White Supremacy in America
In the years followi
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In the years following the defeat of the Confederacy by the Union, resistance to Reconstruction and changes in the status of former African slaves was to emerge throughout the American South. Historian William Miller (1977) has pointed out that the "original" Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations such as the Knights of the White Camellia were formed in part by Southern leaders in the 1860s to destroy the voting power of newly freed slaves and to do damage to carpetbag misrule. Geoffrey Perrett (1989) has commented that during Reconstruction, when the original Klan was formed, the occupation armies of the Union were hard-pressed to prevent their terrorist activities - activities that virtually nullified the rights granted and guaranteed to former slaves under the Fourteenth Amendment. There was, says Perrett (1989, p. 261), little the army "could do in owns where more than a thousand people, including children, might gather to watch a black man tortured to death but not one of them would talk." The Klan in its early manifestation was willing to engage in violence to achieve its goals and objectives. After 1869 many of these organizations engaged in such random pillage and terror that respectable elements in the South abandoned them in horror. Miller (1977) believes that the prompt response of the Federal government via the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1870 was highly instrumental in weakening the original Klan, and that the 1872 Amne
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uthern institutions. Reconstruction was a time of trouble for Blacks and a period in which the promises of freedom were soon proven to be largely unfulfilled. After Reconstruction ended, the conditions under which the former slaves lived worsened.
In the 1920s, the Klan experienced a period of resurgence as it attracted new members to its call for "100 percent pure Americanism (Martin & Roberts, 1989, p. 757)." Colonel William Joseph Simmons, the founder of the revived Klan and its "imperial wizard," was not an effective leader. The revived Klan consisted of about 5,000 members, but when Simmons hired two advertising specialists (Edward Young Clark and Elizabeth Tyler) to "market" the Klan in 1920, membership soared. The klan remained a loosely knit web of white supremacist vigilante groups with no truly national political agenda. Its policy was set at the local level and targeted different non-white groups. Clark and Tyler hired a virtual army of organizers to canvas the country selling Klan memberships for about $10 (the obligatory "sheet" was $4 more); by 1921, the Klan was a national organization with 90,000 paying members, and by 1925 it claimed a membership of 5 million (Martin & Roberts, 1989).
The Klan attracted n
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Approximate Word count = 1841
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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