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The Ku Klux Klan was a brutal, suppressive cult organization which fought to deny the basic civil rights and human liberties granted to citizens of the U. S. by the Bill of Rights to African-Americans, immigrants, Roman-Catholics, Jews, socialists, communists, and anyone else who went against its beliefs or interfered in its work. The Klan was first established in Pulaski, Tennessee in May 1866 by Nathan Forrest, just two years after the end of the Civil War.
Some white southerners, however, were still fighting the war and felt they would be until their death. Forrest was the Klans first Imperial Wizard, and the Klan quickly spread to other southern states. At the time there were other white supremacy organizations such as the White Brotherhood, the Men of Justice, and the Knights of the White Camelia, but the KKK was the most influential and widely recognized of the groups. At the beginning, the main goal of the Klan was to keep blacks from voting and establish exclusive white government, in the southern states to keep blacks at the level of servitude they were at during slavery.
Black trade organizations, protection groups, black sympathizers, and successful black business men were inhumanly terrorized and brutally murdered in the night. Any attempt for a black person to get ahead in the world was threatening to the Klan and quickly put to an end. There were numerous large bands of organized marauders called the Ku Klux Klan, who were dressed in fantastic uniforms, and who rode at night and inflicted unnumbered and horrible outrages upon the negro so that he could not dare to come to the polls. Indeed, the men of the South seemed to think themselves excused in these outrages because they wanted to insure a white man's government in their States. 1 The Klan believed it their duty to ensure that America was kept for the Americans and not overrun by negroes and the foreign devils.
To accomplish this goal the Klan used horrific tactics to intimidate blacks and anyone else who got in their way of a white-government. The Klan would murder whole families in the middle of the night, burn down homes, hold public lynchings and beatings, and conduct other tortures to keep their power. A lad whipped with branches until his back was ribbon flesh: a Negress beaten and left helpless to contract pneumonia from exposure and dies; a white girl, divorcee beaten into unconsciousness in her home; a naturalized foreigner flogged until his back was pulp because he married an American woman; a Negro lashed until he sold his land to a white man for a fraction of its value. 2 These inhuman acts should not have been tolerated and should have been put to an end as soon as reported, but they were not. This was a result of the Klan accomplishing its objective of white supremacy in the south. By 1870, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, where Klan support and membership were highest, were governed by completely white governments. With its objective achieved and the passing of the Ku Klux Act in 1871, the Klan virtually disappeared, but only temporarily.
With the outbreak of World War I and the constant fear of a communist revolution, the Klan was reestablished and brought back into power in 1915, this time targeting more than African Americans. The Klan now fought against African-Americans, foreigners, Jews, socialists, Roman Catholics, and communists, with its main opponent being the NAACP. All hyphenated groups - whether they be Negro-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Catholic-Americans, Italian-Americans or whatever must become American-Americans, or leave the country! The Ku Klux Klan is an American-American organization.
As the Army of the Klan we Klavaliers are dedicated to saving America for Americans! 3 Under the leadership of Hiram Evans in 1922, the Klan quickly regained power and the organization spread quickly. Klan officials controlled state governments in not only the south, but states in other areas of the country such as Maine, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Indiana, and membership soon reached over 4, 000, 000. The Klan continued to work towards ridding the country of the unworthy with its lynchings, beating, ratings, and other forms of intimidation. Klan members were rarely arrested for the crimes they committed, and even when arrested, they were very rarely convicted by the local Southern courts that tried them. Literally half the town belonged to the Klan when I was a boy. At its peak, which was from 1923 through 1925, the Nathan Hale Den had about five thousand members, out of an able-bodied adult population of ten thousand.
With this strength the Klan was able to dominate local politics. It packed the police and fire departments with its own people, with the result that on parade nights the traffic patrolmen disappeared and traffic control was taken over by sheeted figures whose size and shape resembled those of the vanished patrolmen. 4 Klan members were from all classes and professions, from elite officials, right down to the poverty stricken tenant farmers, both men and women alike. As a result of widespread corruption among the high ranking Klan officials, and the conviction of Klan leader, David C. Stephenson for second degree murder, membership dropped rapidly from over 4, 000, 000 at its peak of power in 1925, to around 30, 000 members by 1930. The end of the second Klan era was marked with the Great Depression and the Second World War, Klan members had found other issues to focus on, such as not dieing of hunger during the depression, instead of white supremacy, and in 1944 the organization was again disband.
This disbandment did not last long however. With the growing strength of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950 s and early 1960 s, the Klan once again came into power. Still using lynchings as the main torture against the black population, Klansmen continued to try to intimidate blacks from voting. During this period the Klan was also responsible for the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in which four young black girls were killed and twenty three others were injured, the violent targeting of Freedoms Schools, and the bombing and burning of thirty black homes and thirty-seven black churches.
FBI involvement in the investigation of hate crimes committed in the Deep South, along with several convictions of high ranking Klan officials and members has caused it to largely die out in most areas, but still today in the twenty first century, neither the Klan nor its ignorant, racist, hate filled beliefs have not yet completely disappeared. The supremacy of any race cannot exist or last long. The ridiculous idea didnt work with Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, or even the ancient Romans; they all soon came to and end. Different people have different views of a perfect race, of which all are not only wrong, but ignorant. There can be no supreme, perfect race, and killing off an entire people is not any type of civilized solution.
Without variety of people, cultures, philosophies, religions and the rest of the like, the world would be boring. And anyway, who would we have left to argue with if we all looked, thought, acted, and believe the same?
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