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Drawing on their college Greek, they adopted the term for circle, "kuklos." They added the alliterative word "klan," and the "Ku Klux Klan" was born. Their nightly rides, in which members disguised themselves in masks and flowing robes, soon became a political successor to the prewar slave patrols in controlling newly freed blacks. Particularly across the upper South, Klansmen sought to overturn the new Republican state governments, drive black men out of politics, control black labor, and restore black subordination. Led by elites and drawing on a cross-section of white male society, the Klan's assaults and murders numbered in the thousands. Similar organizations such as the Knights of the White Camelia in Louisiana copied the
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But it had only local success until after World War I, when Simmons hired a dynamic PR man, Edward Young Clarke, who saw the Klan's possibilities. Clarke and his salesmen would keep most of the $10 dollar initiation fee, so he hired hundreds of salesmen, mostly Protestant ministers, and sent them out across the country to sell the Klan. Soon the Klan was no longer narrowly Southern; law and order, prohibition and anti-Catholicism were added to its white supremacist beliefs, and it enrolled millions of Klansmen and Klanswomen. The aura of violence was part of the initial appeal — when you put on your robes, you were a warrior. In the early years there were hundreds of kidnappings and beatings in the South and Southwest, and outbreaks and episodes elsewhere. Often the victims of the Klan were not blacks, Catholics, Jews or new immigrants, but fellow white native-born Protestants who offended the Klan in some …show more content…
The killers of Viola Liuzzo on the road back to Selma, Ala., and Col. Lemuel Penn on the highway near Athens, Ga., were found not guilty. The killing of Mickey Schwerner, Ben Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, Miss., couldn't even get into court. The bombers of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church and the murderers of Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer, among others, walked free. The best the federal courts could do was send the Liuzzo, Penn, and Philadelphia, Miss., killers to jail with limited civil rights-violation
But it had only local success until after World War I, when Simmons hired a dynamic PR man, Edward Young Clarke, who saw the Klan's possibilities. Clarke and his salesmen would keep most of the $10 dollar initiation fee, so he hired hundreds of salesmen, mostly Protestant ministers, and sent them out across the country to sell the Klan. Soon the Klan was no longer narrowly Southern; law and order, prohibition and anti-Catholicism were added to its white supremacist beliefs, and it enrolled millions of Klansmen and Klanswomen. The aura of violence was part of the initial appeal — when you put on your robes, you were a warrior. In the early years there were hundreds of kidnappings and beatings in the South and Southwest, and outbreaks and episodes elsewhere. Often the victims of the Klan were not blacks, Catholics, Jews or new immigrants, but fellow white native-born Protestants who offended the Klan in some …show more content…
The killers of Viola Liuzzo on the road back to Selma, Ala., and Col. Lemuel Penn on the highway near Athens, Ga., were found not guilty. The killing of Mickey Schwerner, Ben Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, Miss., couldn't even get into court. The bombers of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church and the murderers of Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer, among others, walked free. The best the federal courts could do was send the Liuzzo, Penn, and Philadelphia, Miss., killers to jail with limited civil rights-violation