Ku Klux Klan Quotes (1915-)

“The flood of newcomers, vividly different from earlier migrants in faiths, tongues, and habits, aroused powerful anxieties about the capacity of American society to accommodate them. Some of that anxiety found virulent expression in a revived Ku Klux Klan, reborn in all its Reconstruction-era paraphernalia at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915. Klan nightriders now rode cars, not horses, and they directed their venom as much at immigrant Jews and Catholics as at blacks. But the new Klan no less than the old represented a peculiarly American response to cultural upheaval. By the early 1920s the Klan claimed some five million members, and for a time it dominated the politics of Indiana and Oregon. The nativist sentiment that the Klan helped to nurture found statutory expression in 1924, when Congress choked the immigrant stream to a trickle, closing the era of virtually unlimited entry to the United States. The ethnic neighborhoods that had mushroomed in the preceding generation would grow no more through further inflows from abroad. America’s many ethnic communities now began to stabilize. Millions of immigrants awaited the day when they might become American at last.”

“They were common folk, and their commonness radiated from them like heat from a stove….The wheelbarrow handle, it was plain, was more familiar to the men in that long line than the golf-stick, and the washtub had engaged the women far oftener than the lipstick. But what of it? The klan is not a club for snobs, it is a device for organizing inferiorities into a mystical superiority.”

“The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police is the most rabid, racist body of criminal lawlessness by police in the land. It stands shoulder to shoulder with the Ku Klux Klan then and the Ku Klux Klan now.”

“We must remember that the KKK was a white terrorist organization that intimidated and killed African Americans to prevent their participation in the democratic process and to keep them in what would become debt peonage. The KKK enforced racial control and white dominance through well-publicized violence. The Lost Cause and Margaret Mitchell would have us believe that the great threat to the South was the freedmen and the U.S. Army. Yet the four million recently freed ex-slaves suffered from violence far more. Thousands died trying to vote at the hands of white terror groups, not only the Klan, but also its many imitators. The Lost Cause myth propagated by Mitchell and bought by white southerners for a hundred years served as the ideological underpinning of a violently racist society.”