Ku Klux Klan (KKK), informally known as The Klan, is the name of several past and present secret militant organizations in the United States whose avowed purpose was to protect the rights of and further the interests of white Americans. They are best known for engaging in vitriolic rhetoric and committing violent acts to further white supremacy. The first such organizations originated in the Southern states and eventually grew to national scope. Their iconic white costumes consisting of robes, masks, and conical hats, and use of cross burning were designed to intimidate the targets of their hatred and, to this day, strike fear in many African-Americans. The KKK has a record of using terrorism, violence, and lynching to intimidate, murder, and oppress African Americans, Jews and other minorities and to intimidate and oppose Roman Catholics and labor unions.
Six middle-class Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War. They made up the name by combining the Greek kyklos (κυκλος, circle) with clan. 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.
The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and 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 people had many roles. Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks.
Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. Generally, it Canby 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. As the following examples indicate, over 2, 000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868.
In February, former Union General and Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts introduced the Ku Klux Klan Act to supress klan. Many Members were imprisoned and prosecuted.
The second Klan(1915–1944) rose in response to urbanization and industrialization, massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe, the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, and the migration of African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern cities. The Klan grew most rapidly in cities which had high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit, Memphis, Dayton, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. The film The Birth of a Nation Directed by D. W. Griffith's glorified the original Klan,which give a big leap for it.
The name Ku Klux Klan has since been used by many independent groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, they often forged alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama. Several members of KKK-affiliated groups were convicted of manslaughter and murder in the deaths of civil rights workers and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, and the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. Today, researchers estimate there may be more than 150 Klan chapters with 5, 000-8, 000 members nationwide. The U.S. government classifies them as hate groups, with operations in separated small local units.
No comments:
Post a Comment