Finding information on the Reconstruction Klan and the 1920s Klan was fairly straight forward. Finding information on the Civil Rights era Klan, the one I saw in news clips of the 1960s and in movies like Mississippi Burning, was less so.
It was after WWII and once again the country was in flux. The war produced a new wave of mostly European, heavily Jewish, immigrants. Black soldiers returned home having fought for world freedom and often been accepted, even celebrated, by the Europeans they fought for and with. All over the country, particularly in the South, those soldiers returned to home to find that same freedom denied them. Also in the South, where workers were and still are poorer and underpaid, labor unions began organizing. On top of this was the continuing migration from farms to cities. As always in America, when the country is in the grip of great change (white) people embrace white supremacy.
Then came 1954’s Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Brown was in challenge to the precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson in the 1890s. In the majority opinion, Plessy was decided 8 to 1, Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote:
“The object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to endorse social, as distinguished from political, equality. . . If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”*
“Plessy v. Ferguson.” Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/163us537. Accessed 1 May. 2021.
Brown was the conglomeration of cases arising in multiple states including Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington D.C. on to the racial segregation of public schools. It should be noted that neither Kansas nor Delaware were Southern states. American segregation, and its white supremacist underpinnings, was never limited to the South. In Brown, the decision of the Court was unanimous in the opposite direction of Plessy.
Decades of agitating against Jim Crow in the South led African-American leaders to unite to gain equal protection under the law. Brown and the Civil Rights Movement of the time directly inspired the revival of the third wave of the KKK. New members joined remnants from the 1920s and older and banded together to fight against equal access to the rights Black people were morally, and often legally, entitled to.
Both movements, the fight for civil rights and the fight to deny them, had their leaders. The Civil Rights Movement had Alberta King (assassinated), Martin Luther King, Jr. (assassinated), and Malcolm X (assassinated). The Klan had Samuel Green. Green, born in 1889, managed to jumpstart the Klan in 1946 before dying peacefully in his rose garden in 1949. A doctor, Green resurrected the post WWII Klan from coast to coast. From California, to Florida, from New York to Alabama.
As with previous waves the main focus of the third-wave Klan was violence towards African-Americans, focusing on Black civil rights activists and their white allies. But this Klan, like that of the 1920s, expanded their reservoir of hatred beyond Black folks. They hated the traditional enemies of unions, Jews, Catholics, immigrants- anyone who wasn’t a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, adding the relatively new addition of hating communists.
This third wave of the Klan was smaller than that of the 1920s. Estimates of their numbers at the time peak somewhere between 35 and 50 thousand. But, like previous Klan waves, the third-wave Klan was extremely violent indulging in rapes, assaults, arson, torture, and several flavors of murder. According to the Anti-Defamation League “The Klans and their allies were responsible for a major portion of the assaults, killings, bombings, floggings, and other acts of racial intimidation that swept the South in the first years of the 1960s.”
North Carolina under Bob Jones had more folks in the Klan than the rest of the South. Combined. Don’t forget the Klan was never limited to the South. Open white supremacists like the Klan are most successful when 1) whites think the expansion of human and civil rights is a threat to their status or, as they would say, “their way of life”. 2) Where there isn’t a lot of pushback against their fanatical ideals. This is why social media bubbles make such rich breeding grounds. And 3) policing against conservative extremism is lax. Something true even today in vast swaths of the US. As is Klan tradition the Carolina Klan employed violence to begat terror and intimidation. The Carolina Klan was very public.
This time, however, there were a lot more cameras around making it far more difficult for the greater of the powers that be to ignore the Klan’s violence. Eventually, the murders of children and of white Civil Rights workers inspired federal investigation. A leader in the FBI’s fight against the Klan was Agent Roy Moore who worked on both the case of the Birmingham, Alabama bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that murdered four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley and the infamous Mississippi Burning case in which Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were slain. In his 2008 obituary in the Washington Post Mississippi journalist Bill Minor is quoted to declare, “There was only one reliable law enforcement agency in Mississippi at the time, and that was the FBI, headed by Roy Moore.”
Sources
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/klansville/ https://daily.jstor.org/history-kkk-american-politics/
https://www.splcenter.org/20110228/ku-klux-klan-history-racism#nightrider
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_org_kkk.html
https://www.salisburypost.com/2015/01/11/klansville-u-s-a-pbs-special-looks-at-60s-era-when-jones-rowan-county-were-focus-for-kkk-activities/https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199752027.001.0001/acprof-9780199752027
https://study.com/academy/lesson/resurgence-of-the-ku-klux-klan-in-the-1950s-1960s.html
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/kkk-series
*The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the last of the major Reconstruction statutes. It guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public transportation and public accommodations and service on juries. The U.S. Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), were a group of five landmark cases in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments did not empower Congress to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals.
Supreme Court of 1883 (Civil Rights Cases) S. F. Miller S. J. Field J. P. Bradley J. M. Harlan Wm. B. Woods S. Matthews H. Gray S. Blatchford
Supreme Court of 1892 (Plessy) S. J. Field J. M. Harlan H. Gray S. Blatchford L. Q. C. Lamar IID. J. Brewer H. B. Brown Geo. Shiras Jr.