What is "ku klux klan"?

Ku Klux Klan derives its name from the Greek word "kuklos" meaning circle- and adding "clan" for family for the alliteration. Kuklos Clan became Ku Klux Klan.

The original KKK was founded by former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest about 1868 as a response to the Reconstruction policies forced on the South. In particular, the sudden elevation of former slaves to equality with the white man was seen as threatening. A great many blacks gained public office in state and local governments shortly after the War and many southern whites felt civilization was threatened. They sought both legal (poll taxes, jim crow laws, segregation) and terroristic means (burning crosses, night raids wearing hoods, lynchings) to dissuade the blacks from exerting political power. By the 1890's black participation in southern government and business was largely squelched and the KKK was disbanded as no longer being needed. It wasn't until the 1960's with the civil rights movement that blacks again started making a significant impact in politics.

Interestingly, although today the Democratic party tends to be the champion of civil rights, the original KKK was sympathetic to the Democratic party of the 19th C. and opposed Republican policies.

The first blockbuster motion picture, "Birth of a Nation", around 1915, is controversial because it depicts the KKK as heroic in saving the South from collapse.

A second KKK was organized in the 20th Century, and is entirely racist in nature. It is not nearly as powerful as the 19th C version, nor does it have widespread support.

General Nathan Bedford Forrest is a topic of note all by himself- look him up- His home state of Tennessee gave birth to three Presidents- Jackson, Polk, and Andrew Johnson; but there are more Tennessee historical markers about Forrest than about the three Presidents combined.

First of all, this cavalier attitude toward the groups actions is not in any way cavalier. The KKK is a psycho bunch of idiot- morons who can't see past their own back yards.

What was cavalier is the idea that their words and thoughts are so important. 99% of the time, words are just words to me. Have you heard some of the ridiculous ideas that the KKK holds? I mean, seriously....how can you take something like the posted interview seriously.

If someone in the KKK says to me "I am going to kill you because I hate you for being born." yeah, maybe I take them seriously. But if someone in the KKK says "I hate you because you are (whatever, insert here) and I wish you'd never been born." I think, what a moron and move on.

You can hate someone. It's a free country and you can feel however you want, regardless of how stupid it is. You can really hate someones guts and never ever harm them. Or you can hate someone and lynch them. Is it the actual hate that causes people to act? I doubt it, since not every member in the KKK has lynched or killed another person.

Do I think they are evil? Sure. But idiots none the less who don't even deserve the conversation we're having about them. They aren't going to change. I mean, why should we bother giving them the credit that they are smart enough to grow up and move on someday? Nothing any of us can ever say will make a dent.

Not to mention, my cavalier comment was intended as a poke at them. Not as a "oh they aren't so bad".

These people are haters and they are ignorant sheep. Baa.

Forrests involvement with the clan was limited, less {fewer} than three years.

The initial idea behind the clan was to protect southern financial interests, mainly from the carpetbaggers {sleazy northern opportunists} and was made up of, and backed by business men and land owners. It was centered around pageantry and pomp more than anything else...the racial side of things, at least at first, was a backseat issue.

As with most fringe groups, as time passes the memberships tend to go down in quality.."you take what you can get". Poorer, less well off, less educated men began to gain in numbers, as there was ..and still are...an abundance of poor angry southerners as apposed to wealthy complacent ones. This directly affected the actions of the clan as a whole, anger and hate begets violence, which showed as they became ever increasingly violent.

At this point, many of the more respectable southerners withdrew their support, and Forrest himself tried to disban the clan..which basically failed...but he did wholeheartedly distance himself from the organization.


Forrest was an excellent calvary officer, I appreciate him for that fact, and nothing else.

I believe the original KKK members were Masons or former Masons so they know about secrecy and organizing.

Freemasonry was something of a fad during the early 19th century, and quite a lot of people were member of a circle. So that really isn't saying much about the capability of secrecy.

I have to concur that this site is rather amateurish in set up. It does not reflect a powerful well-funded organisation. It reminds me somewhat of the godhatesamerica site which is also awful.

Paaskynen - So who do you think joins groups like these? Rocket scientists? All you need is a small group of ignorant yahoos to cause lots and lots of havoc.

Very true Phoenix.

Paasky, this is my take on it....Sure there are some intelligent, powerful people involved in the KKK, but in general, they are too smart to let their names be publically affilliated with them. If they did, the press and public in general would be all over them like a duck on a june bug.

They prefer to hang in the background.

From my personal experience, people who will let you know right up front they are racist are generally stupid, ignorant people. They'll tell you a joke or make a comment and just make this assumption you agree with them.
These are the people who contribute to these websites.

Not all people who live in trailers are trash, but it's the trailer trash that gives everyone who does a bad name.

Also, just because someone appears silly with their websites, does not mean they aren't dangerous. We've all walked into situations where we have felt in physical danger, I've never had it happen in a room full of Rhodes Scholars.

Hi Chai,

I am not assuming that KKK members ought to be smart. In fact I believe that active xenofobia, homophobia, and anti-everything-ism is born of ignorance. The Wikipedia article about the KKK contains a quote that I think outlines very well the background and motivations of the run of the mill white suppremacist and academic merit is not among those.

Still, I believe the average US high school kid could do a better web site than what the kkk have now. Most of the simple rules of usability are violated in this website.

too bad, racism also applies to asian people too, like my cousin who works in a restaurant in Alabama, he's filipino, a customer, some trucker dude, was drunk kept on ranting sbout where the hell he got his green card, my cousin didn't bother talking to him, but the trucker kept on telling him like black and brown doesn't mix with white, the manager shove the trucker out of the restaurant,eventually!

Until now I've avoided this thread, because it is hard to be emotional and write reasonable posts at the same time.

I come in contact with KKK and KKK clones very frequently. All have been, without exception, stupid and consumed with hate. The first half of the 20th Century was a ridicule/legislate-against/physically-intimidate-or-murder blacks in overt ways time of history. Civil rights movements were brutally crushed. The Klan in the present wants to restore those times. But, smarter racists have moved on to other means of having their way.

The works of racism were part of everyday life within the memory of many living people. It is foolish to think the trauma could vanish by now. One of my black friends tells me of his childhood in Mississippi, how whites got together in packs after dark, looking for any blacks foolish enough to be caught out of doors. He described how his family cowered in darkness, listening to the sounds outside.

A few years ago, a white family took possession of a house, just as I was moving out of it. They assumed by the color of my skin I was like them. They described burning down houses of black families for no reason beyond it was what they wanted to do to them.

I could fill pages with such stories, all of personal reflection, but why go on? Racists will put up walls agains the truth and and go on being racists.

I'll call bullshit on this one...your friend must be very old to have any memories of this nature...

catfish

if edgar says something, it's true.

I am 64. My friend is younger than me. He told the truth.

How old is 'old', catfish? I vividly remember the civil rights marches of the late 1950s and early 1960s, of the people who were killed in Mississippi -- Andrew Goodman, Jim Chaney, Mike Schwerner, others. This ain't ancient history. This is within living memory of many of us.

Edgar

The last few sundays in the Austin American Statesman they had a series re "racial expulsions"....fancy term for lynchings...in many towns in Tx.

I can't find the link, but the graphs showing how within a years time the populations of blacks would plummet to zero while, not exactly surprising, still was an eye opener for this white girl

The thing is, no blacks (or very few) ever move back to these towns, and families warn each other with the "don't get caught there after dark" thing.

A quick google gave me this from the first hit. It concerns Texas today, written in 2002.






Crusade: Racial and religious exclusivism


by Michael Gillespie



On a recent Friday, American flags and red, white, and blue streamers waved proudly in the breeze in Vidor, Texas, as hundreds of East Texans turned out for a "Support our Troops" rally at the Vidor High School football stadium.



Whether the Vidor rally was one of many across the USA reportedly arranged by managers of radio stations owned by San Antonio-based media giant Clear Channel Communications, Inc., which has strong ties to the Bush administration and the Republican Party, is unclear. Clear Channel Vice Chair Thomas Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1998 in a lucrative deal that made then-Texas governor and Rangers part owner George W. Bush a multi-millionaire. Clear Channel, which operates some 1,225 radio and 40 television stations in the United States and advertises itself as "a leading promoter, producer and marketer of live entertainment events," owns at least two radio stations in nearby Beaumont, Texas.



According to the Enterprise, Beaumont's daily newspaper, Vidor rally organizers said they didn't intend to make a statement about the war, but "many of those attending the afternoon rally denounced anti-war demonstrators for being unpatriotic."



Clear Channel has denied ordering its station managers to organize the rallies, but one thing is certain: whoever chose Vidor as a rally site had a finger on the pulse of George Bush's crusade and the xenophobic ignorance and racial and religious exclusivism that drive it.



A Ku Klux Klan stronghold for nearly a century, Vidor is still home to members of active Klan organizations today. One of them, the White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, espouses a Christian Identity racial ideology and a theology based on interpretations of selected Old and New Testament passages used to support claims that the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian peoples are "God's chosen people, Israel." The White Camelia Knights' periodic fundraising and recruiting drives in Vidor typically include the sale of peanut brittle at literature tables set up outside the doors of the local Wal-Mart, evidence that such Klan groups and the attitudes they represent enjoy significant popular support in George Bush's Texas.



Located near the Louisiana border, Vidor has long been proud of its well-earned national reputation for overt hostility toward African Americans and other people of color. Well into the 1960s, crude hand-lettered signs posted on local highways in Vidor informed travelers: NIGGER DON'T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE. The signs were a reminder that hooded Klansmen still roamed the night when they felt the need to do so. Vidor's racist history dates back to the turn of the previous century when the town was founded and named after C.S. Vidor, a local lumber magnate and, in a somewhat ironic twist, father of Hollywood film director King Vidor, whose anti-war classic, The Big Parade (1925), was MGM's most successful film prior to Gone With the Wind.



Overt discrimination against people of color has long been and remains an accepted facet of everyday life in Vidor. In 1994, then-U.S. Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Henry Cisneros called on federal marshals, FBI agents, and police to force compliance with public housing laws in Vidor. HUD housing in Vidor had never been opened to African-Americans because of Klan intimidation, the inaction of the local public housing authority, and the community's long history of violence against Blacks. With the assistance of federal law enforcement authorities, Cisneros personally led the effort to move some Black families into Vidor's federally-funded public housing, but the integration effort, only marginally successful, came at a high cost. One African-American male, harassed and driven out of his HUD apartment in Vidor, was later found murdered in Beaumont. Speculation surrounding the murder said the Klan or Klan sympathizers were involved. In April 1994, White supremacist Edith Marie Johnson was sentenced to 40 hours of community service after pleading guilty to threatening to shoot any Black who moved into Vidor's all-white public housing facility.



More recently, Jasper, Texas, a county seat an hour or so north of Vidor, came to the world's attention after three White supremacists chained a Black man, James Byrd Jr., to the back of a pick-up truck and dragged him to dismemberment and death. The macabre 1998 murder and the resulting trial, which galvanized the nation's attention for a time and resulted in two sentences of death and one of life imprisonment, led directly to political efforts to enact a hate crimes law in Texas. When the Texas House of Representatives passed the bill, 83-61, it seemed that something good might come of the racist murder. Then-governor George Bush promised to consider the bill if the state Senate passed it, but Bush and his Republican colleagues managed to keep the bill tied up in committee in the Senate. Bush, who was preparing to run for president, could not afford to be viewed as friendly to hate crimes legislation by his political base in Texas and across the South. When Byrd's daughter, Renee Mullins, traveled to Austin to plead for passage of the bill, Bush initially refused to meet with her. U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson was eventually able to arrange a meeting, and Bush is reported to have reacted to Mullins' personal plea awkwardly, with icy disdain. Her meeting with Bush left Mullins in tears. Texas Republicans eventually voted to kill the James Byrd Jr. Memorial Hate Crimes Bill, but during the presidential campaign Bush spoke publicly about Texas's hate crimes law taking credit for a strong and effective law that, in fact, does not exist because he himself prevented its passage.

not this time...Edgar's friend makes it sound as if they were hunkered down every night in fear of men in white robes burning crosses and lynching blacks...that was not the case...



wrong....your friend and I are perhaps the same age....I don't recall any such events as being commonplace...in fact they were rare....usually conducted by dimwitted racists...yes there were some here that would do dastardly deeds your friend mentioned but certainly not a common happening...your friend has painted you a picture of exaggeration...



yes and don't forget the high profile incident of Emmett Till in the 50's...I don't deny that there have been racially motivated activities here...however I do take exception to the fact that watching "Mississippi Burning" and characterizing the state of Mississippi as a haven for Klansmen wrecking havoc and terror on the black population as a totally false impression...

Edgar heard it from his friend...ya'll have read about those times in books or movies...I was here....

At the time my friend lived there, things were beginning to change, possibly even in Mississippi. But, where he lived, that's the absolute truth, like it or not.

My friend said that now when he goes back to the same place for visits the people he encounters are pleasant to him.