Race Relations: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan

RACE RELATIONS: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KU KLUX KLAN

Advances in the Battle against Racism

During the Jazz Age the militant white racism of the preceding three decades finally began to lose its intensity. White supremacists of the 1890s had described African Americans as belonging to a diseased, degenerate race not likely to survive more than a generation. Sen. James K, Vardaman of Mississippi had predicted that the "nigra" would be extinct in North America by the 1920s. In fact, the black population of the United States increased steadily in the 1920s. Though lynchings of blacks remained widespread throughout the southern states, the number of such hangings declined during the decade. In 1921 fifty-nine African Americans were lynched, while eight years later the number had dropped to seven. During the same period African American legal advocates won some modest courtroom victories against segregation. The American legal system, however, was not yet prepared to confront the basic question of racial equity.

Victories for "Jim Crow."

There was no apparent tendency among white southerners to relax the Jim Crow legal system in the 1920s. The scope of many segregation laws was actually expanded in these years. For example, in 1924, after "flappers" with bobbed hair began patronizing barber shops, the Atlanta city council passed an ordinance that forbade black barbers from serving white women and all white children under fourteen years of age. In 1926, when the Mississippi General Assembly enacted a statute that applied to taxicabs, one provision stipulated, "There shall be white drivers for the carrying of white passengers and colored drivers for the carrying of colored passengers." The city fathers of Birmingham, Alabama, required that each city taxicab feature a painted sign to indicate which race it served.

The Ku Klux Klan

The most tangible symbol of white racism in the 1920s was the prominence of the Ku Klux Klan. Organized in northern Georgia in 1915, the Klan reached the peak of its national membership in 1924, claiming to have more than four million members. Klansmen were the avowed enemies of all racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in the United States, not just African Americans. Certainly in the American South, however, the Klan was the primary instigator of violence against blacks. The state governments of Texas and Arkansas were widely believed to be under Klan domination.

Combating Klan Violence

A major strike against the so-called Invisible Empire occurred in September 1923 when Gov. J. C. Walton of Oklahoma placed his state under martial law as a means of curtailing widespread lawlessness fomented by the Klan. During the next three weeks more than four thousand Klansmen were taken into custody by the Oklahoma National Guard. Similar actions by other governors helped to induce the eventual decline of the Ku Klux Klan, as did the 1925 conviction of Grand Dragon David C. Stephenson of Indiana on the charge of second-degree murder. By 1929 the membership of the Klan had declined to less than one hundred thousand.

Sources:

Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for A Modern Order (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979);

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).