The Ku Klux Klan. The Klan march may have been cut short, but apparently it helped membership. Other than the Coke bottle, what's more recognizable than the white hood and robe and the flaming cross? The government was intended to be of the white man, by the white man, and for the white man.
Mongo! interest in the Ku Klux Klan has swelled and then dwindled. The Klan's power always came and went in phases. You say you're not the Klan? Until at one point, the tactics used to gather Klan members together ultimately become the hooks used to drag them down.
The oldest Ku Klux Klan organization in the nation may be out of business. But what's never gone away is the fear the Klan built its legacy on. Reserve the racist!
Fear that's still here today. They call themselves white patriots, knights of the Klan, and they have returned to the small Tennessee town where it all began. This is Pulaski, Tennessee, and the Ku Klux Klan began back in 1865 on Christmas Eve, when six ex-Confederate soldiers met to form a social club. Its name was inspired by the Greek word for circle.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was the Klan's first imperial wizard, and the hoods and robes were used to frighten black people in their homes. But then black people start voting, and the Klan and groups like it turn brutal. But the Klan went quiet just years later.
By 1872, all of their goals had been pretty much accomplished, so there wasn't really a need to don a sheet anymore. Because you had your person, your guy at the statehouse who could make laws that would suit your purposes. In 1915, Birth of a Nation became the first film ever screened at the White House.
The book it was based on was written by a friend of then-President Woodrow Wilson. You know, it's a three-hour film. that poses black men as dangerous and violent, which led to, you know, a decade of racial terror lynchings.
And we see that that narrative continues to this very day. The film inspired another war veteran, William J. Simmons, who began to reignite the flames of the Klan, this time against not just blacks, but Catholics, Jewish people, and the nation's newly arriving immigrants. People are shocked to know that there were you know, a million people in the Ku Klux Klan around the country. The Ku Klux Klan spread its poisonous influence.
But you had a lot of people, I mean, a lot of officials. You had governors, you had senators. But by the 1930s, the Klan's millions had dwindled to thousands. Here's why.
As the New Jersey Ku Klux Klan rents the camp for one day, cameramen are not permitted to photograph everything. While the Klan had a national organization, There were copycat groups who fought over funds, dragging each other into court, and adding to the growing disgust of the public. The IRS investigated in 1944 and then demanded $500,000 in back taxes.
That crippled the Klan, but not for long. With the advent of the Civil Rights Movement and the Supreme Court order to desegregate in 1954, the Ku Klux Klan sprang back to life. Robert Shelton's United Clans of America assaulted Freedom Riders and activists from Birmingham to Anniston. The White Knights of Mississippi were responsible for the murder of three civil rights workers. The Klan is responsible for the 1963 Baptist Church bombing and the 1965 murder of mother of five Viola Liuzzo.
The FBI infiltrated and cracked down on the violence, but violence wasn't the only issue. You also have... Those nonviolent actions that were carried out by groups like the White Citizens Council, after Brown v. Board in places like Montgomery, Alabama, where I am, they immediately started these private academies, and to this day, they don't send their kids to school with black kids. I believe in nonviolence. I think that we should react.
and we should work and organize as white people. David Duke tried to popularize a new type of Klansman. He tried to claim they were nonviolent.
They were simply all about white people's rights. And he was photogenic and he got a lot of publicity and his Klan group started growing. And then comes leaders like Bill Wilkinson and Frazier Glenn Miller Jr.
The numbers were smaller than before, but the violence still left people dead. To investigate and go out... After the Klan, Klan Watch director Randall Williams attended several rallies.
There is an odd happy white supremacy family atmosphere to some of this activity. You know, if you go to a Klan rally on a Saturday afternoon, they're having a fish fry. I mean, it almost looks benign. But the KKK's symbols made their members a solid target.
And memberships, reams of propaganda material, assets and bank accounts. became liabilities that groups like the S.B.L.C. could use to take the Klan down in court. In 1987, Beulah Mae Donald won a $7 million lawsuit against the United Klans of America for their involvement in the death of her 19-year-old son.
No, I didn't want it to happen to nobody else's child like it has mine. It bankrupted the largest Klan organization at the time. But the people who'd been attracted to KKK principles had already started to move on.
Beginning in the late 1970s, what we really see is that this sense of emergency shared by white power activists, and here I'm talking about Klansmen, but also Radical tax resistors, white separatists, followers of Christian identity, neo-Nazis, and a whole bunch of other people. That sense of emergency and the sense of a shared frustration with the government brought people together in what they called the white power movement. The KKK's robes and crosses are less popular now, but the tactics the Klan used to draw individuals in proved useful for decades. one key lesson? The clan figured out how to use the internet back in the early 80s, the Liberty Net.
The new white power groups now know how to communicate without making themselves easy targets. We have to remember that these activists are motivated by a sense that their actions are all that stands between them, their families, and the end of the world. They see racial demographic change as the end of the world, as an annihilation of everything that they care about. For them, it's a state of emergency.