The Ku Klux Klan

by Read Listen Learn


Today the Ku Klux Klan has between three and five thousand members in the U.S.A., a country of 320 million people. It’s a tiny group of people with the very ugly idea that only white people should live in America. But it wasn’t always the same. It has a long and murderous history and we all know its name, its ‘uniform’ and its symbols.

The Ku Klux Klan started in Tennessee in 1866, after the southern states of America lost the Civil War. Six men – two of them ex-Army officers – began the organisation and designed the infamous costume we have all seen on television. The mask was there to hide people’s faces because the KKK was most active in the countryside where there were not many people, black or white, and so everybody knew everybody else. The mask meant they could hang and burn freed slaves but nobody could identify them. However, there was another reason for the costume: that was to frighten people.

The KKK burnt houses and left dead black bodies at the side of the road because they wanted to make other freed slaves afraid. They especially did not want them to vote. In this way, the KKK could keep the southern states like they were before the Civil War: black men could have no power. However, in 1870, the government in Washington D.C. started to catch KKK members and, a few years later, the organisation was finished.

The second KKK was started in Georgia, another southern state, in 1915. The group only wanted white, Protestant men to join. They kept the same uniform but also started to burn crosses. The organisation was different from before. In the 1860s, the KKK was groups of people in towns across America. They were not really a national organisation. In the 1920s, all that changed. Four or five million white men joined the KKK and fought for a white Protestant America. They attacked black people, Jews and Catholics. This was the beginning of the end for the group though. Many, many white men wanted a white America but they were sickened by the killings. In 1930, the five million members of the mid-1920s numbered only 30,000 in America and very few in Canada, where white Protestant members killed Eastern European immigrants.

The third KKK began after the Second World War to stop Afro-Americans getting civil rights. In many southern states, black students could not go to the same schools and universities as white students; they could not eat in some restaurants; they could not be pilots in the Second World War or become Army officers; Afro-American boys could not sit next to white girls at the cinema or concerts.

This was the time when Martin Luther King told America that he had a dream, a dream that his children could live in an America where their characters were more important than the colour of their skin. Sadly, many people did not feel the same way. Between 1955 and 1965, there were two hundred bombings by the Ku Klux Klan and forty murders of civil rights workers. There were forty thousand members too.

Some KKK groups were friendly with their local police forces, judges or even state governors – like George Wallace in Alabama who wanted to become President of the United States – so that white men attacked, killed and burnt black people and nothing happened to them. Sometimes the police were even KKK members. Once again, however, as the KKK became more violent, people started to leave the group. By 1973, there were only 1500 members all over the country.

These days, there are small groups here and there, especially in the southern states. But there is no national organisation that’s popular all over the country. The KKK is now open to women and Catholics to try to make it more popular. And, of course, the election of Barack Obama increased numbers as a very few white Americans do not want a person of colour in the White House. Maybe, these days, there is no national danger from the KKK but we can never be sure: they have a history of returning.