Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three historically distinct far-right organizations in the United States. The KKK advocates extreme reactionary, and often violent, agendas such as white supremacy, white nationalism, anti-immigration, and, since the mid-20th century, anti-communist. The current manifestation is classified as a hate group with an estimated 2012 membership of between 3,000 and 5,000 members.
Klan History
The first Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying and to hide their identities.
In the early 1900s, the KKK remerged with costumes and code words similar to the first Klan, becoming a nationwide movement by the 1920s. This second Klan was founded by William J. Simmons at Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta, Georgia. It added to the original anti-black ideology with a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and Prohibitionist agenda. Most of the founders were from an Atlanta-area organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, which had organized around the trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent convicted of murdering a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan. The case fueled anti-Semitism and Frank was later kidnapped from prison and lynched. The new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the Klan presented in the 1915 film, "The Birth of a Nation".
Birth of a Nation
Theatrical poster for "The Birth of a Nation," the 1915 film that romanticized the Ku Klux Klan and helped inspire a renewed KKK to emerge.
Klan organizers, called "Kleagles", signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and bought KKK costumes. The Kleagle would keep half the money and send the rest to state or national officials. After finishing with an area, he would organize a huge rally, often with burning crosses and the presentation of a Bible to a local Protestant minister, and then leave town with the money. The local units operated like fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.
Prohibitionist and Anti-Union
Historians agree that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over Prohibition, the outlawing of alcohol sales or consumption, and created a bond between Klansmen across the nation who opposed bootleggers, sometimes violently. In 1922, approximately 200 Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas. Membership in the Klan and in other Prohibition groups overlapped, and they often coordinated activities.
In southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members controlled access to better-paying industrial jobs, but opposed labor unions. During the 1930s and 1940s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which advocated industrial unions and was open to African-American members. With access to dynamite and using the skills from their jobs in mining and steel, some Klan members in Birmingham during the late 1940s began to perpetrate bombings in order to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks who moved into middle-class neighborhoods, with one neighborhood being so frequently bombed it became known as Dynamite Hill. Independent Klan groups remained active in Birmingham and were deeply engaged in violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.
Urbanization
A significant characteristic of the second Klan was its base in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in both the North and the South. In Michigan, for instance, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, more than half of the state's Klan total. Most were lower- to middle-class whites trying to protect their jobs and housing from waves of newcomers to the industrial cities. These included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who tended to be Catholic and Jewish in numbers higher than earlier groups of immigrants, as well as black and white migrants from the South. As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods experienced social tensions. Due to the rapid pace of population growth in cities undergoing industrialization, such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the Midwest, as well as in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.
Ku Klux Klan cross burning, 1921
Robed members of the Ku Klux Klan burn a cross during a rally in 1921. Cross burning was introduced during the reemergence of the Klan in 1915.
Resistance and Decline
In the 1920s, Indiana had the most powerful Ku Klux Klan organization in America. Though it counted a high number of members statewide, with over 30% of its white male citizens, its importance peaked with the 1924 election of Governor Edward L. Jackson, a Klan member who was involved in several political scandals and tried for bribery in 1927 before finishing his term in disgrace in 1929.
In that same period, the scandal surrounding the 1925 murder trial of D.C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the Ku Klux Klan as upholders of law and order. Stephenson was the Grand Dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states who led the separation of the area under his control from the national KKK organization in 1923. He was convicted of second degree murder for his part in the rape and subsequent death of Madge Oberholtzer, a white, 29-year-old election official. After Stephenson's conviction in a sensational trial, the Klan declined dramatically in Indiana.
D.C. Stephenson
Indiana Ku Klux Klan leader D.C. Stephenson was convicted in 1925 of the rape and murder of a 29-year-old state employee, which led to the discrediting of the Klan as upholders of law and order.
Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan. In response to blunt attacks against Jewish Americans and the Klan's campaign to outlaw private schools, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed following the lynching of Leo Frank. When one civic group began to publish Klan membership lists, the membership quickly declined. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People carried on public education campaigns to inform people about Klan activities and lobbied against Klan abuses in Congress. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership in most areas of the Midwest began to decline rapidly and by 1926 the Ku Klux Klan as a whole was discredited and suffering from what has been observed as a failure in its leadership.
The Klan’s national leader, Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician. They were unable to staunch the declining membership. In 1944, the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944. Local Klan organizations closed over the following years, although many groups remained scattered throughout the United States, especially in the South, and still have members up through today.