KU KLUX KLAN

Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name given not so much to a specific organization as to a tradition of southern vigilantism that dates back to the time of African American slavery in the early to mid-nineteenth century, when "slave patrols" were used to guard against escape, uprising, and other sorts of misbehavior by slaves. The first organization to call itself "Ku Klux Klan" was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, by six young Confederate veterans in 1866. The first two words of the name were derived from kyklos, the Greek word for "circle"—a designation appropriate to its mission, which revolved largely around differentiating those inside the circle (European Americans loyal to white supremacy) from those outside it. The founders regarded the Klan as a social club, a sort of fraternity, and adopted rituals, special outfits, a vow of secrecy, and an elaborate organizational structure to emphasize its exclusivity. Although the originators later claimed to have had no political intent in founding the Klan, it evolved over the course of the next year into a terrorist organization whose methods included lynchings and other tactics of intimidation.

THE KLAN AND RECONSTRUCTION

When the Civil War ended in 1865, it was immediately succeeded by a political war of comparable ferocity. The principal issues were the terms under which the rebel states would be readmitted to the Union and the status and rights of African Americans in those states. Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), although he freed the slaves, was not a friend to the concept of African American equality, and his intention toward the southern states was to put the Civil War behind immediately and heal the Union as quickly and painlessly as possible. After Lincoln was assassinated, the new president, Andrew Johnson (1808–1875), took up Lincoln's moderate approach toward the South. However, the Radical Republicans in Congress, led by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, wanted to treat the South as a vanquished foe and immediately bring the former slaves into full citizenship with suffrage and political rights equal to those of their former masters. The Radical Republicans succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 (both over Johnson's opposition), giving citizenship rights with the exception of suffrage to African Americans. In 1867 they passed the Reconstruction Acts, which added suffrage for African Americans (later made permanent by the Fifteenth Amendment), disbanded the state militias of the defeated southern states, established federal military control of the governments of those states, and required approval of the Fourteenth Amendment by each state before it could be readmitted to the Union. Congress itself was divided over these measures, as reflected by the narrow defeat of the Radical Republican effort to remove Johnson from office by impeachment. Meanwhile, the Southern states were moving in the opposite direction, acting in 1865 and 1866 to establish "black codes" (based on the pre-emancipation slave codes), by which the rights of freed slaves were so radically limited as to return them to a condition not much different from slavery. The political struggle was waged largely along party lines, with Republicans advocating federal control over the Southern states and Democrats advocating "states' rights"—that is, the rights of the states to choose their own forms of government and determine their own laws.

In this highly polarized environment it was not difficult for the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups, such as the Knights of the White Camellia in Louisiana, to attract disaffected southerners, especially former Confederate soldiers, interested in safeguarding the economic well-being and traditional values of southern society. The KKK expanded to become a statewide organization that achieved formal structure at a gathering in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1867. The former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877) was named Grand Wizard, the top position in the Klan's hierarchy. Forrest, a vocal opponent of Republican policies toward the South, issued the "Prescript of the Order," specifying support for white control of state governments and denial of Negro equality.

By 1868 the KKK had spread to all the southern states. At first Klansmen were content to intimidate the black population by sweeping through the night in white robes, riding horses with muffled hooves, and pretending to be the ghosts of the Confederate dead returning to exact retribution. Soon, however, psychological intimidation gave way to whipping, beating, and even murder. The main targets were the former slaves, but many whites who sympathized with the Republican agenda were victims of Klan violence as well. Teachers, both black and white, at public schools established for African Americans by the Freedmen's Bureau (created by the federal government to aid the freed slaves) were among those frequently chosen for harassment.

The reign of the Klan was brief but effective. The main accomplishment was keeping African Americans from voting—an important factor enabling all the southern states within a few years to reject the Republican state governments imposed by Congress, install Democratic rule, and return the African American population to subjugation. Thus, the principal tenets of Forrest's "Prescript" were realized.

THE END OF THE KLAN AND OF RECONSTRUCTION

The success of the Klan, however, also provided the seeds for its demise. The first great blow came from its own Grand Wizard. Declaring that he had never intended terrorist violence to be a part of the order's arsenal, Forrest in early 1869 ordered the KKK disbanded and instructed its officers to destroy all Klan regalia and Klan records. This was the end of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan as a centralized organization operating throughout the South. However, many local Klan groups continued to operate independently and as violently as ever.

At about the same time, Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), a Republican sympathetic to Radical Reconstruction, succeeded Andrew Johnson as president. Urged on by Congress, Grant ordered an investigation of the KKK that resulted in a grand jury report which, calling the Klan the "Invisible Empire of the South," concluded:

The operations of the Klan are executed in the night and are invariably directed against members of the Republican Party. The Klan is inflicting summary vengeance on the colored citizens by breaking into their houses at the dead of night, dragging them from their beds, torturing them in the most inhuman manner, and in many instances murdering. ("Radical Republicans")

In 1870 and 1871 Congress passed the Force Acts and the Ku Klux Klan Act, intended to curb the Klan's activities at all levels. These acts made it illegal to deprive anyone of his or her constitutional rights, including those provided by the recent amendments pertaining to freed slaves. The acts were to be enforced by the states, but if a state failed to enforce the laws, the president had the power to intervene. These federal actions successfully finished the destruction of the Klan that Forrest had begun; by the mid-1870s, when Reconstruction ended, the Klan was virtually nonexistent.

The problems of African Americans in the American South, however, were far from over. In the post-Reconstruction era their mistreatment simply became routine. Although the black codes were gone, they were replaced by Jim Crow laws that legally sanctioned racial segregation. As George Washington Cable (1844–1925) later said (in The Negro Question, published in 1890), "The ex-slave was not a free man; he was only a free Negro" (Trelease, p. xvi). The end of Reconstruction had occurred, curiously enough, with the election of another Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893), in 1876—an election whose outcome initially was inconclusive, hinging on disputed vote counts in three southern states. Hayes, in order to get the vote count he wanted, agreed to bring all Reconstruction activities to an end and let the southern states return to full sovereignty. The states gave Hayes the vote count that resulted in his election, and Reconstruction was over. In this climate the Ku Klux Klan was, in fact, no longer needed. Any intimidation perceived to be required could occur without interference from, and often with the active cooperation of, local and state governments. The federal government, and the North in general, apparently had lost interest in the fate of the freed slaves.

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN

Albion Tourgée's novel A Fool's Errand, published in 1879, recounts many Klan-related atrocities in the Reconstruction South. Tourgée (1838–1905) himself served as a federal judge in North Carolina from 1868 to 1874 and knew firsthand what it was like to experience Klan terror. In 1870 he wrote a letter to Senator Joseph Abbott (later published in the New York Tribune) complaining of Klan violence, including the lynching of fellow judge John Stephens. About his own situation he said: "I have very little doubt that I shall be one of the next victims. My steps have been dogged for months, and only a good opportunity has been wanting to secure to me the fate which Stephens has just met" (Tourgée, "Albion W. Tourgée"). Though A Fool's Errand gives primary attention to Klan crimes, it also shows sympathy for the plight of the South that provided a fertile ground for the growth of the Klan, and it criticizes the federal government's Reconstruction policy—both its omissions and its excesses.

Anger at the sort of violence perpetrated by the Klan and then institutionalized in the post-Reconstruction era led Mark Twain (1835–1910) in 1901 to write "The United States of Lyncherdom" (not published until 1923), which denounced the "moral cowardice" that prevented individuals from opposing mob violence. Twain also dealt with such violence in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which includes several near-lynchings. Most notably, after Colonel Sherburn, an aristocratic resident of a small town in Arkansas, murders the town drunk (Boggs) in broad daylight in front of witnesses, a mob tries to lynch Sherburn, but he faces them down with a shotgun and a liberal dose of scorn. Sherburn's speech to the crowd refers sarcastically to Klan-style justice, though without actually mentioning the Klan (which would have been an anachronism because the novel is set in the 1840s):

The pitifulest thing out is a mob. . . . Now the thing for you to do, is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching's going to be done, it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they'll bring their masks. (P. 191)

The problem is that Sherburn's otherwise admirably heroic stand against mob violence is not really an attack on lynching per se. In fact, he portrays lynching, in view of the average person's cowardice, as perhaps the only viable instrument of justice: "Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and that's just what they would do. So . . . then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back, and lynches the rascal" (p. 190). In Life on the Mississippi (1883), Twain blames many of the South's nineteenth-century deficiencies on what he calls "the Sir Walter [Scott] disease" (p. 468)—a reliance on antiquated romantic notions "that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations" (p. 469).

The sort of sentimentality and delusions of grandeur that Twain cites as being so harmful to the South are precisely the values promoted in novels by Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) and Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864–1946). The hallmark of the KKK as portrayed in Page's Red Rock (1898) is the preservation of purity: the purity of southern womanhood, the purity of the threatened idyllic southern lifestyle, the purity of the European American racial heritage. Dixon's much more influential The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865–1900 (1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) follow a similar trajectory but add a deep racial hatred to the mix. All three novels sold well, and their premises were for the most part not regarded as offensive. In an era in which social unrest had become a major concern for those in the North (where there were serious labor uprisings) as well as the South, an organization such as the Klan, whose mission was to stifle troublemakers and maintain an unruffled surface for society, could exert a romantic appeal.

Dixon believed that African Americans had been "idealized" and "worshipped" in accordance with their romanticized portrayal in Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–1896) Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851–1852) and that Americans had "heard only one side for forty years" (Railton). The Leopard's Spots straightforwardly presents itself as an antithetical rewriting of Stowe's novel. It represents blacks as subhuman, Radical Republicans as evil, and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of the wholesome traditional values of the South.

The Clansman is a heavily researched historical novel that again portrays the KKK as heroic and blacks as bestial—acceptable as domesticated animals but dangerous if allowed to roam free. The story centers on the rape of a young, white southern virgin by a black man, the girl's and her mother's suicides rather than live with their shame, and the heroic lynching of the perpetrator by the Klansmen. A subplot features Austin Stoneman, a character based on the Radical Republican senator Thaddeus Stevens. Stoneman sets the evil machinery of the Reconstruction in motion, but then, broken in health, moves to the South with his son and daughter. The daughter falls in love with a dashing ex-Confederate officer who becomes the Grand Dragon of the South Carolina KKK and, at the novel's dramatic conclusion, leads his Klan forces in rescuing Stoneman's son from an unjust execution.

THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

The literary rehabilitation of the Ku Klux Klan was completed in 1915 when the moviemaker D. W. Griffith turned Dixon's The Clansman into a feature film titled The Birth of a Nation. The film was a cinematic masterpiece and was immensely popular. President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) was said to have commented after seeing the film: "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true" (Freund). Inspired by Griffith's film, William J. Simmons, a former Methodist clergyman living in Atlanta, revived the Klan tradition with a dramatic ceremony at Stone Mountain, Georgia, that included a cross burning—a ritual that had not been part of Klan ceremonies of the Reconstruction era. Simmons called his group the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and declared himself Imperial Wizard. The new Klan grew rapidly and became a nationwide organization, though strongest in the South and the Midwest.

Simmons's Klan abstained for the most part from violence; however, it was a potent political force promoting an ultraconservative moral, religious, and social agenda. As in Page's and Dixon's novels, the emphasis was on purity—white Anglo-Saxon Protestant purity. It was opposed not only to African Americans but also to Jews, Roman Catholics, immigrants, and labor unions as well; it also supported Prohibition. At its peak in the 1920s, it had more than four million members, including about half a million members in the Women's Ku Klux Klan, and this translated into votes that were likely to be focused effectively on a narrow range of issues. The Klan successfully supported the election of sixteen U.S. senators in the 1920s, of whom five were actually members of the KKK—including Hugo Black, who later became a Supreme Court justice. President Warren Harding also joined the Klan. The Klan gained almost total political control over the state of Indiana, but that control dissolved when Indiana's Klan boss David Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder. When Ed Jackson, Stephenson's handpicked governor, refused to pardon him, Stephenson took revenge by releasing incriminating information showing the deep corruption of the Klan organization. These events, coming in 1925 at the height of Klan power, led to a rapid deflation of its image as defender of purity, and despite a momentary revival in 1928 to oppose the presidential candidacy of Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, membership plummeted.

In 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) published The Great Gatsby, in which Tom Buchanan, a rich but thoroughly boorish character, says that he has been reading a book titled The Rise of the Colored Empires: "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. . . . It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things" (p. 17). Though Fitzgerald's treatment is satirical, Tom is articulating a concern shared by millions of his contemporaries, as exhibited by the huge, if short-lived, success of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

The early twentieth century also showed a growing reaction to Klan-style violence among African American writers. Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899) chronicles a fictional attempt to establish an insurrectionist black government; characters debate what would later be called the "black power" response to racial violence and injustice (with the specific warning that a black man "beset by the Ku Klux" [p. 182] would get no help from the federal government) versus the accommodationist/integrationist approach. Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901), based on an actual incident of large-scale racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, attacks the pervasive injustice of Jim Crow laws and strongly invokes the memory of Klan violence. W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) includes a story titled "The Coming of John," in which the title character, a promising young black man in a southern town, kills a white man who is in the act of raping a young black woman, and the story ends with the lynch mob closing in. Anti-lynching plays also constitute a notable subgenre among African American authors of the early twentieth century, especially African American women—for example, Angelina Grimké's Rachel (1916), Georgia Douglas Johnson's A Sunday Morning in the South (1925), and May Miller's Nails and Thorns (1933). Each of these plays is built around the lynching of a black man on the basis of a false accusation that he has raped a white woman, and each is designed to appeal to the maternal instincts of white women who might imagine such things happening to their own innocent sons. Langston Hughes's "Father and Son," published in The Ways of White Folks (1933), concludes with the lynching of two black men, one of whom is known by the lynchers to be innocent, and several of the stories in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children (1938) depict incidents of Klanlike violence.

THE KLAN AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The Klan declined through the 1930s, and in 1944 the national organization was effectively destroyed when the Internal Revenue Service hit it with a $650,000 lien for back taxes. Yet the Klan rose again when the civil rights movement began to gain momentum. This new Klan actually consisted of several separate organizations. Most notable were Robert Shelton's United Klans of America, based in Alabama, and Sam Bowers's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Like the Reconstruction Klan, these new groups inflicted considerable violence on blacks and those supporting their right to racial equality, but unlike the Reconstruction Klan, the Klans of the 1960s were unable to halt the social forces they deplored. The federal government, under the strong leadership of President Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973), used the provisions of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to prosecute racial crimes when state courts failed to do so. Bowers received a life sentence for the murders of civil rights activists. Shelton's organization was ruined financially when the mother of a black victim of a Klan murder successfully sued the United Klans, with the help of the activist Southern Poverty Law Center, as a conspirator in the violation of her son's civil rights. Various Klan organizations have continued to exist in diminished form and, though clinging to some of the old traditions, have begun to merge with or evolve into the paramilitary and neo-Nazi organizations that have taken up the banner of white supremacy.

See alsoThe Birth of a Nation; Blacks; Jim Crow; Lynching; The Marrow of Tradition; Reconstruction; Violence

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cable, George Washington. The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South. 1890. Edited by Arlin Turner. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958.

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. New York: Arno, 1969.

Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. 1905. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970.

Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865–1900. 1902. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 2001.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. 1935. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribners, 1995.

Griggs, Sutton. Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem. 1899. New York: Arno, 1969.

Railton, Stephen. "Dixon's Leopard's Spots." Stephen Railton and the University of Virginia, 2004. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/proslav/dixonhp.html.

Tourgée, Albion Winegar. "Albion W. Tourgée, Letter on Ku Klux Klan Activities (1870)." America Past and Present. Available at http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/divine5e/medialib/timeline/docs/sources/theme_primarysources_Civil_Rights_5.html.

Tourgée, Albion Winegar. A Fool's Errand: A Novel of the South during Reconstruction. 1879. New York: HarperCollins, 1979.

Tourgée, Albion Winegar. The Invisible Empire. 1880. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. 1883. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Secondary Works

Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: New Viewpoints, 1976.

Freund, Charles Paul. "Dixiecrats Triumphant: The Menacing Mr. Wilson." Reasonline, 18 December 2002. http://reason.com/links/links121802.shtml.

Horn, Stanley F. Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871. 2nd ed. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1969.

Katz, William Loren. The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan Impact on History. Seattle: Open Hand, 1986.

"Radical Republicans." Teaching History Online. 15 March 2005. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASradical.htm.

Randel, William Peirce. The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1965.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. New York: Knopf, 1965.

Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

James S. Leonard