Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism

The bare facts about the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and its revival half a century later are baffling to most people today. Little more than a year after it was founded, the secret society thundered across the war-torn South, sabotaging Reconstruction governments and imposing a reign of terror and violence that lasted three or four years. And then as rapidly as it had spread, the Klan faded into the history books. After World War I, a new version of the Klan sputtered to life and within a few years brought many parts of the nation under its paralyzing grip of racism and bloodshed. Then, having grown to be a major force for the second time, the Klan again receded into the background. This time it never quite disappeared, but it never again commanded such widespread support.

Today, it seems incredible that an organization so violent, so opposed to the American principles of justice and equality, could twice in the nation’s history have held such power. How did the Ku Klux Klan — one of the nation’s first terrorist groups — so instantly seize the South in the aftermath of the Civil War? Why did it so quickly vanish? How could it have risen so rapidly to power in the 1920s and then so rapidly have lost that power? And why is this ghost of the Civil War still haunting America today with hatred, violence and sometimes death for its enemies and its own members?

Frontier Justice

The answers do not lie on the surface of American history. They are deeper than the events of the turbulent 1960s, the parades and cross burnings and lynching’s of the 1920s, beyond even the Reconstruction era and the Civil War. The story begins, really, on the frontier, where successive generations of Americans learned hard lessons about survival. Those lessons produced some of the qualities of life for which the nation is most admired — fierce individualism, enterprising inventiveness, and the freedom to be whatever a person wants and to go wherever a new road leads.

But the frontier spirit included other traits as well, and one was a stubborn insistence on the prerogative of “frontier justice” — an instant, private, very personal and often violent method of settling differences without involving lawyers or courts. As the frontier was tamed and churches, schools and courthouses replaced log trading posts, settlers substituted law and order for the older brand of private justice. But there were always those who did not accept the change. The quest for personal justice or revenge became a key motivation for many who later rode with the Ku Klux Klan, especially among those who were poor and uneducated.

Night Patrols

A more obvious explanation of the South’s widespread acceptance of the Klan is found in the institution of slavery. Freedom for slaves represented for many white Southerners a bitter defeat — a defeat not only of their armies in the field but of their economic and social way of life. It was an age old nightmare come true, for early in Southern life whites in general and plantation owners in particular had begun to view the large number of slaves living among them as a potential threat to their property and their lives.

A series of bloody slave revolts in Virginia and other parts of the South resulted in the widespread practice of authorized night patrols composed of white men specially deputized for that purpose. White Southerners looked upon these night patrols as a civic duty, something akin to serving on a jury or in the militia. The mounted patrols, or regulators, as they were called, prowled Southern roads, enforcing the curfew for slaves, looking for runaways, and guarding rural areas against the threat of black uprisings. They were authorized by law to give a specific number of lashes to any violators they caught. The memory of these legal night riders and their whips was still fresh in the minds of both defeated Southerners and liberated blacks when the first Klansmen took to those same roads in 1866.

Aftermath of War

An even more immediate impetus for the Ku Klux Klan was the civil War itself and the reconstruction that followed. When robed Klansmen were at their peak of power, alarmed Northerners justifiably saw in the Klan an attempt of unrepentant confederates to win through terrorism what they had been unable to win on the battlefield. Such a simple view did not totally explain the Klan’s sway over the South, but there is little doubt that many a confederate veteran exchanged his rebel gray for the hoods and sheets of the Invisible Empire.

Finally, and most importantly, there were the conditions Southerners were faced with immediately after the war. Their cities, plantations and farms were ruined; they were impoverished and often hungry; there was an occupation army in their midst; and Reconstruction governments threatened to usurp the traditional white ruling authority. In the first few months after the fighting ended, white Southerners had to contend with the losses of life, property and, in their eyes, honor. The time was ripe for the Ku Klux Klan to ride.

Lynchings were a common form of vigilante justice during the 19th century.

Mischief Turns Malicious

Robert R. Lee’s surrender was not fully nine months past when six young ex-confederates met in a law office in December 1865 to form a secret club that they called the Ku Klux Klan. From that beginning in the little town of Pulaski, Tennessee, their club began to grow. Historians disagree on the intention of the six founders, but it is known that word quickly spread about a new organization whose members met in secret and rode with their faces hidden, who practiced elaborate rituals and initiation ceremonies.

Much of the Klan’s early reputation may have been based on almost frivolous mischief and tomfoolery. At first, a favorite Klan tactic had been for a white-sheeted Klansman wearing a ghoulish mask to ride up to a black family’s home at night and demand water. When the well bucket was offered, the Klansman would gulp it down and demand more, having actually poured the water through a rubber tube that flowed into a leather bottle concealed beneath his robe. After draining several buckets, the rider would exclaim that he had not had a drink since he died on the battlefield at Shiloh. He then galloped into the night, leaving the impression that ghosts of confederate dead were riding the countryside.

The presence of armed white men roving the countryside at night reminded many blacks of the pre-war slave patrols. The fact that Klansmen rode with their faces covered intensified blacks’ suspicion and fear. In time, the mischief turned to violence. Whippings were used first, but within months there were bloody clashes between Klansmen and blacks, Northerners who had come South, or Southern unionists. from the start, however, there was also a sinister side to the Klan.

Klansmen were caught trying to lynch a carpetbagger in 1871.

Black Codes

By the time the six Klan founders met in December 1865, the opening phase of reconstruction was nearly complete. All 11 of the former rebel states had been rebuilt on astonishingly lenient terms which allowed many of the ex-confederate leaders to return to positions of power. Southern state legislatures began enacting laws that made it clear that the aristocrats who ran them intended to yield none of their pre-war power and dominance over poor whites and especially over blacks. These laws became known as the Black codes and in some cases amounted to a virtual re-enslavement of blacks.

In Louisiana, the Democratic convention resolved that “we hold this to be a Government of White People, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the White race, and ... that the people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.” Mississippi and Florida, in particular, enacted vicious Black codes, other Southern states (except North Carolina) passed somewhat less severe versions, and President Andrew Johnson did nothing to prevent them from being enforced.

These laws and the hostility and violence that erupted against blacks and Union supporters in the South outraged Northerners who just a few months before had celebrated victory, not only over the Confederacy but its system of slavery as well. In protest of the defiant Black Codes, Congress refused to seat the new Southern senators and representatives when it reconvened in December 1865 after a long recess. At the moment the fledgling Klan was born in Pulaski, the stage was set for a showdown between Northerners determined not to be cheated out of the fruits of their victory and die-hard Southerners who refused to give up their supremacy over blacks.

Ironically, the increasingly violent activities of the Klan throughout 1866 helped prove the argument of Radical Republicans in the North, who wanted harsher measures taken against Southern governments as part of their program to force equal treatment for blacks. Partly as a result of news reports of Klan violence in the South, the radicals won overwhelming victories in the congressional elections of 1866. In early 1867, they made a fresh start at Reconstruction. In March 1867, congress overrode President Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Acts, which abolished the ex-confederate state governments and divided 10 of the 11 former rebel states into military districts. The military governors of these districts were charged with enrolling black voters and holding elections for new constitutional conventions in each of the 10 states, which led to the creation of the radical Reconstruction Southern governments.

Ghost Riders

In April 1867, a call went out for all known Ku Klux Klan chapters or dens to send representatives to Nashville, Tenn., for a meeting that would plan, among other things, the Klan response to the new Federal Reconstruction policy.

Throughout the summer and fall, the Klan had steadily become more violent. Thousands of the white citizens of west Tennessee, northern Alabama and part of Georgia and Mississippi had by this time joined the Klan. Many now viewed the escalating violence with growing alarm — not necessarily because they had sympathy for the victims, but because the night riding was getting out of their control. Anyone could put on a sheet and a mask and ride into the night to commit assault, robbery, rape, arson or murder. The Klan was increasingly used as a cover for common crime or for personal revenge.

The Nashville Klan convention was called to grapple with these problems by creating a chain of command and deciding just what sort of organization the Klan would be. The meeting gave birth to the official philosophy of white supremacy as the fundamental creed of the Ku Klux Klan. Throughout the summer of 1867 the Invisible Empire changed, shedding the antics that had brought laughter during its parades and other public appearances, and instead taking on the full nature of a secret and powerful force with a sinister purpose.

All the now-familiar tactics of the Klan date from this period — the threats delivered to blacks, radicals and other enemies warning them to leave town; the night raids on individuals they singled out for rougher treatment; and the mass demonstrations of masked and robed Klansmen designed to cast their long shadow of fear over a troubled community.

By early 1868, stories about Klan activities were appearing in newspapers nationwide, and reconstruction governors realized they faced nothing less than an insurrection by a terrorist organization. Orders went out from state capitols and Union army headquarters during the early months of 1868 to suppress the Klan.

Invisible Government

But it was too late. From middle Tennessee, the Klan quickly was established in nearby counties and then in North and South Carolina. In some counties the Klan became the de facto law, an invisible government that state officials could not control.

When Tennessee Governor William G. Brownlow attempted to plant spies within the Klan, he found the organization knew as much about his efforts as he did. One Brownlow spy who tried to join the Klan was found strung up in a tree, his feet just barely touching the ground. Later another spy was stripped and mutilated, and a third was stuffed in a barrel in Nashville and rolled down a wharf and into the Cumberland River, where he drowned.

With the tacit sympathy and support of most white citizens often behind it, the Klan worked behind a veil that was impossible for Brownlow and other Reconstruction governors to pierce. But even though a large majority of white Southerners opposed the Radical state governments, not all of them approved of the hooded order’s brand of vigilante justice. During its first year, the Klan’s public marches and parades were sometimes hooted and jeered at by townspeople who looked upon them as a joke. Later, when the Klan began to use guns and whips to make its point, some white newspaper editors, ministers and other civic leaders spoke out against the violence.

But in the late 1860s, white Southern voices against the Klan were in the minority. One of the Klan’s greatest strengths during this period was the large number of editors, ministers, former Confederate officers and political leaders who hid behind its sheets and guided its actions. Among them, none was more widely respected in the South than the Klan’s reputed leader, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a legendary Confederate cavalry officer who settled in Tennessee and apparently joined the Klan fairly soon after it began to make a name for itself. Forrest became the Klan’s first imperial wizard, and in 1867 and 1868 there is little doubt that he was its chief missionary, traveling over the South, establishing new chapters and quietly advising its new members.

The ugly side of the Ku Klux Klan, the mutilations and floggings, lynching’s and shootings, began to spread across the South in 1868, and any words of caution that may have been expressed at the Nashville meeting were submerged beneath a stream of bloody deeds.

The KKK’s First Death

As the violence escalated, it turned to general lawlessness, and some Klan groups even began fighting each other. In Nashville, a gang of outlaws who adopted the Klan disguise came to be known as the Black Ku Klux Klan. For several months middle Tennessee was plagued by a guerrilla war between the real and bogus Klan’s.

The Klan was also coming under increased attack by Congress and the Reconstruction state governments. The leaders of the Klan thus realized that the order’s end was at hand, at least as any sort of organized force to serve their interests. It is widely believed that Forrest ordered the Klan disbanded in January 1869, but the surviving document is rather ambiguous. (Some historians think Forrest’s “order” was just a trick so he could deny responsibility or knowledge of Klan atrocities.)

Whatever the actual date, it is clear that as an organized, cohesive body across the South, the Ku Klux Klan had ceased to exist by the end of 1869.

That did not end the violence, however, and as atrocities became more widespread, Radical legislatures throughout the region began to pass very restrictive laws, impose martial law in some Klan dominated counties, and actively hunt Klan leaders. In 1871, Congress held hearings on the Klan and passed a harsh anti-Klan law modeled after a North Carolina statute. Under the new federal law, Southerners lost their jurisdiction over the crimes of assault, robbery and murder, and the president was authorized to declare martial law and suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Night riding and the wearing of masks were expressly prohibited. Hundreds of Klansmen were arrested, but few actually went to prison.

The laws probably dampened the enthusiasm for the Ku Klux Klan, but they can hardly be credited with destroying the hooded order. By the mid-1870s, white Southerners didn’t need the Klan as much as before because they had by that time retaken control of most Southern state governments. Klan terror had proven very effective at keeping black voters away from the polls. Some black officeholders were hanged and many more were brutally beaten. White Southern Democrats won elections easily and then passed laws taking away the rights blacks had won during Reconstruction.

The result was an official system of segregation which was the law of the land for more than 80 years. This system was called “separate but equal,” which was half true — everything was separate, but nothing was equal.

Born Again

During the last half of the 19th century, memories of the Ku Klux Klan’s brief grip on the South faded, and its bloody deeds were forgotten by many whites who were once in sympathy with its cause. On the national scene, two events served to set the stage for the Ku Klux Klan to be reborn early in the 20th century.

The first was massive immigration, bringing some 23 million people from Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Russia and a great cry of opposition from some Americans. The American Protective Association, organized in 1887, reflected the attitude of many Americans who believed that the nation was being swamped by alien people. This organization, a secret, oath bound group, was especially strong in the Middle West, where the reborn Ku Klux Klan would later draw much of its strength.

The other major event which prepared the ground for the Klan’s return was World War I, which had a wrenching, unsettling effect on the nation. On the European battlefields, white Americans again were exposed to unrestrained bloodshed while blacks served in the uniform of their country and saw open up before them a new world. Back at home, Americans learned suspicion, hatred and distrust of anything alien, a sentiment which led to the rejection of President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations.

In the South, yet another series of events occurred which helped breathe life into the Klan several decades later. In the 1890s, an agrarian Populist movement tried to build a coalition of blacks and poor whites against the mill owners, large landholders and conservative elite of the Old South. The aristocracy responded with the old cry of white supremacy and the manipulation of black votes. As a result, the Populists were substantially turned back in every Deep South state except Georgia and North Carolina. A feeling spread across the South, shared by both the aristocracy and many poor whites, that blacks had to be frozen out of society.

The 1890s marked the beginning of efforts in the Deep South to deny political, social and economic power to blacks. Most segregation and disenfranchisement laws date from that period. It was also the beginning of a series of lynching of blacks by white mobs. The combination of legalized racism and the constant threat of violence eventually led to a major black migration to Northern cities.

The scholar Gladys-Marie Fry, who writes about slave patrols in her book, Night Riders in Black Folk History (University of Tennessee Press, 1977), believes it was no accident that the early Klansmen chose white sheets for their costumes. The following story was told to her by a black resident of Washington, D.C., who heard the story from his ex- slave ancestors:

“Back in those days they had little log cabins built around in a circle, around for the slaves. And the log cabins, they dabbed between two logs, they dabbed it with some mortar. And of course when that falls out, you could look out and see. But every, most every night along about eight or nine o’clock, this overseer would get on his white horse and put a sheet over him, and put tin cans to a rope and drag it around. And they told all the slaves, ‘now if you poke your head out doors after a certain time, monster of a ghost will get you.’ they peeped through and see that and never go out. They didn’t have to have any guards.”

Fry said such disguises meant to scare slaves were common and that the first Klansmen, knowing this, naturally chose similar uniforms, often embellishing them with fake horns and paint around the lips and eyes.

Relying heavily on the oral testimony of contemporary blacks whose parents or grandparents were slaves, Fry concludes that many slaves were superstitious, with real fears of ghosts, “haints,” and the supernatural. But she said most slaves knew when white slave owners and patrollers were trying to fool them. One ex-slave told a Federal writer’s project interviewer during the 1930s, “Ha! ha! dey jest talked ‘bout ghosts till I could hardly sleep at night, but the biggest thing in ghosts is somebody ‘guised up tryin’ to skeer you. ain’t no sich thing as ghosts.” another former slave reported, “Dey ghost dere — we seed ‘em. Dey’s w’ite people wid a sheet on ‘em to scare de slaves offen de plantation.”

According to Fry’s research, slaves may have been frightened by the slave patrols, but they were far from defenseless. A common trick of the patrollers was to dress in black except for white boots and a white hat, which did make a ghostly sight when a group of them were riding along on a dark night. On one such occasion, however, slaves stretched grapevines across the road at just the right height to strike a rider on horseback. The slave patrol came galloping along and hit the grapevines; three patrollers were killed and several others injured. There were no more mounted slave patrols for a long time afterwards in that county.

After the Civil war, when the Ku Klux Klan served the same purpose of controlling blacks as the slave patrols had, many whites (and later historians) mistook the surface behavior of blacks for their genuine feelings. For blacks, Fry says, “appearing to believe what whites wanted them to believe was a part of wearing the mask and playing the game ... in another instance, on ex-slave who heard rumors of strange riders in his neighborhood went to his former master for information. The master told him, ‘there are Ku Klux here; are you afraid they will get among you?’ the black said, ‘what sort of men are they?’ the reply: ‘they are men who rise from the dead.’ according to the Congressional committee’s report, this informant gave the matter considerable thought and rejected it. In his own words: ‘I studied about it, but I did not believe it.’ “

Fry continues, “It is significant that the early Klan made such great efforts to frighten and terrorize blacks through supernatural means. The whole rationale for psychological control based on a fear of the supernatural was that whites were sure that they knew black people. they were not only firmly convinced that black people were gullible and would literally believe anything, but they were equally sure that blacks were an extremely superstitious people who had a fantastic belief in the supernatural interwoven into their life, folklore, and religion.

“Such thinking had obvious flaws: the underestimation of black intelligence and the overvaluation of existing superstitious beliefs. Blacks were frightened, no doubt, but not of ghosts. They were terrified of living, well-armed men who were extremely capable of making black people ghosts before their time.”

William J. Simmons, a Spanish war veteran-turned preacher-turned salesman, was a compulsive joiner who held memberships in a dozen different societies and two churches. But he had always dreamed of starting his own fraternal group, and in the fall of 1915 he put his plans into action.

On Thanksgiving eve, Simmons herded 15 fellow fraternalists onto a hired bus and drove them from Atlanta to nearby Stone Mountain. There, before a cross of pine boards, Simmons lit a match, and the Ku Klux Klan of the 20th century was born.

Although Simmons adopted the titles and regalia of the original version, his new creation at its outset had little similarity to the Reconstruction Klan. It was, in fact, little different from any of the dozens of other benevolent societies then popular in America. There is little doubt that Simmons’ ultimate purpose in forming the group was to make money. But growth at first was slow, even after America entered World War I in 1917 and the Klan had a real “purpose” — that of defending the country from aliens, idlers and union leaders.

Then, in 1920 Simmons met Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, two publicists who had formed a business in Atlanta. In June 1920, with the Klan’s membership at only a few thousand, Simmons signed a contract with Clarke and Mrs. Tyler giving them 80 percent of the profits from the dues of the new members Simmons so eagerly sought. The new promoters used an aggressive new sales pitch — the Klan would be rabidly pro American, which to them meant rabidly anti-black, anti-Jewish, and most importantly, anti-Catholic.

Simmons graphically illustrated the new approach when he was introduced to an audience of Georgia Klansmen and drew a Colt automatic pistol, a revolver and a cartridge belt from his coat and arranged them on the table before him. Plunging a Bowie knife into the table beside the guns, he issued an invitation: “Now let the Niggers, Catholics, Jews and all others who disdain my imperial wizardry, come out!”

Exploiting Fears

The message was clear — the new Klan was serious. That meant expanding its list of enemies to include Asians, immigrants, bootleggers, dope, graft, night clubs and road houses, violation of the Sabbath, sex, pre- and extra-marital escapades and scandalous behavior. The Klan, with its new mission of social vigilance, soon had organizers scouring the nation, probing for the fears of the communities they hit and then exploiting them to the hilt.

And the tactic was immediately a raging success. By the late summer of 1921, nearly 100,000 had enrolled in the Invisible Empire, and at $10 a head (tax-free since the Klan was a “benevolent” society), the profits were impressive. While Simmons made speeches and tinkered with ritual, Clarke busied himself with expanding the treasury, launching Klan publishing and manufacturing firms and investing in real estate. The future looked very good.

But during that summer the Klan leaders in Atlanta ran into their first trouble — controlling their far-flung empire. While Klan officials talked of fraternal ideals in Atlanta, their members across the nation began to take seriously the fiery rhetoric the recruiters were using to drum up new initiation fees. Violence first flared in a rampage of whippings, tar-and-feathers raids and the use of acid to brand the letters “KKK” on the foreheads of blacks, Jews and others they considered anti-American. Ministers, sheriffs, policemen, mayors and judges either ignored the violence or secretly participated. Few Klansmen were arrested, much less convicted.

The Klan Exposed

In September 1921 the New York World began a series of articles on the Klan, backed up by the revelations of an ex-recruiter. Another newspaper reported some of the internal gossip and financial manipulations within the Atlanta headquarters. And even more embarrassing was a story in the World that Clarke and Mrs. Tyler had been arrested, not quite fully clothed, in a police raid on a bawdy house in 1919.

The Klan was accepted as part of american life in the early 1920s.

The article badly tarnished the Klan’s moralistic image and precipitated a serious rift within the ranks. The World exposés also brought demands for countermeasures, and congress responded in October 1921 with hearings into the Klan’s activities. Although the congressional inquiry so upset Clarke that he considered resigning, the actual hearings did little damage to the Klan. Simmons explained away the secrecy of the Klan as just part of the fraternal aspect of the organization. He disavowed any link between his Klan and the nightriders of reconstruction days, and he denied — just as Forrest had done 50 years earlier — any knowledge of or responsibility for the violence. The committee adjourned without action, and the Klan benefited from all the publicity.

It almost seemed as if people in the rural areas of the country were determined to support whatever the big newspapers and congress condemned. Following more articles in the World in October (these concentrating on the violent nature of the Klan), membership in the Invisible empire exploded. “It wasn’t until the newspapers began to attack the Klan that it really grew,” Simmons recalled later. “Certain newspapers also aided us by inducing congress to investigate us. The result was that congress gave us the best advertising we ever got. Congress made us.”

Blacks were regularly lynched by white mobs.

Power Struggle

With the Klan’s new strength came prolonged internal bickering. In the fall of 1922, with Texas dentist Hiram Wesley Evans leading the way, six conspirators made plans to dethrone Simmons. Evans became imperial wizard, and in 1923 the conspirators saw a chance to grab permanent control of the Klan’s property, worth millions by this time. When Clarke was indicted on a two-year-old morals charge, Evans was able to cancel the promoter’s lucrative contract with the Klan and thus seize control of the money-making dues apparatus. Mrs. Tyler had already resigned to get married, so that left only Simmons, who became furious when he realized he had been out-maneuvered by Evans and his faction.

A full-scale war was fought between the Evans and Simmons factions with lawsuits and countersuits, warrants and injunctions, all gleefully reported in newspapers across the country. The fight spilled over into chapters in Texas and Pennsylvania and resulted in the shooting of Simmons’ lawyer by Evans’ chief publicity man. The power struggle ended in February 1924, when Simmons agreed to a cash settlement.

The Klan continued to grow during this period of internal strife, but its weaknesses were laid open for America to see. The Klan promoted itself as an organization dedicated to defending the morals of the nation, but there had been too many charges of immorality against its leaders. It’s supposed nonprofit status was badly undermined by the wrangling over finances, and most of its vaunted secrecy was exposed in the reams of court documents churned out by the feuding.

More Violence

And its violence was clearly revealed. Under Evans, the Klan launched a campaign of terrorism in the early and mid-1920S, and many communities found themselves firmly in the grasp of the organization. Lynching’s, shootings and whippings were the methods employed by the Klan. Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Mexicans and various immigrants were usually the victims.

But not infrequently, the Klan’s targets were whites, Protestants and females who were considered “immoral” or “traitors” to their race or gender. In Alabama, for example, a divorcee with two children was flogged for the “crime” of remarrying and then given a jar of Vaseline for her wounds. In Georgia, a woman was given 60 lashes for a vague charge of “immorality and failure to go to church”; when her 15-year-old son ran to her rescue, he received the same treatment. In both cases, ministers led the Klansmen responsible for the violence.

But such instances were not confined to the South. In Oklahoma, Klansmen applied the lash to girls caught riding in automobiles with young men, and very early in the Klan revival, women were flogged and even tortured in the San Joaquin Valley of California.

In a period when many women were fighting for the vote, for a place in the job market and for personal and cultural freedom, the Klan claimed to stand for “pure womanhood” and frequently attacked women who sought independence.

Political Gains

During the period of its most uncontrolled violence, the Klan also experienced unprecedented political gains. In 1922, Texas sent Klansman Earl Mayfield to the U.S. Senate, and Klan campaigns helped defeat two Jewish congressmen who had headed the Klan inquiry. Klan efforts were credited with helping to elect governors in 12 states in the early 1920s.

With two million members, new recruits joining the secret rolls daily, a host of friendly politicians throughout the land and his internal enemies subdued for the moment, Evans wanted to influence the presidential election of 1924. He even shifted his national headquarters from Atlanta to Washington. The Klan had a foothold in both parties since Deep South members tended to be Democrats while Klansmen in the North and West were often Republicans. But of the three major Presidential candidates, two were outspoken enemies of the Ku Klux Klan. And when the Democratic convention opened in New York, many Democrats were demanding the party adopt a platform plank condemning the Ku Klux Klan. The resulting fight tore the convention apart. After days of bitter wrangling over the issue, the platform plank denouncing the Klan lost by a single vote.

Although politicians became increasingly uncomfortable with Klan allies as a result of the turmoil, the success of the Klan candidates across the nation in 1924 buoyed Evans’ spirits. His notoriety peaked with a parade of 40,000 Klansmen down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue to the Washington Monument in August 1925. Evans boasted of having helped reelect Coolidge, of having secured passage of strict anti-immigration laws and of having checked the ambitions of Catholics and others intent on “perverting” the nation. The Klan was riding high.

Losing Ground

But the decline of the Ku Klux Klan was already well underway. By 1926, when Evans tried to repeat the parade in Washington, only half as many marchers arrived, and they were sobered by the news of political defeats in areas that a year before had been considered safe Klan strongholds.

Increasingly the Klan suffered counter attacks by the clergy, the press and a growing number of politicians. Then, in 1927, a group of rebellious Klansmen in Pennsylvania broke away from the Invisible Empire, and Evans promptly filed a $100,000 damage suit against them, confident that he could make an example of the rebels. To his surprise, the Pennsylvania Klansmen fought back in the courts, and the resulting string of witnesses told of Klan horrors, terrorism and violence, named members and spilled secrets. Newspapers carried accounts of testimony ranging from the kidnapping of a small girl from her grandparents in Pittsburgh to a Colorado Klansman who was beaten when he tried to quit. One particularly horrible story described how a man in Terrell, Texas, had been soaked in oil and burned to death before several hundred Klansmen. The enraged judge threw Evans’ case out of court.

The next year the Democrats nominated Al Smith — a New York Catholic and longtime Klan foe — for president against the Republicans’ Herbert Hoover. The Ku Klux Klan had a perfect issue which Evans hoped to use to whip up the faithful. But his Invisible Empire had melted from three million in 1925 to no more than several hundred thousand, and the Klan was no factor in Hoover’s election. Americans had clearly tired of the divisive effect of the masks, robes and burning crosses. What was left of the Klan’s clout disappeared as its old friends in office, smelling the new political winds, deserted the organization in droves.

During the 1930s, the nation struggled through the Great Depression, and the Klan continued to shrink. It became primarily a fraternal society, its leaders urging its members to stay out of trouble and the national headquarters hoarding its meager funds. After Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, the Klan began to charge that he was bringing too many Catholics and Jews into the government. Later they added the charge that the New Deal was tinged with communism. The red menace was used more and more by Evans and other Klansmen as the rallying cry, and communists eventually replaced Catholics as one of the Klan’s foremost enemies.

Only in Florida was the Klan still a factor in the 1930s. With a membership of about 30,000, the Klan was active in Jacksonville, Miami, and the citrus belt from Orlando to Tampa. In the orange groves of central Florida, Klansmen still operated in the old night riding style, intimidating blacks who tried to vote, “punishing” marital infidelity and clashing with union organizers. Florida responded with laws to unmask the nightriders, and a crusading journalist named Stetson Kennedy infiltrated and then exposed the Klan, rousing the anger of ministers, editors, politicians and plain citizens.

Women’s auxiliaries of the Ku Klux Klan formed their own marching corps and joined in mass Klan demonstrations.

New Leadership

Evans was replaced in 1939 by James A. Colescott of Indiana. He led the Klan in the Carolinas, where unions were trying to organize textile workers, and in Georgia, where nightriders flogged some 50 people during a two-year period. An outcry from the citizens of Georgia and South Carolina brought arrests and convictions, and the Klan was forced to retreat.

In the North the Klan suffered another reversal when some local Klan chapters began to develop ties with American Nazis, a move Southern Klansmen opposed but were basically powerless to stop. The end came in 1944 when the Internal revenue Service filed a lien against the Ku Klux Klan for back taxes of more than $685,000 on profits earned during the 1920s. “We had to sell our assets and hand over the proceeds to the government and go out of business,” Colescott recalled when it was over. “Maybe the government can make something out of the Klan — I never could.”

Powerful social forces were at work in the United States following World War II. A new wave of immigrants, particularly Jewish refugees, arrived from war-torn Europe. A generation of young black soldiers returned home after having been a part of a great army fighting for world freedom. In the South, particularly, labor unions began extensive campaigns to organize poorly paid workers. The migration from the farms to the cities continued, with a resulting shakeup in old political alliances.

Bigots began to howl more loudly than in years, and a new Klan leader began to beat the drums of anti-black, anti-union, anti-Jew, anti-Catholic and anti-communist hatred. This man was Samuel Green, an Atlanta doctor. Green managed to reorganize the Klan in California, Kentucky, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Alabama. But both federal and state bureaus of investigation prosecuted Klan lawlessness, and Green found that his hooded order was surrounded by enemies. The press throughout the South had become increasingly hostile; ministers were more and more inclined to attack the Klan, and state and local governments passed laws against cross burnings and masks.

By the time of Green’s death in August 1949, the Klan was fractured internally by disputes and hounded by investigations from all sides in response to a wave of Klan violence in the South. Many Klansmen went to jail for floggings or other criminal acts. By the early 1950s, the Invisible Empire was at its lowest level since its rebirth on Stone Mountain in 1915.

Sooner or later just about every Klansman worthy of his robe sees the silent film classic Birth of a Nation, which is usually accompanied by a stirring narrative of the two hour and 45 minute saga. For those who believe in the legend of the Ku Klux Klan as the savior of the South during reconstruction, the movie has always been one of the most powerful pieces of propaganda in the Klan’s arsenal.

Released in 1915, Birth of a Nation was a cinematic masterpiece that set new standards for the fledgling film industry. The story it tells fits perfectly into the version of history the Klan preaches. The movie, based on a novel by North Carolina minister Thomas Dixon Jr., was the brainchild of a talented young director, D.W. Griffith. In an era of short, slapstick nickelodeon comedies, Griffith wanted to film a masterpiece that would tell the grand story of events leading up to the Civil war, the great conflict itself, and finally the tragedy and suffering of reconstruction, complete with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

In making his epic, Griffith blended the almost magical appeal of the pre-war South, the heroics of the great Civil war battles and all the stereotypes and myths of reconstruction with a skill that made the picture a sensation. The plot is a cotton-candy love story between a Southern colonel and the prison nurse who tended to him. The cast includes an evil northern congressman, who wanted the South to be punished for the war; a brutish carpetbagger; loyal black family servants; a sex-crazed black rapist, and loutish, power-mad black reconstruction legislators and soldiers.

The suspense builds until finally the demure sister of Ben Cameron, the Southern colonel, leaps to her death to avoid being raped by a lecherous black. With this outrage, the Ku Klux Klan enters the picture, riding the South Carolina piedmont to rid the land of the scourge that had descended upon it. To audiences accustomed to nothing more than one-reel comedies and melodramas, the panoramic epic was a blockbuster.

The son of an ex-Confederate officer, Griffith viewed his material as nothing less than history on the screen, but the first showings of the movie provoked a storm of indignant protest in northern cities. Thomas Dixon, the novel’s author, effectively smoothed the way for widespread acceptance of the picture by cleverly arranging for a screening for his old classmate, President Woodrow Wilson, and the Cabinet and their families. Wilson emerged from the showing very moved by the film and called it “like writing history with lightning ... my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

The movie went on to gross $18 million before it was retired to art theaters and film clubs. So powerful was the impact of the movie in 1915 that it is often credited with setting the stage for the Klan revival that same year. In fact, the man who actually created the 20th century Klan, William J. Simmons, was acutely aware of the promotional value of the film, and he used the publicity surrounding it to win recruits to his organization. Modern Klan leaders still use the movie as a recruiting gimmick and provide their own narration to the silent film.

Although the film is still regarded by critics as an early masterpiece for its direction and inventive uses of the camera, Birth of a Nation is so blatantly racist that it is rarely shown in public theaters today. Protest demonstrations frequently disrupt scheduled screenings. Now, only the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists still claim any historical authenticity for the movie.

The Klan’s use of the film is a good indication of how out-of-touch white supremacists are with the predominant American attitudes on race. The racial hatred exhibited in the movie, once acceptable, is now abhorrent to all but the Klan and the most extreme bigots.

The Civil Rights Memorial Honors The Fallen Heroes Of The Struggle For Racial Justice

The civil rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, was built by the Southern Poverty Law center as a perpetual reminder of the sacrifices that were made to end racial segregation in the South. The names of 40 individuals, killed because they stood up for human rights, are inscribed in the circular black granite table that serves as the centerpiece of the Memorial. These are the true heroes of the civil rights Movement — their martyrdom made freedom possible for millions in the South.

For every story of courage that is represented on the Memorial, there is a parallel one of evil and violence. For every person killed, there was a killer — in most cases more than one. Some acted out of impulsive rage. Others used their legal authority to enforce the rules of a dying social order.

In many cases, the killer was never apprehended, the crime concealed by a code of silence.

At the forefront of the racial terrorism of the 1950s and 1960s was the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen have been identified as the killers of 14 of the individuals honored on the Memorial. Their stories are told below. But that number is surely an incomplete accounting. Many killings attributed to unknown night riders were likely the work of the Klan.

The deaths remembered on the civil rights Memorial offer undisputed testimony to the Klan’s willingness to use murder as a tool to enforce its belief in white supremacy. The heroic spirit of those who gave up their lives in the cause of racial freedom should not be forgotten. Nor should the crimes of those who forced them to make that sacrifice.

23 • January • 1957

WILLIE EDWARDS JR.

KILLED BY KLAN

MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA

The racial climate in Montgomery, Alabama, was palpably ugly in early 1957. A grass-roots movement of black citizens — led by the rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — had recently forced the integration of the city transit system. The Ku Klux Klan reacted violently. Members of the Klan marched through Montgomery in an effort to terrorize black bus riders and bombed the homes and businesses of boycott supporters.

Several members of a local Ku Klux Klan group decided that only the murder of a black would express their outrage. Willie Edwards Jr., a quiet man who had kept his distance from the bus boycott, became the unfortunate victim of their deadly resolve.

On Jan. 23, Edwards was substituting for the driver of a supermarket delivery truck when the Klansmen pulled him over on a rural stretch of road outside Montgomery. Their intent was to harass the regular driver of the truck, whom they suspected of dating a white woman. Not knowing what he looked like, they mistakenly assumed that Edwards, the fill-in, was their target.

The Klansmen forced Edwards into their vehicle and drove through rural Montgomery County. Though Edwards denied making advances to white women, his kidnappers tortured him repeatedly. Finally, they ordered him at gunpoint to jump off a bridge over the Alabama river. Seeing his only hope of escape, he leaped into the water below. His decomposed body was found three months later.

The investigation turned up no suspects and was quickly closed. Some 19 years later, the Alabama attorney general indicted three Klansmen for edwards’ murder. But a judge threw out the indictments on a legal technicality, and the men were never brought to trial.

15 • September • 1963

ADDIE MAE COLLINS

DENISE McNAIR

CAROLE ROBERTSON

CYNTHIA WESLEY

SCHOOLGIRLS KILLED IN BOMBING

OF 16TH ST. BAPTIST CHURCH

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

As the summer of 1963 waned, blacks in Birmingham, Alabama, had reason to celebrate. They had bravely withstood police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor’s fire hoses and attack dogs while marching through city streets in opposition to segregation. Stung by harsh criticism of these repressive measures, local and federal officials were dismantling laws which prohibited black access to public institutions.

But the Ku Klux Klan, holding firm to its belief in white supremacy, intensified its efforts to intimidate blacks. In the early morning hours of September 15, Klan members planted a bomb at Birmingham’s prominent 16th Street Baptist church. Some eight hours later, as Sunday worship services were about to begin, an explosion ripped through the brick structure. Four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14 — were instantly killed. The FBI identified the group of Klansmen responsible for the bombing, but inexplicably no one was charged. It wasn’t until the Alabama attorney general reopened the case 14 years later that an arrest was made. Klansman Robert Chambliss, then 73, was found guilty of first degree murder and spent the remainder of his life in prison.

2 • May • 1964

HENRY HEZEKIAH DEE

CHARLES EDDIE MOORE

KILLED BY KLAN

MEADVILLE, MISSISSIPPI

The civil rights struggle in Mississippi was fought on many fronts during the summer of 1964. College students from the North descended on Mississippi in response to the call of civil rights leaders for an all-out campaign to expose the injustices of racial segregation. White opponents fought back with a bloody campaign of beatings, church burnings and murders.

The Mississippi White Knights, known as the South’s most violent Ku Klux Klan organization, led this campaign of intimidation. Their most noted victims were three civil rights workers killed near Philadelphia, Mississippi. But one month before those murders, two White Knights were implicated in the murder of a pair of young men near the southwest Mississippi town of Meadville.

Charles Eddie Moore, 20, had just been expelled from college for participating in a student demonstration. Henry Hezekiah Dee, 19, worked in a local lumber yard. Two White Knights — James ford Seale, 29, and Charles Marcus Edwards, 31 — were convinced that the two young men were part of a rumored Black Muslim uprising in the area, Edwards said later. (Their information was groundless.) They abducted the young black men, took them into a nearby forest, beat them unconscious, and dumped them into the nearby Mississippi river where they drowned. Nearly two-and-a-half months passed before their remains were found.

Edwards and Seale were arrested for the murders. Edwards, a paper mill worker, gave the FBI a signed confession, but his admission of guilt was insufficient to convict him. A justice of the peace threw out the charges without explanation, and the case was never presented to a grand jury.

This pattern of law enforcement indifference to Klan-related crimes was repeated throughout the South until federal intervention forced local officials to prosecute the perpetrators of racial violence. But that shift in attitude came too late for justice to be done for Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. Their murderers were never punished.

21 • June • 1964

JAMES CHANEY

ANDREW GOODMAN

MICHAEL SCHWERNER

CIVIL RIGHTS WORKERS ABDUCTED

& SLAIN BY KLAN

PHILADELPHIA, MISSISSIPPI

Nothing enraged Mississippi Klansmen like a Northerner helping blacks achieve racial justice in their state. And if that “outsider” was a Jew, their hatred was even more intense.

Michael Schwerner, 24, epitomized the Klan stereotype of a Yankee agitator. The outspoken, self-confident Schwerner was a social worker from New York who came to Meridian, Mississippi, to work with the congress of racial equality in early 1964. He quickly earned the enmity of local Mississippi White Knights, and soon they talked openly of killing him. His efforts to build a freedom School in Philadelphia, Mississippi, provided the opportunity.

Schwerner had developed a working relationship with James Chaney, a black native of Meridian. Chaney, 21, had convinced the members of the Mount Zion Methodist church to host the Freedom School. The church’s elders previously had been reluctant to use their building for civil rights activities out of fear that the Klan would retaliate. On Sunday, June 21, their concerns were realized: arsonists firebombed the church, reducing it to a charred rubble.

Schwerner, Chaney and Andrew Goodman, 21, a newly arrived civil rights worker from New York, were on their way from Mt. Zion to Philadelphia, Mississippi, when they were stopped by Neshoba county Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Price charged Chaney with speeding and arrested Goodman and Chaney on the absurd charge of burning Mt. Zion. Now the stage was set for local Klansmen to murder Schwerner and his accomplices.

Around 10 p.m., Price released the three civil rights workers and ordered them to return to Meridian. They had traveled only a short distance when Price, accompanied by two carloads of Klansmen, pulled the men over again. The Klansmen drove them to an isolated area where they were shot at point-blank range, one by one. They were buried in a nearby earthen dam.

The disappearance of the three men prompted a national cry of outrage. Blacks had been terrorized for decades in the South, but the violence against two white men finally moved the federal government to action. President Lyndon Johnson ordered the FBI to give the case top priority.

After a massive investigation, officers found the bodies of the dead men after paying an informant $30,000 for information on the murders.

Mississippi officials never brought charges against the murderers of Schwerner, chaney and Goodman. The Department of Justice accused 19 men of federal civil violations in connection with the incident. Seven were found guilty, but none received a sentence greater than 10 years.

11 • JULy • 1964

LT. COL LEMUEL PENN

KILLED BY KLAN

COLBERT, GEORGIA

Although the U.S. Armed forces was integrated after World War II, the American South in the 1960s remained hostile to blacks — service members or not. So when Army reserve officer Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, 49, left his home in Washington, D.C., in June 1964 to attend summer training at ft. Benning, Georgia, he timed his trip to avoid unnecessary stops.

His attempt to escape confrontation proved tragically unsuccessful. While he and two other black army officers were driving back to Washington on July 11, Penn was accosted outside of Athens, Georgia, by a carload of Klansmen and shot at point-blank range. The three assailants were members of a violent Klan group called the Black Shirts. They were searching for “out-of town niggers [who] might stir up some trouble in Athens,” the driver of the car confessed later.

An investigation implicated the Athens Klansmen in the crime. Cecil William Myers and Joseph Howard Sims were tried on first-degree murder charges, but an all-white jury acquitted them despite the driver’s confession. Later, the Department of Justice brought civil rights charges against Myers, Sims and four other Klansmen. After a lengthy proceeding, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme court, Myers and Sims were convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Their accomplices were set free.

25 • March • 1965

VIOLA GREGG LIUZZO

KILLED BY KLAN

WHILE TRANSPORTING MARCHERS

SELMA HIGHWAY, ALABAMA

On the night of Sunday, March 7, 1965, Americans received a close-up view of the harsh methods employed by Southern law enforcement officers against civil rights activists. News broadcasts that evening showed Alabama state troopers brutally beating participants in a voting rights march as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. It was a critical turning point in the civil rights movement in America.

Many viewers merely expressed outrage at the incident. Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a mother of five from Michigan, was moved to action. She traveled to Selma to participate in the struggle for racial equality and soon was ferrying marchers on the road between Selma and Montgomery as the demonstrations in support of voting rights continued.

Liuzzo’s presence in Selma and the casual way she interacted with black marchers enraged a group of Klansmen who were assigned to terrorize the protesters. They chased down Liuzzo’s Oldsmobile on the highway between Selma and Montgomery, and one of the group shot her through the car window. She died instantly.

The men charged with Liuzzo’s murder were set free by an all-white jury. As it became increasingly clear that state prosecutors were unable or unwilling to bring these criminals to justice, the Department of Justice stepped up its use of the civil rights Act to bring charges against the Klan. A federal jury convicted three of Liuzzo’s murderers, and the judge gave them 10-year prison terms.

10 • JanUary • 1966

VERNON DAHMER

BLACK COMMUNITY LEADER

KILLED IN KLAN BOMBING

HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI

Vernon Dahmer was a business and political leader in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, whose success as a farmer, sawmill operator and merchant had earned him the admiration of black and white residents alike. But his outspoken support of voting rights for blacks earned him the enmity of the violent White Knights of Mississippi.

For years, the White Knights stalked Dahmer. When the time was right, they planned to burn his home — or kill him, if possible. After Dahmer offered to pay the poll taxes of blacks too poor to register to vote, the Klan decided to strike. They attacked Dahmer’s home and grocery store with guns and fire bombs. His 10- year-old daughter was hospitalized with third degree burns; Dahmer died from the injuries he suffered in the blaze.

During the civil rights Movement, Klansmen expected the support of whites (or at least their quiet acquiescence) after they attacked civil rights leaders. The reaction to the Dahmer murder was different. The entire community — black and white — rallied around the Dahmer family and helped rebuild their burned-out house. Local law enforcement officials aggressively investigated the crime. Three Klansmen were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Dahmer’s death was not in vain. In the wake of his murder, city officials began reforming local segregation laws, just as Dahmer had been asking them to do for years. equally important, the prosecutions and loss of support from the white community diminished the power of the White Knights. After conducting a reign of terror for a decade, this group of violent white supremacists began to lose its grip on the people of Mississippi.

10 • June • 1966

BEN CHESTER WHITE

KILLED BY KLAN

NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI

Among all of the Klan victims in the struggle for civil rights, Ben Chester White seems the most unlikely. He was a quiet, unassuming man who worked his entire life on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. He avoided protests against segregation and wasn’t even registered to vote. But White’s race was enough to make him a target of local Klansmen. Members of the cottonmouth Moccasin Gang, a faction of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, conspired to kill the 61-year-old man on the false premise that he favored school integration. They had an ulterior motive. They hoped the murder would lure Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (then leading a protest march through Mississippi) to Natchez so they could kill him and establish themselves as heroes among their fellow Klansmen.

Gang members James Jones, Claude Fuller and Ernest Avants took White to a secluded area outside Natchez on the pretext that they were looking for a lost dog. There, fuller shot and killed the unsuspecting man. On orders of fuller, Avants fired his shotgun into White’s lifeless body. The men dumped White’s corpse in a nearby creek.

Wracked with guilt, Jones admitted his role in the slaying. Despite his admission, the jury was unable to reach a verdict against him and set him free. Local authorities arrested Avants, but he was found innocent after arguing that he had shot a dead body. Fuller, the triggerman, was never tried.

White’s son vowed to see the killers punished. He filed a $1 million civil suit against the White Knights for conspiring to violate the civil rights of his father. The judge found in favor of the plaintiff, marking the first time civil damages were assessed against the Klan for the actions of its members.

The story of a white supremacist group formed in North Carolina in the 1980s epitomizes the evolution of the Klan from traditional rituals to more militant underground tactics.

Glenn Miller was a member of the national Socialist party of America, a neo-Nazi group, when he participated in the 1979 confrontation in Greensboro that resulted in the deaths of five anti-Klan protesters. Believing that the swastika would not appeal to large numbers of white Southerners, Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan a year later. He drew members from other less active Klan groups in the state and began building a network of klaverns (local units). He staged well-publicized marches with his members dressed in the traditional Klan robes; he started a newspaper, The White Carolinian, and solicited members through numerous radio talk show broadcasts. During 1984, Miller and several other Carolina Knights ran for public office. Despite losing, they generated a flurry of publicity for the group.

By 1985, Miller’s organization had 23 local units and an estimated 1,000 members. They operated 27 taped message hotlines, which delivered a racist recruitment spiel. But the marches, taped messages and political campaigns were only one side of the story.

Miller, like other Klan leaders in the early 1980s, began to see the value of more militant tactics. He maintained his alliance with the national Socialist party and held joint meetings with other white supremacists in North Carolina. His group engaged in paramilitary training, which he publicized in order to attract more young male recruits. He published descriptions of the training in his newspaper, complete with photos of armed and camouflaged Klansmen, as if he had nothing to hide. But in fact, he did.

For Glenn Miller, the weapon training was much more than a clever recruitment tool. It was part of a long-range plan for a total white revolution.

In 1985, Glenn Miller changed the name of the Carolina Knights to the Confederate Knights and preached the need to secure the Southern United States for a white homeland. He told his followers at one rally, “We’re building up a white Christian army.

We’re going to get our country back. we hope to keep bloodshed to a minimum, but anyone that gets in the way is going to be sorry.” with the name change, Miller’s group took on a new look — instead of wearing Klan robes to rallies and marches, members wore camouflage uniforms and army boots.

THE PRIVATE ARMY

As the group adopted a more militant image, Miller delighted in issuing wildly provocative statements. But the public front was mild compared to the covert preparations for violence that had preoccupied him for years.

During 1983, several of Miller’s followers had carried on a campaign of harassment against a black prison guard, and as a result of the victim’s lawsuit, the entire organization was prohibited from conducting paramilitary training. As evidence emerged that Miller was operating an underground organization, investigators for the Klanwatch project of the Southern poverty Law Center, which had represented the black prison guard, began to look into Miller’s group and discovered an astounding illegal army.

Not only was Miller conducting the training he wrote about in his newspaper, he authorized his second-in-command to purchase a whole array of weapons that had been stolen from military bases. They included dynamite, claymore mines, grenades, plastic explosives, AR-15 rifles, gas masks, night scopes, chemical warfare items and light-weight anti-tank weapons capable of piercing up to 11 inches of armor. Miller also hired a military weapons expert to train his men in small teams at night, sometimes as often as twice a week.

In the summer of 1984, Miller later admitted, he had received $200,000 of money stolen by members of the revolutionary group, the order. In late 1984, Miller hooked the Carolina Knights into the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, a computer bulletin board which listed activities of various radical white supremacists around the country. The investigation that led to indictments of the order revealed that Glenn Miller was the group’s “civilian administrator” for the Southeast. His code name was “Rounder.”

In 1986, Miller, his lieutenant Stephen Miller (no relation), and their organization, now renamed the white patriot party, were found guilty of violating the order that banned them from conducting paramilitary training. They were both sentenced to brief prison terms; Stephen Miller’s was suspended. But while they were out on bond waiting for their appeal to be heard, they took their radical strategy to its extreme.

DECLARATION OF WAR

Several months after his conviction, Stephen Miller and four other white patriots were arrested after they plotted to rob a Fayetteville, North Carolina, restaurant, buy stolen military explosives, blow up the Southern poverty Law Center and kill Law Center Director Morris Dees. (Dees, SPLC’s Legal Director Richard Cohen and U.S. attorney Sam Currin had conducted the contempt of court prosecution of the Millers.) Two of the conspirators pleaded guilty; Stephen Miller and another were convicted and sentenced to prison. The fifth man was acquitted.

In April 1987, Glenn Miller, then in hiding, issued a “declaration of total war” against the government, blacks and Jews. In his declaration, Miller assigned a point system for the assassination of key minority, government and civil rights leaders, with Dees heading the list. Ten days later, Miller was captured in Missouri along with three other White Patriots and a cache of weapons that included grenades, pipe bombs, automatic rifles, shotguns, pistols and crossbows.

HARDCORE REVOLUTIONARIES

Miller, who had become a hero in the eyes of the most militant white supremacists for his bold lawlessness, was suddenly in serious trouble. Already saddled with the contempt of court conviction, he now faced bond, weapons, and potential civil rights violations. In a move that shocked his former allies, Miller agreed to plead guilty to one count of illegal weapons possession and testify against his former colleagues in the white supremacist movement. (He has since served as a government witness against white supremacists in several trials, including the 1988 seditious conspiracy trial against 10 top leaders of the extremist movement.)

Miller left behind a core of violent revolutionaries who were determined to carry on despite the white patriot party’s demise and Miller’s change of heart. Partly as a result of Miller’s cooperation, authorities charged two of his followers with killing three men and injuring two others at a Shelby, North Carolina, adult bookstore in January 1987. The former white patriot party members believed that their targets were gay.

In seven years, Glenn Miller had taken a small band of Klansmen, turned them into an underground paramilitary army, educated them in the ideology of revolution, and inspired their crimes of intimidation, threats, thefts and murder. Although they were numerically a tiny group, the white patriots demonstrated the primary lesson of recent white supremacist history. The danger lies not in the length of the membership roll but in the zeal of the members.

By the late 1980s, the Klan was once again in decline. The resurgence of a decade earlier had fizzled, and the Klan was down to around 5,000 members — much smaller than during the Civil Rights era and a mere fraction of its size during its heyday in the 1920s. The ebb in Klan fortunes continued into the 1990s, and observers of the Invisible Empire began to question whether the organization would play any significant role in the extremist movement in the 21st century.

A number of lawsuits against various factions contributed to the Klan’s demise. The fear of litigation made Klan groups leery of organizing into chapters, naming officers and expanding across state lines.

The Klan also reeled under the weight of internal squabbles over money and power. The Klan had always been rife with petty infighting and jealousy among its leaders, and this natural inclination toward discord was exacerbated during the lean years of the 1980s and 1990s. Further dividing the movement was a disagreement over tactics: Some factions favored a cleaned-up organization that emphasized public relations, while rivals sought to revive the more militant tactics of earlier Klan incarnations.

But competition from other extremist groups was the real drag on Klan membership and influence. Racism and bigotry still existed in the United States in the latter part of the 20th century; the Klan just no longer seemed a relevant vehicle for expressing it. Meanwhile, the nation’s reinvigorated neo-Nazi organizations filled the void, outpacing the Klan in sheer numbers, influence and militant activism. In the 1990s, many extremists, who once would have gravitated to the Klan, joined the anti-government Patriot movement, especially its militia wing. The philosophy of the Patriot movement, as well as its commitment to armed paramilitary training, had more appeal than the worn-out rhetoric of the Klan.

But if the Klan’s numbers were dropping, its terrorist philosophy was still influencing the extremist movement. Many of the leaders of neo-Nazi and Patriot organizations started in the Klan and continued to espouse the hooded order’s racist ideology in their new roles. This legacy of hate was a testament to the power of the Klan and its enduring influence for over a century.

Lawsuits Take Their Toll

Civil lawsuits had a chilling effect on the activity of many Klan groups. Although it is difficult to measure the deterrent value of such litigation, evidence suggests that Klan leaders began to fear the legal consequences of their members’ acts. Klan outfits toned down their rhetoric and propaganda, altered their recruiting tactics, and banned weapons, alcohol and drugs from their rallies and meetings.

In 1996, four members of a north Carolina-based Klan admitted to the burning of the century-old Macedonia Baptist Church near Bloomville, South Carolina.

In 1987, an all-white Mobile, Alabama, jury awarded a $7 million judgment against the United Klan’s of America for the lynching of a young black man named Michael Donald. To satisfy the terms of the judgment, the group turned its headquarters over to the victim’s mother and went out of business. (See The Woman Who Beat the Klan, page 41).

The Southern Poverty Law center, which filed the suit on behalf of Mrs. Donald, used this legal strategy against another Klan group with an equally sordid history of violence. Over the years, the members of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had been convicted of crimes ranging from cross burnings and bombings to assaults and murder. At its peak, it was the nation’s largest Klan organization, operating in at least 20 states from coast to coast.

A 1987 attack by the Invisible Empire on a peaceful civil rights march in all-white Forsyth County, Georgia, proved to be the organization’s undoing. SPLC filed suit and in 1988, a federal jury ordered the Invisible Empire, the Southern White Knights (another participant in the violence) and 11 individual Klansmen to pay the marchers nearly $1 million in damages.

In the settlement, the Invisible empire’s leader, James Farrands, agreed to relinquish all the group’s assets — including its name —and personally pay $37,500 to the civil rights marchers. By the summer of 1993, the Invisible Empire was defunct as a consequence of settling the lawsuit.

In 1996, SPLC filed a civil action against the North Carolina-based Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and four of its members on behalf of a black church in South Carolina that had been destroyed by arson the previous year. The century-old Macedonia Baptist church, located near Bloomville, South Carolina, burned to the ground on June 21, 1995, the night after another black church, Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in nearby Greeleyville, was destroyed by fire. (The arsons were among a string of over 30 suspicious fires at black or predominantly black churches from 1995-96.) The complaint, which asked for punitive and compensatory damages, contended that the Christian Knights “encourage their members to commit acts of violence and intimidation” against blacks in order to promote the organization’s goals.

While lawsuits have a proven history of disrupting and even disbanding white supremacist organizations, they also deliver a powerful warning to others in the movement — hate violence can be expensive.

Internal Struggles

A series of internal disagreements over leadership and tactics further decimated the Klan in the closing decades of the 20th century. Klan groups historically were rife with infighting and jealousy, but strong figures usually emerged to bridge the chasms and provide direction. No such individual appeared to reverse the group’s failing fortunes.

When the Invisible Empire crumbled in 1993, Thom Robb’s Arkansas-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan became the country’s largest Klan organization by default. In the early 1990s, Robb won invaluable publicity by appearing on nationwide television talk shows and in a Time magazine article on the hate movement. Aside from Duke, no modern Klan leader was more adept at exploiting television than Robb. The television appearances helped him gain a national following, but they also earned him the scorn of militants in the white supremacist movement who despised the “all talk and no action” posture of Robb’s organization.

Robb’s public relations campaign produced only short-lived gains for his organization. In time, Robb’s television act suffered from overexposure and lost much of its novelty and shock appeal. In 1994, the irreverent television series, TV Nation, aired a segment that lampooned Robb and his followers. The comical portrayal exposed the anti-black, anti-Semitic underbelly of Robb’s sanitized bigotry. His many critics in the white supremacist world had a field day, deriding Robb as a “Hollywood Klansman” leading a group of “Ku Klux Klowns.”

Later that year, the Knights splintered, and Robb found himself scrambling desperately for members. The schism gave birth to a militant offshoot with strong neo-Nazi leanings called the federation of Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The leader of the group was Robb’s former Illinois Grand Dragon Ed Novak, who at one time had been affiliated with the National Socialist Party of America and the American Nazi Party. The federation of Klan’s took more than a third of Robb’s membership nationwide, including leaders and members from Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, California, Missouri and Texas.

Most of the defectors to Novak’s group were hard-core militants who chafed under Robb’s purportedly moderate, non-violent policies and his timid racism. Novak said his group would be more militant than the Knights and would avoid the limelight Robb so avidly sought. After the split, Novak operated quietly behind the scenes, organizing rallies on private property and recruiting. But the militant Klan umbrella organization Novak hoped the federation would become never materialized.

The Knights went through another upheaval in 1994 when a renegade group took what remained of Robb’s Midwest stronghold. The new group’s leader, Michigan Klansman David Neumann, appointed himself imperial wizard. Despite a threatening letter from Robb’s lawyer, he vowed to continue to use the Knights’ name. Neumann’s group tried to oust Robb as national director and claimed that they controlled the Knights. Robb dismissed the new faction as a mere “blip on the radar screen,” but the two massive defections in less than one year delivered a devastating blow to his organization.

Neo-Nazis and Patriots

As Klan influence faded in the 1980s and 1990s, the white supremacist movement began to chart a new course. The Order, a terrorist group that committed murder, armed robbery and counterfeiting in the early 1980s, became the new standard for bold action on behalf of white supremacy. The members of the Order were seen as people of action and conscience, fighting to the death, in the words of leader Bob Mathews, for “blood, soil and honor.” Mathews had lived the ideal, dying after a shootout with federal agents in 1984.

The Klan in contrast looked plodding, cowardly, and even foolish. The old-line, traditional Klan came to be viewed as outdated and out-of-touch, all talk and no action. Militants left the Ku Klux Klan in droves. As the Klan faltered, neo-Nazi organizations like Aryan Nations and the National Alliance, as well as other white supremacist factions like the church of the creator and Tom Metzger’s White Aryan resistance, rose to prominence during the 1980s and 1990s.

Where the Klan had failed in recruiting and keeping members, the neo-Nazi groups and other racist organizations succeeded spectacularly by focusing on the one thing that was vital to the hate movement’s long-term survival — enlisting the next generation. To that end, they aggressively pursued the young, ruthless, neo-Nazi Skinheads and recruited heavily on high school and college campuses. Eager to prove their courage as radical racists, Skinheads quickly became the most violent of all white supremacists.

Prominent white supremacists also sought to manipulate and exploit the anti-government fervor of the militias that sprang up across the nation and became the most visible of the extremist organizations in the 1990s. By early 1997, the Southern Poverty Law center’s Klanwatch project and its Militia Task force had identified 380 militias and 478 Patriot support groups. Some 101 of these groups had ties to racist groups or leaders, or had expressed racist or anti-Semitic beliefs. Camouflaged fatigues may have replaced the Klan robes, but hatred of Jews, blacks, immigrants and other minorities continued to infect the American body politic.

A Klan for the 21st Century?

As the end of the century neared, there was no single, monolithic Klan, if indeed there ever was one. The organization was in tatters, its decreasing membership scattered in scores of squabbling factions across the country, some with no more than a handful of adherents.

The once powerful Invisible Empire was gone. Its successor as the nation’s largest Klan group, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was fractured and disorganized. The most militant activists, such as Louis Beam (see accompanying article), Robert Miles (now deceased) and Tom Metzger, left the Klan years before and assumed leadership roles in other white supremacist groups.

Since its birth in the aftermath of the civil War, the Klan experienced three periods of significant strength in American history — the reconstruction era of the 19th century, when newly-freed slaves began to hold office and own land; the 1920s, when the country’s fierce anti-immigrant mood drove Klan membership into the millions; and, finally, at the height of the civil rights Movement in the 1960s, when blacks and other minorities began to demand equal treatment under the law.

These periods of growth have one common characteristic: they were eras of great social upheaval when the dominant white population felt threatened. In each of these eras, as the perceived attack receded, the Klan faded. And yet it has never completely disappeared.

Will the Ku Klux Klan rebound again as a new century begins? Will it ever vanish completely?

History would suggest a continued role for the Klan. For over a century, the Klan has always appeared on the stage whenever white Americans felt threatened by people different than themselves. Even in decline and disarray, the Klan’s message of hatred endures, supported by a record of violence and terror unmatched in the history of American extremist groups.

It was a sultry June day in Decatur, Alabama. I had come to meet with some of the black marchers who had been attacked on a Decatur street by 100 robed Klansmen swinging bats and sticks, and firing guns. I am a lawyer and had sued the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and some of its top officials for the attack. I had come to Decatur that day to hear from the marchers, first hand, about the confrontation.

Although I was not at the march, I felt as if I had been. I had spent hours viewing video news footage which showed the procession of about 75 black marchers as they were savagely assaulted by waiting Klansmen. I had studied hundreds of photo enlargements obtained by our investigators from the small army of news photographers who had covered the well-publicized march. We had identified marchers as future witnesses, and Klansmen as future defendants. As I walked into the room where the marchers were waiting to be interviewed, I immediately recognized many of their faces.

One was Hattie Brown, a rather large black woman, street wise though not educated beyond high school. On May 26, 1979, Mrs. Brown was in the front line of marchers who gathered to protest the treatment of Tommy Lee Hines, a mentally retarded black youth convicted by an all-white jury for the alleged rape of three white women. The march marked the anniversary of Hines’ arrest, and Mrs. Brown was there because she believed, along with many others, that Hines was incapable of committing the crimes.

Hattie Brown was one of the first marchers to feel the full force of Klan clubs, and she narrowly missed fatal injury. I asked her about the confrontation, gingerly pressing for more details about the attack, and then, towards the end of our interview, she blurted out: “Mr. Dees, do Klansmen bleed?”

She explained that, as one white-sheeted man raced toward her with a raised club, a black man next to her drew his pocket knife and stabbed into the robe flowing around the Klansman’s waist. The man kept coming. She saw no blood.

I heard in her question the genuine terror of a victim of Klan violence. The legends of ghostlike figures riding horseback across rural fields in the moonlight had been passed down through generations, and Mrs. Brown, like many Southern blacks, still viewed Klansmen as larger than life. I assured her that, yes, Klansmen do bleed.

Klan Terror

Bobby Person of Moore County, North Carolina, was the intended victim of this Klan terrorism. 53 After working for years as a state prison guard, he finally mustered the courage to apply to take the sergeant’s examination. No black had ever held an officer’s position in this prison unit.

On the night of May 30, 1983, he awoke to noise outside his small home located at the end of a dirt road, and saw the remnants of a smoldering cross. Several months later, a pickup truck slowed in front of his home and a white-robed Klansman shouted for him to “come out, nigger!”

Mr. Person emerged to see two men standing in the back of the truck with guns pointed at him. His children were terrified. Before the sheriff arrived, the men left.

The man in the robe, I later learned from depositions taken in a civil suit filed on Mr. Person’s behalf against the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was Jerry Michael Lewis. The other man, dressed in military camouflage, was Gregory Short. Mr. Person’s bravery in allowing his name to be used as plaintiff resulted in the exposure of a Klan ring which bought stolen military supplies from soldiers at fort Bragg and a court order enjoining the group’s paramilitary activity.

Both Hattie Brown and Bobby Person were victims of Klan violence. Neither suffered the ultimate sacrifice of Michael Donald, who was lynched in March 1981 by members of the Alabama-based United Klan’s of America “to show Klan strength in Alabama.” But Brown and Person share a much more common trauma — the modern-day reminder to blacks that free exercise of basic civil rights cannot be taken for granted.

The Other Victims

The Klan appeals to young men like Lloyd Letson, Jerry Michael Lewis and Gregory Short. They are also its victims.

Most rank-and-file Klan members I have met in over 250 court depositions, and many more personal interviews, are basically good people. They are little different than my rural neighbors or my many country relatives — with the exception that most are life’s losers. The Klan meetings offer them what they have not been able to attain in their day to-day life — social opportunities, a chance to gain leadership roles, and a forum to vent their gripes.

Klan violence, though horrible, is not the mainstay of Klan activity. Much time is spent cursing the federal government for affirmative action employment policies, welfare programs like food stamps, and imagined Jewish plots to mongrelize the “white race.”

A Klansman-turned-plaintiff’s witness in the North Carolina case told me that he was the black sheep of his family — nothing he did seemed to bring him success until he joined the Klan. He quickly used his commando skills learned in Vietnam to gain respect and a leadership role in the Klan’s underground paramilitary army.

Lloyd Letson, the Klansman who Hattie Brown saw “stabbed,” became my friend. After we filed the Decatur suit, Letson’s lawyer contacted me and a meeting was arranged for Letson and me to talk privately. He told me that he joined the Invisible Empire’s Decatur Klan group after hearing a fiery speech by the charismatic Imperial Wizard Bill Wilkinson. Letson said he was “sick and tired” of the blacks holding parades on Decatur streets protesting for “that nigger” Tommy Lee Hines who was guilty of “cold-blooded rape.” Letson was an ideal audience for Wilkinson, who had come from his home base in Louisiana to capitalize on local racial unrest to sign up new members.

Letson told me that he quickly saw the Klan leaders as being out for money and power. As they started talking about “the race war to come” and wanted him to get a camouflage uniform for paramilitary training, he balked. He agreed to testify against the Klan.

I visited Letson’s small home, met his wife and children. Except for color, Bobby Person and Lloyd Letson are little different. Both wanted better lives for their families. If they had been neighbors, they might have been friends.

Hopefully, both victims of blind racism — the members who fill the marching ranks and the minorities who suffer the ultimate abuse — will join hands in brotherly love and friendship.