Race and the cross burning

probably.

LOL

I'm very much in favor of burning crosses. The race of the cross doesn't matter. It can be birch, pine, maple, fir, etc. I'm not even opposed to burning metal crosses, or the interspecies variety with wood or metal inlays.

Please burn all and every cross you come across. And don't stop there; there are symbols in every religion that could go up in flames.

I disagree maporsche. Railroad crossings, intersections and blind driveways are also represented with crosses. These signs are important for finding our way.

Good point.

I also heard that burning plastics could be bad for the planet, so maybe we just piss or deficate on them.

Please race to the oven so you don't burn the hot cross buns:

What was the symbolism of cross burning supposed to be?

I know it was a Klan racist thing....but, when the Klan first met and decided what they were going to do, what was the burning cross the hell about?

YES!!

im the first black person here.


woohooo!!

where is my sheet?

I heard a reference to cross burning in a James Clavel novel indicating it was a Scottish method of marking a clan's territory. I have no idea if he had a basis outside his own mind, or not.

The Klu Klux Klan was originally founded by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a famous cavalryman of the Confederacy. His intention was basically to found a secret society of veterans, and to oppose reconstruction policies considered odious in the South. The name comes from the Greek word kuklos, meaning a circle, and it was, more than anything else, just a secret society. However, there were a lot of night riders in those days, and they attacked Republican politicians, and eventually began killing blacks. Forrest did not want to be associated with such activities, and in 1870, he disbanded the organization. Congress held hearings into the night riders, and two former Confederate generals, Forest and John Brown Gordon of Georgia (Forrest was from Tennessee) were widely and publicly charged with being behind the night riders. However, the congressional hearings cleared both men, and they, in their turn, publicly condemned the night riders. There is no record that either Forrest's organization or any of the night riders burned crosses

There the matter might have rested, were it not for three things. The first was the popularity of a series of novels by a man named Dixon, the most prominent of which was The Clansman, and which included the symbolism of a burning cross, which literary types think he borrowed from a novel of Sir Walter Scott. Dixon's novels glorified a fictionalized version of the Ku Klux Klan. The next was the silent motion picture, The Birth of a Nation, based on Dixon's novels (it was originally released under the title The Clansman), by the then very popular director D. W. Griffith. All of this happened to have coincided with the ugly incident of the lynching of a Jewish industrialist in Atlanta, Georgia, who had been accused of the murder of an adolescent girl (modern criminologists, including those in the South, do not believe that he committed the murder, and that the police fastened on him as the most easily "convictable" suspect, especially as he was Jewish). The lynching of that man, Leo Frank, helped to energize a then dying socio-political movement which had been popular in the North and the South, the Lily Whites, who were anti-Catholic, anti-Jew and anti-black.

At that point, a defrocked Methodist minister, William Simmons, got a bright idea. A few months after Frank had been lynched, and with the threat of prosecutions circulating, some of those who had lynched him organized a night-time rally, and burned a cross, based on the symbolism of the Dixon novels, or the movie, or both--apparently the object was to warn the authorities in Atlanta that they had widespread public support. Simmons, inspired by the movie, the novels and the lynching, decided that the Klan should be refounded, which he did on the night of Thanksgiving, 1915. A cross was burned during the ceremony, and it quickly became identified with the new Klan.

The origin of the burning of crosses which Dixon allegedly borrowed from Scott is, as far as i know, obscure. You're on your own to figure that one out.

To me 'Race & Cross burning' are associated with a bunch of uneducated, in bred red necks calling themselves KKK.

You appear to have had a specific cross in mind. Which one is it?

Setanta, do you research at all before a post like that? It would not surprise me if you knew all that without having to do so, I'm just curious.

I've known about Forrest for years and years and years. I read a life of Forrest written shortly after the American Civil War about 20 years ago--and it had the details (and reliable references) of the founding of the Klan, the dissolution of the Klan, and the Congressional hearings during which Forrest and Gordon were charged and then cleared in the matter of the night riders.

My friend introduced me to Dixon's book The Clansman more than 30 years ago, and over the years i put together the pieces about Griffith and The Birth of the Nation as well as the lynching of Leo Frank. I learned about the "re-founding" of the Klan prior to the Great War perhaps 15 to 20 years ago, but i only learned the details about Simmons and the cross burnings within the last ten years.

I often check to make sure that i've spelled names correctly, and gotten dates right (if it matters, otherwise i'll just say something happened about such and such a time) when i post these things, but most of it is in my memory. If i'm not absolutely certain about something (and, of course, i can still be wrong), i will check what i consider reliable online sources before posting.

In the case of this post, the only thing i checked was the church from which Simmons was expelled--i couldn't remember that one. All the rest is well engraved in my memory.

I never questioned the historic accuracy of that particular Clavel claim (it was in Tai Pan, I believe). That, and the Sir Walter Scott quote cited by Setanta, have for a long time bolstered my understanding that the burning of a cross was an ancient Scottish rite, practiced primarily among the Highland clans, to make a claim of property ownership and to announce defiance to any neighbors who would dispute such a claim. It was a the Scots laird's way of announcing, "Here I am and here I'll stay. You cross this line at your peril, laddie."

There's nothing strange or incongruous in the practice having been adopted by Klansmen as the majority of them were of Celtic descent. If you look at a roster of the owners and overseers of slave-owning plantations in pre-bellum South, you'll see more Campbells, McGregors and Stewarts than you can shake a a claymore at. Or a shellaighle, if you'd rather.

Thanks for the confirmation. Some fiction writers I trust more than others, but still, it's not presented as history.

I thought as much. May I take the opportunity to compliment you, sir, on your extraordinary internal resources and ability to harness such.

Indeed, by far, most of the peckerwoods that I know personally are Scotch/Irish....I myself happen to be a Campbell, but I would be classified as poor white trash, rather than a peckerwood....but someday...