KKK: 150 Years of Racist Terror

The article reprinted below originally appeared in WV No. 318 (26 November 1982), when it was used to help build the mass united-front labor/black mobilization initiated by the Spartacist League that stopped the Klan from marching in Washington, D.C., on 27 November 1982.

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They came in the dead of night, white-robed, with burning cross. They came on horseback to the home of a black family on an isolated rural Southern road. The inhabitants, in sheer terror, knew it was the Ku Klux Klan. And they knew the KKK had come to flog, to cripple, to lynch.

For more than a century the white robes of the nightriders have meant terror for black Americans. But today there is much talk of a “new Klan.” Most of this talk comes from Klan leaders who have been given a forum by the media. But how “new” is this Klan?

Historians of the Ku Klux Klan distinguish three periods of KKK activity: the original Klan which rode against Reconstruction after the Civil War; a born-again Klan of the 1920s based in the industrial cities; and the contemporary Klan. But there is a thread of white terror which ties together the long history of KKK violence. Each “new” Klan rekindles the fiery cross of race-terror and initiates the bizarre rituals of the post-Civil War Klan. From the genteel Southern planter with horse and lash to the three-piece suited Kleagles and Wizards of TV talkshows, the Klan has always been an organization of race-terror for white supremacy and counterrevolution.

The Klan has been the most influential, effective and dangerous of all the fascist groups in America. But if Klan terror has continued for more than a century, so has the struggle against it. In order to better organize that fight, it is important to understand the Klan’s origins and history, to know what it is that the modern day Wizards emulate. For the history of the Ku Klux Klan is written in rivers of blood of black Americans waiting to be avenged.

The Reconstruction War (1866-1877)

The Klan was born out of the heat of bloody counterrevolution in the South after the Civil War. The Second American Revolution, which was begun to prevent secession, ended by crushing the Southern slave system and placing the industrial-based Northern capitalists (represented by the Republican Party) in command. To consolidate its victory the revolutionary bourgeoisie granted formal political rights to the freed slaves, and during Reconstruction black and white radical Republicans, protected by the Union army, sought to overturn the political and social structure of the antebellum South. To fight the Reconstruction governments, Southern reactionaries turned to a secret war of terror and intimidation. Their armed fist in this war was the Ku Klux Klan.

Formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 by a group of ex-Confederate officers, the KKK spread quickly across the South as the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party. The Grand Wizard was an ex-slave trader, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who commanded the Confederate troops at the massacre of Fort Pillow where in 1864 more than 300 black troops were taken prisoner and savagely murdered along with their families.

The precedent and model for the Klan terror was the pre-war slave patrol. This common practice involved groups of men who patrolled the roads at night looking for slaves to “interrogate” and whip. They would also make midnight raids on the slave quarters. When there was fear of slave revolts (and this was often), the slave patrols would be stepped up in their frequency and violence.

In the name of protecting civilization and “Southern womanhood” against the “carpetbagger,” the Klan created a reign of terror meant to restore and maintain white supremacy in every sphere of life. Their main target was the black Union Leagues which were the political and fraternal organizations of the Republican Party. The Union Leagues and the few armed black militias were all that made the Reconstruction governments possible. For the “crime” of being in the Union League, or even voting Republican, blacks could well expect a visit from the nightriders. Another favorite Klan target was teachers, white and black, in the newly established black schools.

But any sign of manhood could mark a black for a murderous night visit. Whippings with hickories were the common means of intimidation. And the usual dose of several hundred lashes was enough to permanently scar, often cripple or kill the victims. W.E.B. DuBois describes in Black Reconstruction how the terrorists “rode through the country at night, marking their course by whipping, shooting, wounding, maiming, mutilation, and the murder of women, children and defenseless men, whose houses were forcibly entered while they slept, and, as their inmates fled, the pistol, the rifle, the knife, and the rope were employed to do their horrid work.” Before the 1874 city elections in Vicksburg, Mississippi, for instance, 200 blacks were massacred in a single week.

Blacks fought the nightriders bitterly, but were out-organized, out-gunned and in the surprise attacks out-numbered. By the early 1870s the Klan had driven off the Union Leagues. It would have taken a massive military effort to finish the Civil War by crushing the counterrevolution in the South. Particularly it would have meant the arming and training of a Southern black militia. But whereas Confederate soldiers were allowed to keep their arms after the war, blacks discharged from the Union army were forced to give up theirs. Negro troops had been withdrawn from the South as early as 1866.

In general there was insufficient military power to enforce the Reconstruction laws and suppress the Klan. When the Union army did arrest the KKK killers, it did little good because they were then turned over to local authorities who released them. Despite cries by radical Republicans for more troops to combat lawless terror, the number of Union troops in the South was steadily drawn down. By 1876 there were only 6,000, mainly on frontier duty in Texas.

As the Northern bourgeoisie became convinced that the South would not rise again, they had less interest in black rights. They had accomplished what they set out to do economically: break the challenge of the Southern slaveowners to the American capitalist state. Ten years after the war ended, with class struggle heating up in the industrial North, the bourgeoisie was willing to give up its democratic ideals for an alliance with its former enemies.

With the Compromise of 1877, Reconstruction was over. The Democrats promised to support Rutherford Hayes for president in exchange for a promise that the last few remaining federal troops would be pulled out of the South. This was a sign that white supremacy had won in the South, gaining the support or acquiescence of the Northern bourgeoisie. With Klan terror the Southern planter-capitalist enforced sharecropping on the former black slaves. Jim Crow, sanctioned by the Supreme Court as “separate but equal,” was established in every sphere of life. The Klan declined in growth because they had become the state with the Democrats in power. There was little need for masks as “kluxing” became a permanent feature of Southern rural and town life. Lynching in the last decades of the 19th century became a grotesque commonplace.

Terror in the Cities (1915-1930)

The white supremacists won the Reconstruction War, and for generations history books told the story their way. Most still do. In 1915 the “redeemers’” version of Reconstruction was made into a powerful film, Birth of a Nation, viewed by 50 million Americans who cheered as the hooded nightriders “saved” the South from corrupt whites and evil black rapists. One of those who saw it many times in the year of its release was Joseph Simmons, who took a small band up to Stone Mountain, Georgia to revive the Klan.

This incarnation of the KKK, promoted as a “fraternal order,” became a mass movement in the early 1920s. It had an estimated three to five million members and achieved considerable political clout within the Democratic Party. The Klan was able to elect many of its number to local, state and federal office. The Klan had so much influence that it split the 1924 Democratic convention. A motion to condemn the Klan failed by one vote.

The Klan is often thought of as an exclusively Southern and rural phenomenon, but the early 1920s saw the rise of urban Klansmen. Chicago, for example, had 50,000 members organized in 20 “klaverns.” The Midwest cities were ripe for the Klan’s brand of race-terror. Since 1910 blacks had been coming North for industrial jobs and had been subjected to murderous riots (e.g., East St. Louis in 1917).

But the major spur to the revived Klan in the North was the influx of Southern and East European immigration which had been temporarily stopped during the war. These immigrants, who were mainly Catholic and to a lesser extent Jewish, would become the KKK’s targets along with blacks in its campaign for “100 percent Americanism.” When Al Smith ran for president in 1928, one Oregon Klan leader declared: “We will float our horses in blood to their bridles before we see a Roman Catholic sitting in our presidential chair.”

The Klan in the 1920s was no “fraternal order” or electoral caucus. “Tar and featherings” were all too common a part of KKK night-time parades and cross-burnings, held in cooperation with the local police. Their victims—who now included, besides blacks, Catholics, Jews, union organizers, socialists and “n----r lovers”—were beaten, flogged and their wounds stuffed with hot tar and feathers. Thus, it was a particular provocation against all black Americans and immigrants when the KKK held their giant march in Washington, D.C., in August 1925. Forty thousand hooded and robed Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue while another 200,000 watched.

The Klan of the 1920s faded due to internal corruption at the top and the fact that the bourgeoisie took up most of its nativist program, passing more restrictive immigration laws. However, the KKK remained a potent force in the Jim Crow South, and racist terror was key to preventing the establishment of strong integrated industrial unions in the South with the rise of the CIO in the 1930s.

Jim Crow Terror (1946-1965)

After World War II blacks began powerful organizing efforts to demand their political rights. Thousands of black GIs came home trained in the use of arms and determined to stand up for their rights. With legal segregation in the South an economic anachronism and an international embarrassment for U.S. imperialism, Jim Crow faced the first serious challenge since Reconstruction. And the Klan once again began riding at night. While George Wallace was standing in the schoolhouse door swearing “segregation forever,” and Bull Connor was unleashing his dogs and hoses on civil rights demonstrators, the KKK was the cutting edge of the same racist reaction with bombs, bullets and beatings.

The Justice Department reported that from 1954 to 1965 the KKK was responsible for 70 bombings in Georgia and Mississippi, 50 of them in Montgomery, Alabama, alone. And what black American will forget what happened on that Sunday morning in 1963, when a KKK bomb shattered a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young girls lay dying in their Sunday school class; 22 of the congregation were seriously injured.

The Klan was no isolated group of fanatics. Many of the die-hard white racists were “law enforcement officials” during the day, White Citizens’ Council members after dinner and Klansmen at night. When busloads of freedom riders arrived in Birmingham in May 1961, they were met by over 1,000 armed Klansmen, who’d been tipped off by the local police—and they left the bus terminal strewn with broken bodies in pools of blood. And 600 civil rights marchers on the bloody Selma to Montgomery voter rights march of 1965 were met on March 7 by a joint assault of Alabama state troopers and the KKK.

While Martin Luther King’s SCLC and the NAACP were appealing to the federal government and FBI against the Klan, it was these very agencies which worked directly with the murderous KKK to terrorize the oppressed. But many blacks did not buy King’s liberal pacifism. For example, in 1957 blacks led by local NAACP head Robert F. Williams armed to defend themselves in Monroe County, North Carolina, and drive the Klan off in historic gun battles. The practice of armed self-defense was taken up in the mid-1960s by the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana.

Remember Greensboro!

The so-called “new Klan” has grown rapidly as the terrorist fringe of the anti-Soviet war drive and the racist backlash that has dominated American politics for the last decade. Divided into four competing groups, the KKK is estimated to have 10,000 members as of 1980 (up from 4,000 in 1971), with ten times that number of active supporters. Recruiting out of the most backward and desperate white layers of society, the Klan has appealed to the anti-busing racism that erupted on the streets of Boston and Louisville, and which was confirmed in the halls of Congress.

The “new” Klan is playing a double game. On the one hand it is pushing for renewed bourgeois respectability, while it simultaneously pursues a rising line of terror on the streets. The bourgeoisie, perhaps with intimations that these white-sheeted fascists may soon prove useful once again, are giving them the platform they desire. The Klansmen in pinstriped suits and the preppy fascist David Duke have become media fixtures. The results have been electoral gains. KKKer Tom Metzger won the Democratic nomination for Congress in San Diego; another former Klansman (and Nazi) got the Republican nomination for Congress in Michigan, and won 32 percent of the vote in 1981.

But the suit-and-tie Klansmen still don the white sheets, and they are surrounded by their machine-gun-toting killers. Shootings in Chattanooga; military training camps for race war in Texas and Alabama; cross-burnings across the country. The most spectacular example of racist Klan terror in recent years was the massacre of five leftists, union organizers and civil rights activists—shot to death in full view of TV cameras—in Greensboro, North Carolina. The liberal press labeled this a “shootout” between equally violent “extremists”—equating the murderers with their victims. And a year later the KKK/Nazi killers were acquitted by an all-white jury. Once again a green light for cold-blooded racist murder from the state.

The liberals accept the myth of a “new Klan” of respectable racism. But the KKK today is at bottom the same vicious animal as always: fundamentally the terrorist arm of the racist, counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie, with strong links to the police agencies of the capitalist state. Unlike the Kluxers of the 1920s, today’s Klan is small...but dangerous. They have a symbiotic relationship with the ultra-Reaganite “New Right” that bellows in the halls of Congress. The KKK waits in the wings of economically depressed America to be used as shock troops against the unions and blacks. And it will take the revolutionary mobilization of labor and all the oppressed to get rid of the Ku Klux Klan for all time.