The Ku Klux Klan had at one time been especially dominant in the mountain, Piedmont and Deep South areas of the United States of America. But the Knights of the White Camellia, another race hatred organization, finally ruled in the Deep South, after being founded in 1867 in Louisiana.
They were reputed to have more members than the KKK, but were more conservative and less spectacular in their actions. The Knights had a similar divisional organization to the Klan, with headquarters in New Orleans. One scholar placed the Knights as actually a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, stating it was a Texas group led by Charles Lee. It was linked to a number of incidents of racial intimidation and harassment in Vidor, Texas, occurring in 1992 and 1993.
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These events involved efforts to prevent the desegregation of an all-white federally assisted housing project. Among reported threats was an attempt to blow up a unit to prevent its integration. Residents of this housing project issued a statement that the Knights "carried automatic weapons on a bus they drove through the housing complex and that one Klan member offered white children to beat up African-American children."
Based on that, the Texas Commission on Human Rights brought a civil suit against the Klan. One tactic nowadays used against them is to bring civil suits, for in many cases, these cowards have attacked an individual with a group of people. That makes it harder to get a criminal conviction. Groups who kill or hurt individuals are difficult to convict in criminal court, due to the "eye for an eye" nature of homicide and assault laws, but it's easier to get a conviction against them as a group in civil court.
In 1915, the second Ku Klux Klan was founded by William J. Simmons, a famous white promoter of fraternal orders. The new group proposed a much broader program than the first one, including with its white supremacy orientation a degree of nativism, or preaching against foreigners, and anti-Catholicism. They were now also more sharply oriented towards anti-Semitism, and were similar in these regards to the Know-Nothing movement of the mid-19th century.
The newfound power of the modern mass media inspired the Klan's comeback. For example there was the silent 1915 black and white film, "Birth of a Nation," which made a major point of featuring the Klan as "American heroes," and inflammatory anti-Semitic newspaper accounts surrounding the trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man accused of murder.
Frank was the manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, and he was accused of killing 13-year-old employee Mary Phagan, an accusation that due to anti-Semitic fervor grew into wild tales of orgies and rapes that Frank had supposedly committed. His death by lynching through a mob of prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia in 1915 caused the formation of the Anti-Defamation League, but also fanned the flames of unrest. Georgia politician and publisher Tom Watson used the case to build support for the renewal of the first Klan, which had been destroyed by the federal government in the early 1870s.
But now, the second KKK was a formal fraternal organization with the ability to communicate through the mails, the newly invented telephone, and the mass media. It had a national and state structure, which paid thousands of men to organize local chapters all over the country. At its peak in the early 1920s, the KKK included nearly 15% of the nation's eligible white population. Some southern groups caused lynchings and other violent activities, which in a few years made the South gain in its reputation for wanton lawlessness.
After 1920, professional promoters Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Y. Clarke helped it spread rapidly through the North this time, as well as the South. It gave the militant patriotism that had been aroused in WWI an outlet, and began stressing Christian fundamentalism. But they also began controlling politics in many communities, and in the 1920s they elected many state officials and Congressmen. The states of Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Oregon and Maine were being held under their pervasive influence. Their power in the Midwest began to fade in the late 1920s when a major Klan leader, David C. Stephenson, was convicted of murder.
Such evidence of corruption led to the indictment of Indiana's governor and Indianapolis' mayor, as they were both Klan supporters. Meanwhile, the Klan was organizing lynchings, as they had already done in the 1800s, and committing other crimes against humanity, such as dissuading black people from taking jobs for which they had been hired. In one case, they talked a black female schoolteacher out of assuming her position by visiting her at night while wearing their peculiar costumes, with Viking horns sticking out of their heads. They were known for their extreme measures taken against Native Americans, blacks and Jews, plus their newer anti-Catholic sentiments were sometimes violently expressed, as by the mid-1920s, their membership had peaked sharply. They now had an estimated 4 to 5 million members.
Although their active membership was probably much smaller, the Invisible Empire had finally fulfilled their own sick premise, making sure that "you'd better be racist, or else." But the Klan next proceeded to decline rapidly, and was down to about 30,000 members by 1930. In the meantime, the "Klan spirit" managed to help break the Democratic Party's hold on the South in 1928, when Roman Catholic Alfred E. Smith was running as that party's presidential candidate.
The collapse of the second Klan almost immediately afterwards was due to state laws forbidding masks and disallowing the "secret organization" elements of the group, which stemmed from the bad publicity they were receiving through the sporadically violent action of their thugs and swindlers. Also, the interest in it among the ghouls, or individual members, was disappearing, and during the Great Depression of the 1930s, their dues-paying membership pretty much disappeared. There wouldn't be further interest in it until well after WWII, especially since one of the reasons they had problems was their affiliations with the Nazis and similar groups. They tried getting together with the Neo Nazis in the 1980s, but differing ideologies quickly drove the two groups apart.
The third attempt at the Klan "rising again" was by Dr. Samuel Green of Georgia, when he attempted to revive it in the years following the Second World War, but this failed. The organization was splintered, and states were beginning to individually "bar" it as an illegal group.
But the southern civil rights activities during the 1960s, although they had begun to combat Jim Crow laws and not to particularly oppose the Klan, caused a resurgence of Klannish activities and led to the resurrection of the scattered klaverns. The most notable ones belonged to Mississippi's White Knights of the KKK groups, which were led by Robert Shelton. These newly revived groups attacked blacks and civil rights workers in many southern cities, including Jacksonville and St. Augustine, Florida, Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, and Meridian, Mississippi.
However, this new Klan was not organized well or strongly believed in, so by the end of the 1960s, its power and membership declined to practically nothing. The Civil Rights Movement had used their violent methods against them by practicing gentle nonviolence instead, which made them more sympathetic to the general public than what was now only a bunch of violent, hate-mongering "hoodlums." The federal government now treated them the same way they treated other organizations seen as "hostile" to American interests, and the FBI was infiltrating and monitoring them well before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., beloved head of the Civil Rights Movement in America during the 1960s.
They were subject to federal probes, and in Birmingham, my father and the Boys were allowed free license to use "scare tactics" on the "ghouls" as individuals. They "spooked" certain important members by asking their employers about Klan affiliations, also visiting their next-door neighbors and bothering them with questions about the KKK, until these individuals quit the group. Also, MLK's death in 1968 caused some overdue hatred against them, and anti-Klan sentiment in general, as many people thought the Klan was involved in his murder.
There are some few reports on the Internet about violent attacks by blacks on Klan members in recent years, and apparently there were at least a few murders of whites. Though there was a resurgence of support in the early 1990s via the recruitment efforts of right-winger David Duke in Louisiana, he has since quit the organization, and the membership of the KKK is estimated to now be in the low thousands. With black militancy through "gangstas" on the rise, I think their days may indeed be numbered.
But it has also been estimated that there are as many as 150 Klan chapters or klaverns in the USA, with up to 8,000 members nationwide. These "clubs" run their operations in separate, small local units, and are considered to be extreme hate groups. Therefore, the modern KKK has been repudiated by the mainstream media and many political and religious leaders. Recently, a website touting "Christian Love" was found headed by a female Klan leader, under the phrase "Christina love" on the Internet. It's doubtful that they're getting much press coverage; according to the FBI, they're pretty much "over with."
Read the next article in this series, "Early American Civil Rights - Begins in 1896"and the other articles in this long article series about why racism was and is so prevalent in the American South.
The Ku Klux Klan - Ends in 20--?
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