The Ku Klux Klan (often known by its initials KKK and also the Klan), founded December 24, 1865, white supremacist organization is a Protestant United States of America. Ranked in the far-right American politics, it was never a political party, but rather an organization defending or lobbying interests and prejudices and xenophobic elements of some traditionalists White Protestants, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) as a community "ethno-religious". the twenty-first century, it is largely a nebula of organizations more or less formal and structured, legal or covert, often competing with each other. Although it remains a powerful symbol, it is nonetheless challenged today by organizations to the image less archaic, like the neo-Nazi groups, more openly revolutionary militias or private self-defense, and more community communalists.
The Ku Klux Klan schematically advocates the supremacy of "white race" over other "races" - blacks (descendents of former slaves), Asian (Chinese immigrants and Japanese), Hispanics (Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and other peoples from Latin America), Eastern Europeans (Russians, Yugoslavs, Ukrainians, etc..) - And generally anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism Roman (here mainly referred to the origin at least, of obedience papist immigrants: Polish, Italians, Irish) and homophobia. It is primarily conservative and xenophobic. To a large extent, it is also very anticentraliste (very hostile to what he sees as the encroachment of the federal authorities on the rights of states and rather isolationist foreign policy).
The Ku Klux Klan was originally derived from the defeat and occupation of the eleven secessionist states of the Union in 1860-1861 and member of the Confederate States of America (CSA) , familiarly called Dixieland territory by federal troops and the spontaneous reaction of the most active of the population to the excesses committed by them and especially their civilian collaborators.
He revived much later in time the First World War, but this time as a legal association and cultural open to all WASP, both North and South, eager to defend the values they regard as fundamental to the "White Nation "American.
Etymology
The name "Ku Klux Klan" comes from the Greek word kuklos, which means circle. This is one of the founders, James R. Crowe had the idea to separate the word into two and change the ending, which gives the Ku Klux. As the founders all have Scottish ancestors, another founder, John C. Lester, moved to add the word to end clan, replacing the C with a K, so as to standardize the first letter of three words.
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The creation of the Ku Klux Klan was originally a direct consequence of the defeat of Confederate troops southerners against northerners to unionists end of the Civil War and falls during a tense period in the history of the United States with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, the massacres of blacks in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866 and the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson from 1867 to 1868.
The Ku Klux Klan is founded on the night of 24 to 25 December 1865 by six young Confederate officers (J. Calvin Jones, Frank O. McCord, Richard R. Reed, John B. Kennedy, John C. Lester, James R. Crowe) from the town of Pulaski, Tennessee. Attempts are made to create a structure from local groups in counties up a national organization. Including a questionnaire to be submitted before admission to new members is designed, which tests the adequacy of the candidate's ideas with those of the Klan (in particular the rights of white superiority over blacks). However, local structures remain autonomous, and no intermediate structure at the state level or district is established.
The association is based on the origin of student fraternities, American tradition from Europe and particularly the British and German universities, of where the use of Greek terms and a parody of Masonic ritual.
or First Klan "Klan primitive"
Gradually, the Ku Klux Klan is becoming increasingly important and seeking to organize with the help of more or less open civil or military notables of the old Southern Confederacy. The Klan will turn into a secret army of resistance in the South. Thus Nathan Bedford Forrest , a former cavalry general in the Confederate Army, is chosen as leader and organizer in 1867. Forrest took control of the organization by proclaiming a constitution, which sets the goals and operation of the Ku Klux Klan. Although defining itself as an "institution chivalrous, humanitarian, merciful and patriotic," he sets the "sacred goal" "maintaining the supremacy of the white race in this republic," and by what methods often contradict those values. A chart is created, headed by the first "Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan." This role back in 1867 to Forrest himself wants to do the KKK an influential force in politics. Victory northerners has several consequences: the maintenance of ex-state Confederate of 1860 in the Union, abolition of slavery, the South's rural economy ruined. The Klan opposed to recent laws granting rights to blacks closer to those of whites before. The willingness to let the people of southern political autonomy vis-à-vis the federal state is an important tool used by the Klan. The Ku Klux Klan wants impact on the outcome of elections. It will affect all sorts of ways: intimidation, blackmail and bribery to impose its candidate in the Democratic party and to win these elections for the institutions of the secessionist states. For example, in Columbia County, the election of April 1868, 1222 people voted for the Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, but only one candidate for the presidential election in November (Ulysses Grant) .
For this, Forrest will travel the country to hold meetings. Each of his appearances will be followed by a wave of violence against blacks. The members of the KKK burn crosses in front of the houses of black, break at home to whip them or even kill them by hanging them on trees. Some pregnant women were disemboweled and castrated men. Whites who encounter or instruct blacks were also targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and the carpetbaggers.
Anticipating a formal response although late Washington authorities, Forrest officially disbanded the Klan in 1869.
Following the murder May 18, 1870, Republican Senator John Stephens (en) in open court and to the increasing violence of klanistes, the federal government will respond officially. Also April 20, 1871, Ku Klux Act (The Klan Act) was passed in the Congress of the United States to abolish the Ku Klux Klan. The President of the United States at the time, General Ulysses Simpson Grant, instigator of the Ku Klux Act, declares martial law in nine counties in South Carolina. Several thousands of KKK members were arrested. Most are released for lack of evidence. But the Ku Klux Klan as an organization active disappears quickly. It is officially banned in 1877.
Most institutions of the former Confederate states are then ironed already under the control of the Southerners. The principle of racial segregation was imposed, including in the northern states, faced with substantial emigration of former slaves, now without work, to major industrial centers. cartoon appeared in Harper's Magazine in October 1874, denouncing the alliance of the White League and the Ku Klux Klan against the reconstruction of the South.
Other organizations such as the White League or Shot Gun were then created by former members of the Klan. They continued to conduct campaigns of lynching and terror, but they did not have the importance and influence of the Ku Klux Klan original.
Second Ku Klux Klan or "modern Klan" (1915 - 1944)
is the book The Clansman (The Man Clan) by Thomas Dixon published in 1906, but especially its film adaptation by David Wark Griffith in his film The Birth of a Nation (The Birth of a Nation) output in 1915, marking the rebirth of the KKK. This is mainly the work William J. Simmons. The latter uses the movie's popularity and his party took to the Klan and the southerners to meet some people and revive the Klan. He will inaugurate the rebirth of the Klan at the top of Stone Mountain, Georgia. At that time, and as they engage in the First World War under the leadership of a progressive president, but Southern and supporter of the recognition of self-determination of peoples by the Public International Law ( argument justifying secession and subsequent paradoxically condemns and Abraham Lincoln and invalidates the ruling of the Supreme Court on the perpetuity of the Union), American White all states have the feel for the first time to create a real nation centered around the values of the founding fathers: self-determination, freedom of enterprise, individualism and absolute respect for the property.
For Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats south, it is probably more a revenge that are former supporters of the North, Russian and Prussian who will do the costs of world war against the British and the French, Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War.
The second Ku Klux Klan will be very different from the first, although he also fights also for the "supremacy of the white race." But as the whites do not feel threatened in this sense, it now adds to this problem the rejection of new immigration No "northern European" and not Protestant and preservation of the values it considers that those Founding Fathers embodied. The new Ku Klux Klan is not only an organization born of the Confederate defeat, it is perfectly legal, open to all U.S. whites, Protestants and conservatives, the former transcends partisan divisions and regionalist and seeks to bring together all Americans "authentic" who see themselves as endogenous or permissive influences from abroad the new trends society (communism, syndicalism, socialism, feminism, atheism, Catholicism, organized crime, liberalization of customs ...).
Discreetly sponsored by President Wilson and his successors, the movement takes on a considerable number of years and no longer just the Old South. It appears as a fraternity of mass, and membership is considered a sign of patriotism. In the mid-1920s, members of the second Ku Klux Klan is estimated at five million. He quickly became an influential political force with which politicians must rely. The headquarters of the second Ku Klux Klan moved to Washington, several gigantic parades were held in the same capital.
Its members continue to hunt down blacks, immigrants, Catholics, Jews and all those around them and help them. Some are branded with the three letters of the Ku Klux Klan, others are painted with boiling tar and feathered chickens and such campaigns of lynching from the branches of trees continues. All these violent actions are losing support from some politicians. Louisiana passed a law prohibiting the ability to hide the face out of certain festivals, like Mardi Gras. Other states will follow the action of Louisiana. President Harding acts against lynching by authorizing the FBI to intervene. The Ku Klux Klan was officially banned in 1928.
In addition, a number of criminal incidents reveal the corruption of leaders, small or large, an organization which, with its local roots acts like the mafia Wasp. All these reasons and the crisis of 1929 weakened the organization that does not control under a number of votes necessary to obtain the Democratic nomination. Thus, the rumor would have it, Franklin Roosevelt and his supporters have had to pay a very large sum to Dr. Hiram Wesley Evans (en), the Klan of imperator to his reelection in 1937. The same year was created a Committee on Un-American Activities House of Representatives, to fight against the Klu Klux Klan. Dissension within the Klan broke with the approach of war. The rise of Nazism in Germany drew sympathy from some members. Some links will even be created, but collapsed after the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese aircraft. Many Klansmen commit to go to war against Japan. Nazi Germany, the ally of Japan, is designated as an enemy, the links forged What some members break.
The choice of Harry Truman, former Klan sympathizer, as vice-president Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 has often been interpreted as a call up to the voters of the south. Although conservative democrat, Truman always has been one of the firmest supporters of the social policy of Roosevelt as a representative of Missouri, strongly affected by the economic crisis. He even allowed African Americans to become officers in the army during his second term.
The second Ku Klux Klan officially disappeared in 1944 after it was wound up by Evans as a result of unpaid taxes since 1920 amounting to And $ 685,000 claimed by the Internal Revenue Service.
groupuscules
After the Second World War, many people try to revive the third time the Ku Klux Klan, but nothing will. It happens from time to time increased activity of certain small groups at events such as the law against segregation in the years 1950 and 1960. Some groups try their hand even anti-communism, but to no avail, the Ku Klux Klan as it was before, no longer exists. In 1978, there were approximately 10,000 members, but numbers are considerably reduced since that date.
The Ku Klux Klan is also associated with other movements of the American extreme right, such as Aryan Nations, WASP, The Order, and Posse Comitatus.
The Ku Klux Klan exists today in many organizations still active in the U.S., spread across various states or responding to particular doctrines, some contain only a dozen members, while others are real organizations.
In the 1990s, an estimated 3000 the number of members of a group referring the Ku Klux Klan, but a national report of the Anti-Defamation League published in February 2007 estimated that this number has increased since 2000. It currently has 5 000-8 000 members in 179 sections, and organized with various movements boneheads (Nazi skinheads) in militant action (rallies, recruitment campaigns, distributing leaflets and pamphlets racist).
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