please stay tuned and be engaged and informed. Send us comments if you have questions or even show ideas and we will respond to all requests and comments as soon as we can. Thank you.