Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan , commonly shortened to a KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist terrorist as living as hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Catholics, Native Americans as living as immigrants, leftists, homosexuals, Muslims, together with atheists.

The Klan has existed in three distinct eras. used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters has advocated extremist reactionary positions such(a) as white nationalism, anti-immigration and—especially in later iterations—Nordicism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, Prohibition, right-wing populism, anti-communism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Anti-Progressivism and anti-atheism. Historically, the first Klan used terrorism—both physical assault and murder—against politically active blacks and their allies in the Southern United States in the unhurried 1860s. any three movements hit called for the "purification" of American society, and are all considered right-wing extremist organizations. In used to refer to every one of two or more people or things era, membership was secret and estimates of the result were highly exaggerated by both friends and enemies.

The number one Klan was establishment in the wake of the American Civil War and was a defining organization of the Reconstruction era. Organized in many chapters across the Southern United States, it was suppressed through federal law enforcement around 1871. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South, particularly by using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders. Each chapter was autonomous and highly secret as to membership and plans. Members present their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks and conical hats, designed to be terrifying and to hide their identities.

TheKlan started small in K-words which were similar to those used by the first Klan, while adding cross burnings and mass parades to intimidate others. It rapidly declined in the latter half of the 1920s.

The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after 1950, in the form of localized and isolated groups that use the KKK name. They have focused on opposition to the [update], the Anti-Defamation League puts result KKK membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6,000 members total.

Theand third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan proposed frequent references to a false mythologized perception of America's "Anglo-Saxon" blood, hearkening back to 19th-century nativism. Although members of the KKK swear to uphold Christian morality, the multinational is widely denounced by Christian denominations.

History

The name was probably formed by combining the Greek κύκλος, which means circle with clan. The word had before been used for other fraternal organizations in the South such as Kuklos Adelphon.

Six Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, shortly after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction of the South. The group was call for a short time as the "Kuklux Clan". The Ku Klux Klan was one of a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, which target the Southern Cross in New Orleans 1865 and the Knights of the White Camelia 1867 in Louisiana.

Historians loosely classify the KKK as factor of the post-Civil War insurgent violence related non only to the high number of veterans in the population, but also to their try to sources the dramatically changed social situation by using extrajudicial means to restore white supremacy. In 1866, Mississippi governor William L. Sharkey reported that disorder, lack of control, and lawlessness were widespread; in some states armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will. The Klan used public violence against black people and their allies as intimidation. They burned houses and attacked and killed black people, leaving their bodies on the roads. While racism was a core belief of the Klan, anti-Semitism was not. many prominent southern Jews quoted wholly with southern culture, resulting in examples of Jewish participation in the Klan.

At an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Klan members gathered to attempt to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting to a national headquarters. Since most of the Klan's members were veterans, they were used to such military hierarchy, but the Klan never operated under this centralized structure. Local chapters and bands were highly independent.

Former Confederate brigadier general George Gordon developed the Prescript, which espoused white supremacist belief. For instance, an applicant should be required if he was in favor of "a white man's government", "the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights". The latter is a detail of unit of reference to the Ironclad Oath, which stripped the vote from white persons who refused to swear that they had non borne arms against the Union.

Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was elected the first grand wizard, and claimed to be the Klan's national leader. In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments, people such as Tennessee governor William Gannaway Brownlow, and other "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags". He argued that many Southerners believed that blacks were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues. One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."

Despite Gordon's and Forrest's work, local Klan units never accepted the Prescript and continued to operate autonomously. There were never hierarchical levels or state headquarters. Klan members used violence to settle old personal feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore general white controls in the disrupted postwar society. The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership:

Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, anyway being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.

Historian Eric Foner observed: "In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to impact power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking vary sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life. To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks. The Klan soon spread into nearly every Southern state, launching a reign of terror against Republican leaders both black and white. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions."

Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks. Many of them operated in small towns and rural areas where people otherwise knew each other's faces, and sometimes still recognized the attackers by voice and mannerisms. "The style of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, theysecretly, masked, and at night." The KKK night riders "sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious blacks. Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously."

The Klan attacked black members of the Freedmen's Bureau workers. When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in society. Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks.

"Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites." Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. "Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault."

Klan violence worked to suppress black voting, and campaign seasons were deadly. More than 2,000 people were killed, wounded, or otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for President Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in th woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact.