WHITE SUPREMACIST GROUPS

COMPARISON OF TWO WHITE SUPREMACIST GROUPS:

And damn his treacherous flattery . . .

Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog

In public duty and in private thinking;

For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,

Their large professions and their little deeds,

Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,

Wrong rules the land and waiting justice sleeps.

- excerpt taken from a KKK ritualistic initiation

Groups advocating racial or religious hatred and violence are common in American history. Indians, Blacks, Irish, Catholics and Jews have all been included as objects of this intolerance. The political impact of hate groups has varied. On some occasions, they have helped shape governmental and societal policies; on many others, they have existed as political pariahs on the margins of American society. The purpose of this paper is to compare the development, philosophy and activities of two such groups: the Ku Klux Klan and the Skinheads. Roots of the Klan run deep in American history, dating back to the post-Civil War period. There is a considerable body of secondary and primary literature which examines their activities. The Skinheads appeared during the 1980s, so initial assessments of their role and significance are still underway.

The original KKK was created in 1865 by six young Confederate soldiers as a social club and as a form of amusement. From the Greek word for circ

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will find this laid out in the Eleventh Chapter of Genesis, in which He segregated the races" (Lowe 70). The authority of the Bible was being called upon to resist the court's order to desegregate public schools. The Klan renewed activities in a fight to preserve the "Southern way of life." This resurgence of the Klan centered primarily in the deep South where a distinct climate of intense and blatant racial hatred often prevailed. During the period between 1955 to 1965, approximately one thousand instances of racial violence and intimidation were attributed to the Klan primarily in the South. In addition to numerous bombings, more than forty civil rights workers were murdered. These masked men of violence continually left horror and destruction behind them. They beat, branded and castrated many innocent people. So protected were they by the local law enforcement agencies that Klansmen were rarely brought to trial and almost never convicted. Though the KKK has toned down its rhetoric and violence since the 1950s and 1960s, the organization maintained its mythical character: "Like all myths, it became even grander and eventually, a new generation later, it fired the flames of a new, more ominous revival of the KKK" in a

Category: Psychology - W