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Photo by Zephyrance Lou
The Ku Klux Klan has been in the news more frequently due to this group’s presumable connection to numerous murder cases where the victim is part of a minority group. Although the group was in its glory in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is still active in today’s democratic United States where every citizen has the right to vote and segregation has been long forgotten. The Klan and its radical views are potential threats to the American society, and politicians are challenged to confine this cult. It is hard to believe that there is such a group openly violating civil rights without being banned by the government. This shows that gaining democratic values and freedom nowadays means that politicians are restricted to take actions against certain groups or operations because the American constitution contains certain rights which would have been harmed in case of the government’s interference. This essay will depict the Klan’s history and what events led to this group’s growth. Moreover, I would like to show how cultural and political changes established and reformed the Ku Klux Klan’s basic ideals and how the members acted against common American values.
The Klan is different from the religious groups we have discussed during our class in several ways. First, it is not a religion based organization. Second, the founding members
ways. First, it is not a religion based organization. Second, the founding members established their group because they were against the Reconstruction Era, and they wanted justice for those Southern White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, who still favored slavery. Third, the Klan’s basic ideals have changed during the past centuries, as it was mentioned earlier, but one characteristic remained the same that has connected the members: hatred. This hatred motivated the members to sabotage the Reconstruction government’s actions and to perform the first terror attacks in the history of the United States.
In order to see a full picture of this hatred group’s function and motivation, I used Julian Bond’s book The Ku Klux Klan: The History of Racism and Violence and Rory McVeigh’s The Rise of The Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics. The two books focused on the Klan in different aspects. Bond described the member of the “Hooded Order” (25) as a group of racist men while McVeigh defined them as right-wing nationalists (32) who have been against not only colored people but also against immigrants, Catholics, and political parties which have great influence on the society. What both writers agree on is that the Ku Klux Klan’s members are influential, rich, often political figures who have the power to sponsor this organization’s operations. Moreover, Bond and McVeigh also confirms that modern, third wave Klan members are not keeping their membership as a secret as opposed to the first and second wave KKK participants, who were hiding their identity behind a white cover which represented that they were white-skinned. So the basic elements of the Hooded Order of the twenty-first century differ in many aspects from the nineteenth century’s KKK. In the following sections these distinctions will be elaborated on in more details.