It has been called America's most famous hate group and has been terrorising the country for 150 years.
In this episode, we look at the history of the Ku Klux Klan, examining its three distinct phases and murderous ideology.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about the uncomfortable topic of white supremacy.
[00:00:27] And specifically, a white supremacist group that emerged from the ruins of the war-torn United States, the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:00:36] By day, their members appeared as normal members of society - doctors and lawyers, judges, politicians and policemen.
[00:00:45] By night they were an underground group who murdered, lynched, tortured and terrorised people different to them.
[00:00:53] You will no doubt have heard of the Ku Klux Klan, or the KKK, but in today’s episode we’ll go a little deeper, talking about where they came from, what they actually did, why the group was tolerated for so long, and their repeated rises and falls throughout the past 150 years of American history.
[00:01:12] OK, let’s get right into it and talk about the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:01:21] It is a warm summer night.
[00:01:24] It’s dark, but you can see the outline of four enormous crosses on the hillside, and rows and rows of hooded figures beyond them.
[00:01:34] They wear white robes, and the silhouettes of their hoods spread along the hill as far as the eye can see.
[00:01:42] There is anticipation in the air, and you realise they are waiting for something.
[00:01:47] To your left are hundreds of cars, and people lounging around, drinking beers, observing the spectacle.
[00:01:55] Then, coming over the hill, a man on horseback appears.
[00:02:00] “Every Klansmen will salute the Imperial Cyclops,” says a voice from under its hood, though it’s hard to tell exactly where it came from.
[00:02:10] Slowly thousands of hands start to rise up in the air.
[00:02:14] Then the man on horseback takes a torch and lights the crosses, one by one.
[00:02:21] They burn bright, the smell of smoke in the air.
[00:02:24] Their flickering flames light up the night sky, and you see that the rows of hooded figures extend for hundreds and hundreds of metres.
[00:02:33] There are thousands of them, their hands raised in the air.
[00:02:38] It is July 1923, and you are in Seattle, Washington, in the northwestern United States, at a rally of the Ku Klux Klan, the most infamous hate group in American history.
[00:02:52] The Ku Klux Klan, to put it plainly, has terrorised the United States for over 150 years, but in ebbs and flows, we can split the Klan into three specific periods of history.
[00:03:06] The first phase started in 1865 and ended in 1872.
[00:03:12] The second started in 1915 and ended in around 1944.
[00:03:19] And the third started in the 1950s, grew in strength during the Civil Rights movement, before gradually reducing in size to the fringe movement that it is today.
[00:03:31] So, to understand these phases, we must first go back to where it all started.
[00:03:37] The Ku Klux Klan, was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865.
[00:03:44] The name is believed to come from a combination of the Greek word for circle, kyklos, and the Scottish word clan, meaning group.
[00:03:53] Now, if you know anything about American history, you will probably have noticed that the year of its founding, 1865, was quite a significant year.
[00:04:04] It was, of course, the year the American Civil War ended, and the origins of the KKK, its very founding and existence, come from those Civil War divides.
[00:04:17] In fact, the first KKK branch, or chapter, was started by former Confederate soldiers - those who fought for the south and the states that were pro-slavery.
[00:04:29] By the summer of 1867, a few different branches had opened up across the south, so they met up and established what they called the “Invisible Empire of the South.”
[00:04:42] Sounds a little strange, perhaps, a little mysterious.
[00:04:45] Well, wait until you hear about the names they gave members of this Invisible Empire.
[00:04:51] The first leader of the KKK, a Confederate general named Nathan Bedford Forrest, was known as the “grand wizard,” of the Klan, and was top of a hierarchy of various different grand dragons, grand titans and grand cyclopses.
[00:05:09] A cyclops, by the way, is the gigantic monster with only one eye, the type of creature that Odysseus outsmarted by hiding under a sheep.
[00:05:19] At this early stage, some Klan members, or Klansmen as they are known, wore masks or hoods and occasionally white robes, but there was no established uniform as there was in later years.
[00:05:34] Now, it’s important to remind ourselves of the historical and political context in which the KKK was born.
[00:05:42] The KKK was born during, and in response to, the Reconstruction Era.
[00:05:48] As you might have guessed from the name, this was the federal government’s attempt to reconstruct, or put back together, the war-torn South after this part of the country had been destroyed by the Civil War.
[00:06:01] As part of Reconstruction, the South was split up into five districts, and each state was told to pass the 14th and 15th Amendments of the US constitution, which gave “equal protection” to former slaves and the vote to black men.
[00:06:20] After this, newly freed black southerners began to become involved in politics, sometimes winning election to state and even federal government.
[00:06:30] It was, clearly, a large change in American society.
[00:06:35] One day the law stated that a man could own another man. The next day, the law stated that this previously owned man could legislate over his former owner.
[00:06:46] Now, to state the obvious, this is by no means trying to lessen the horror of this previous system of slavery, but simply reminding you of what a change in American society this was.
[00:06:59] And for those ex-slave owners, people who had profited greatly from and still supported slavery, there was a violent backlash.
[00:07:08] And nowhere was this stronger than with the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:07:13] From 1867 to the early 1870s, it began a terror campaign against politicians and voters, black and white, in an effort to overturn Reconstruction policies and restore white supremacy in the South.
[00:07:30] But it wasn’t just the KKK that was opposed to Reconstruction, and the KKK was far from the only white supremacist group.
[00:07:39] During this period, there were many other white supremacist organisations, such as the Knights of the White Camelia and the White Brotherhood.
[00:07:49] Whatever the name of the group, their methods and violence were the same.
[00:07:54] Klansmen and other white supremacist groups whipped, shot and hung black Americans and their white supporters in the night.
[00:08:03] They burned down the houses of black families as they slept, and wore their masks or robes not only to avoid being identified, but to spread terror among the community.
[00:08:15] So, who actually joined this hate organisation in its first iteration?
[00:08:22] When people think of the KKK, many often think of poor, rural, often less-educated, white southerners.
[00:08:31] Now, though it’s true that the Klan’s first phase was largely made up of poorer, rural members, this stereotype of its members is exactly that, it’s a stereotype, and it doesn’t include all the types of people who were attracted to white supremacism.
[00:08:48] In reality, the KKK drew its members from all social classes, from the poorest of farmhands right up to lawyers, doctors and church ministers, highly educated people.
[00:09:02] What’s more, many police officers and politicians were also members or at least supportive of the group, meaning that the crimes it committed very often went uninvestigated.
[00:09:14] Now, fortunately, their efforts to overturn these Restoration policies failed, the Klan was too disorganised, weak and inexperienced to do much lasting damage, and is now regarded as something of a political failure during this first phase.
[00:09:32] But, as we’ll see, the racial tensions that gave birth to the KKK were still bubbling away beneath the surface.
[00:09:41] After forming again in 1915 in Georgia, the Klan then registered itself as a ‘fraternal organisation’, trying to portray itself less as an explicitly white supremacist group and something closer to the Freemasons.
[00:09:58] Importantly, by doing this, the Klan was allowed to claim tax-exemption - meaning that it wasn’t required to pay taxes. The relevance of this will become apparent in a minute.
[00:10:09] But this second iteration, or form, of the Klan was slightly different to the first - it had expanded its hate.
[00:10:18] Now the group was not only anti-black but also anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, generally anti-immigrant and opposed to organised labour and trade unionism, groups with traditionally big black and Catholic representation.
[00:10:35] As you will know, at the turn of the twentieth-century the United States experienced a surge in immigration, especially from Europe, with huge numbers of Catholics and eastern-European Jews arriving in the country.
[00:10:49] The vast majority of this was concentrated in the North, and the Klan’s revival, its second phase, was largely born in reaction to this.
[00:11:00] It also explains, in part at least, why the group’s membership was slightly different and spread northwards.
[00:11:08] Though the KKK still had its traditional southern stronghold, the Klan of the 1920s was more northern, more middle-class, with a political wing and even women’s groups.
[00:11:21] For white supremacists in the north, the migration of black southerners northward, combined with the new arrival of Catholics and Jews, was changing the America they knew.
[00:11:34] During this period, in the 1920s, the Klan adopted the burning cross as a symbol and began holding grand rallies like the one you heard about at the start of this episode.
[00:11:47] The uniforms were also standardised, and the white robes and pointed hoods became more common.
[00:11:54] And during this second phase of the Klan, there were more members than ever. By one estimate there were over 4 million members.
[00:12:05] If we take population data from the 1920 US census, which reports that the population was roughly 106 million people at the time, that means that a staggering 4% of the American population were members of the KKK.
[00:12:23] And if we take the state of Indiana, which had around a quarter of a million members in 1925, around 30% percent of the state’s entire white male population were Klansmen.
[00:12:36] Mad, right? And this is less than 100 years ago.
[00:12:41] But after a series of scandals, including the conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon D.C Stephenson for rape and murder in 1925, the Klan lost moral credibility, membership started to dwindle, started to reduce, and it entered the 1930s much weaker.
[00:13:00] And the Great Depression of the 1930s substantially cut its membership, and the group was even disbanded, or shut down, in 1944, when the Internal Revenue Service began demanding taxes from the Klan.
[00:13:16] Partly as a result of this, it would remain dormant for the next two decades, with occasional bursts of localised violence, largely in the rural South.
[00:13:27] The second phase was over.
[00:13:30] But the Klan emerged from the ashes again in the 1950s, in opposition to the civil rights movement, the movement to give people of all races equal rights.
[00:13:41] Klan activity in the South surged again, and a deadly campaign of harassment, intimidation, burnings, beatings, bombings, lynchings and shootings of African-Americans and white pro-civil rights campaigners began.
[00:13:57] Like in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in response to government action: in the mid-nineteenth century it was against Reconstruction policies, in the mid-twentieth century, it was in reaction to the Civil Rights movement.
[00:14:14] In 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, and therefore illegal, a wave of violence spread across the south, membership of the Klan grew again, and by the late-1950s it was holding rallies with thousands of people.
[00:14:33] And as the Civil Rights movement fought on, trying to dismantle the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws, the laws outlining racial segregation, the Klan’s violence became more gruesome, and shocking.
[00:14:47] In Alabama, in 1957, a group of KKK members abducted Edward “Judge” Aaron, a black handyman from Birmingham, in Alabama.
[00:14:58] They castrated him, they cut off his testicles, and poured boiling chemicals into his wounds.
[00:15:06] The KKK also began to use bombs, something that was first done in 1956 when Klan leaders bombed the house of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
[00:15:17] During the Civil Rights era, it's thought the Klansmen were responsible for around 70 bombings in Georgia and Alabama and the burning of 30 black churches in Mississippi alone.
[00:15:30] By the early-1960s the Klan had grown into a loosely connected collection of white supremacist groups spread out across the southern states and all operating under the Klan name - the Invisible Empire was back, although it wasn’t particularly structured or well-organised.
[00:15:50] And unfortunately, just like during the Klan’s first two phases, often at the local level law enforcement did little to stop the group’s terror campaign.
[00:16:01] Like in the post-Civil War era and during the 1920s, there were plenty of police officers in the south who were themselves Klansmen, and many more were unsupportive of the Civil Rights movement.
[00:16:14] As a result, there was a response at a federal, a national level, a move from above to infiltrate and destroy the Klan once and for good.
[00:16:25] In 1964, the FBI began a major operation and by September of 1965 had informants in 7 of the 14 different Klan groups across the country.
[00:16:38] Amazingly, of the 10,000 or so active Klan members, it’s thought that as many as 2,000 were giving information to the government, and as a result its leaders began being sent to prison.
[00:16:51] This more prominent and violent iteration was condemned from the very top of the American state.
[00:16:58] In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson publicly attacked the Klan and announced the arrest of four members following the murder of a white Civil Rights campaigner in Alabama.
[00:17:10] And as the late 1960s moved into the 1970s, the combination of the FBI operation, public rejection of its violence, and its leaders going to prison, the Klan became even more of a fringe group with an increasingly dwindling membership.
[00:17:28] Now, one name you probably associate with the KKK is David Duke, who was the charismatic and supposedly respectable face of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1970s.
[00:17:41] His life is too bizarre to do justice in a short section of this episode, so we are actually going to do a full episode on his life and his impact on the Ku Klux Klan. That’s going to be the next episode, so, a follow-up to this one.
[00:17:57] But, in brief, although he was only leader of the KKK for four years, he did a huge amount to portray it as a semi-respectable organisation, and disguised its hideous beliefs behind a respectable smile and a suit and tie.
[00:18:14] He was a dangerous man indeed, and we’ll go deep into the reasons why in the next episode.
[00:18:20] But moving on.
[00:18:21] The KKK enjoyed very brief localised revivals in the late-1980s and then again in the early 2000s, but nothing close to the levels of the 1960s, 1920s, or Reconstruction Era, when it all started.
[00:18:37] Ever since the 1980s, really, the group has continued to become more fragmented, lacking in organisation, diluted by the emergence of newer skinhead and neo-Nazi groups.
[00:18:49] The Southern Poverty Law Center estimated in 2017 that there were, and I’m quoting directly, "at least 29 separate, rival Klan groups currently active in the United States, and they compete for members, dues, news, media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan.”
[00:19:11] And all of this brings us back to the modern day - the age of the internet and social media.
[00:19:18] Huge cross burning rallies like the one in Seattle you heard about at the start thankfully no longer exist, and the Klan’s organising and meeting spaces are now mostly virtual - among a tiny minority of competing online radicals.
[00:19:34] This makes it much more difficult to accurately assess how many active members the Klan has today, but most estimates put it at a few thousand.
[00:19:44] But clearly, the hateful ideas and values of the Ku Klux Klan have gone nowhere.
[00:19:51] You might remember the events of August of 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd, killing one and injuring 35.
[00:20:03] This wasn’t the Klan per se, but a far-right ‘Unite the Right’ rally, which was an attempt to merge the various far-right groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:20:15] So, while the organisation might be a shadow of its former self, this event served as one of many grim reminders to all Americans, and to the world, that its hateful ideology lives on to this very day.
[00:20:33] OK then, that’s it for today’s episode on the Ku Klux Klan, America’s most infamous hate group.
[00:20:39] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about the KKK, or this was the first time you’d really heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:20:49] As a quick reminder, we are going to be following up this one with a members-only episode on the very strange life of David Duke, the man who took over the KKK when it was in decline and tried to change its image.
[00:21:02] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:06] What do you think can and should be done about these kinds of hate groups?
[00:21:10] Are there similar types of groups in your country?
[00:21:13] And how has this changed over the years?
[00:21:15] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:19] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:27] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:32] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about the uncomfortable topic of white supremacy.
[00:00:27] And specifically, a white supremacist group that emerged from the ruins of the war-torn United States, the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:00:36] By day, their members appeared as normal members of society - doctors and lawyers, judges, politicians and policemen.
[00:00:45] By night they were an underground group who murdered, lynched, tortured and terrorised people different to them.
[00:00:53] You will no doubt have heard of the Ku Klux Klan, or the KKK, but in today’s episode we’ll go a little deeper, talking about where they came from, what they actually did, why the group was tolerated for so long, and their repeated rises and falls throughout the past 150 years of American history.
[00:01:12] OK, let’s get right into it and talk about the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:01:21] It is a warm summer night.
[00:01:24] It’s dark, but you can see the outline of four enormous crosses on the hillside, and rows and rows of hooded figures beyond them.
[00:01:34] They wear white robes, and the silhouettes of their hoods spread along the hill as far as the eye can see.
[00:01:42] There is anticipation in the air, and you realise they are waiting for something.
[00:01:47] To your left are hundreds of cars, and people lounging around, drinking beers, observing the spectacle.
[00:01:55] Then, coming over the hill, a man on horseback appears.
[00:02:00] “Every Klansmen will salute the Imperial Cyclops,” says a voice from under its hood, though it’s hard to tell exactly where it came from.
[00:02:10] Slowly thousands of hands start to rise up in the air.
[00:02:14] Then the man on horseback takes a torch and lights the crosses, one by one.
[00:02:21] They burn bright, the smell of smoke in the air.
[00:02:24] Their flickering flames light up the night sky, and you see that the rows of hooded figures extend for hundreds and hundreds of metres.
[00:02:33] There are thousands of them, their hands raised in the air.
[00:02:38] It is July 1923, and you are in Seattle, Washington, in the northwestern United States, at a rally of the Ku Klux Klan, the most infamous hate group in American history.
[00:02:52] The Ku Klux Klan, to put it plainly, has terrorised the United States for over 150 years, but in ebbs and flows, we can split the Klan into three specific periods of history.
[00:03:06] The first phase started in 1865 and ended in 1872.
[00:03:12] The second started in 1915 and ended in around 1944.
[00:03:19] And the third started in the 1950s, grew in strength during the Civil Rights movement, before gradually reducing in size to the fringe movement that it is today.
[00:03:31] So, to understand these phases, we must first go back to where it all started.
[00:03:37] The Ku Klux Klan, was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865.
[00:03:44] The name is believed to come from a combination of the Greek word for circle, kyklos, and the Scottish word clan, meaning group.
[00:03:53] Now, if you know anything about American history, you will probably have noticed that the year of its founding, 1865, was quite a significant year.
[00:04:04] It was, of course, the year the American Civil War ended, and the origins of the KKK, its very founding and existence, come from those Civil War divides.
[00:04:17] In fact, the first KKK branch, or chapter, was started by former Confederate soldiers - those who fought for the south and the states that were pro-slavery.
[00:04:29] By the summer of 1867, a few different branches had opened up across the south, so they met up and established what they called the “Invisible Empire of the South.”
[00:04:42] Sounds a little strange, perhaps, a little mysterious.
[00:04:45] Well, wait until you hear about the names they gave members of this Invisible Empire.
[00:04:51] The first leader of the KKK, a Confederate general named Nathan Bedford Forrest, was known as the “grand wizard,” of the Klan, and was top of a hierarchy of various different grand dragons, grand titans and grand cyclopses.
[00:05:09] A cyclops, by the way, is the gigantic monster with only one eye, the type of creature that Odysseus outsmarted by hiding under a sheep.
[00:05:19] At this early stage, some Klan members, or Klansmen as they are known, wore masks or hoods and occasionally white robes, but there was no established uniform as there was in later years.
[00:05:34] Now, it’s important to remind ourselves of the historical and political context in which the KKK was born.
[00:05:42] The KKK was born during, and in response to, the Reconstruction Era.
[00:05:48] As you might have guessed from the name, this was the federal government’s attempt to reconstruct, or put back together, the war-torn South after this part of the country had been destroyed by the Civil War.
[00:06:01] As part of Reconstruction, the South was split up into five districts, and each state was told to pass the 14th and 15th Amendments of the US constitution, which gave “equal protection” to former slaves and the vote to black men.
[00:06:20] After this, newly freed black southerners began to become involved in politics, sometimes winning election to state and even federal government.
[00:06:30] It was, clearly, a large change in American society.
[00:06:35] One day the law stated that a man could own another man. The next day, the law stated that this previously owned man could legislate over his former owner.
[00:06:46] Now, to state the obvious, this is by no means trying to lessen the horror of this previous system of slavery, but simply reminding you of what a change in American society this was.
[00:06:59] And for those ex-slave owners, people who had profited greatly from and still supported slavery, there was a violent backlash.
[00:07:08] And nowhere was this stronger than with the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:07:13] From 1867 to the early 1870s, it began a terror campaign against politicians and voters, black and white, in an effort to overturn Reconstruction policies and restore white supremacy in the South.
[00:07:30] But it wasn’t just the KKK that was opposed to Reconstruction, and the KKK was far from the only white supremacist group.
[00:07:39] During this period, there were many other white supremacist organisations, such as the Knights of the White Camelia and the White Brotherhood.
[00:07:49] Whatever the name of the group, their methods and violence were the same.
[00:07:54] Klansmen and other white supremacist groups whipped, shot and hung black Americans and their white supporters in the night.
[00:08:03] They burned down the houses of black families as they slept, and wore their masks or robes not only to avoid being identified, but to spread terror among the community.
[00:08:15] So, who actually joined this hate organisation in its first iteration?
[00:08:22] When people think of the KKK, many often think of poor, rural, often less-educated, white southerners.
[00:08:31] Now, though it’s true that the Klan’s first phase was largely made up of poorer, rural members, this stereotype of its members is exactly that, it’s a stereotype, and it doesn’t include all the types of people who were attracted to white supremacism.
[00:08:48] In reality, the KKK drew its members from all social classes, from the poorest of farmhands right up to lawyers, doctors and church ministers, highly educated people.
[00:09:02] What’s more, many police officers and politicians were also members or at least supportive of the group, meaning that the crimes it committed very often went uninvestigated.
[00:09:14] Now, fortunately, their efforts to overturn these Restoration policies failed, the Klan was too disorganised, weak and inexperienced to do much lasting damage, and is now regarded as something of a political failure during this first phase.
[00:09:32] But, as we’ll see, the racial tensions that gave birth to the KKK were still bubbling away beneath the surface.
[00:09:41] After forming again in 1915 in Georgia, the Klan then registered itself as a ‘fraternal organisation’, trying to portray itself less as an explicitly white supremacist group and something closer to the Freemasons.
[00:09:58] Importantly, by doing this, the Klan was allowed to claim tax-exemption - meaning that it wasn’t required to pay taxes. The relevance of this will become apparent in a minute.
[00:10:09] But this second iteration, or form, of the Klan was slightly different to the first - it had expanded its hate.
[00:10:18] Now the group was not only anti-black but also anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, generally anti-immigrant and opposed to organised labour and trade unionism, groups with traditionally big black and Catholic representation.
[00:10:35] As you will know, at the turn of the twentieth-century the United States experienced a surge in immigration, especially from Europe, with huge numbers of Catholics and eastern-European Jews arriving in the country.
[00:10:49] The vast majority of this was concentrated in the North, and the Klan’s revival, its second phase, was largely born in reaction to this.
[00:11:00] It also explains, in part at least, why the group’s membership was slightly different and spread northwards.
[00:11:08] Though the KKK still had its traditional southern stronghold, the Klan of the 1920s was more northern, more middle-class, with a political wing and even women’s groups.
[00:11:21] For white supremacists in the north, the migration of black southerners northward, combined with the new arrival of Catholics and Jews, was changing the America they knew.
[00:11:34] During this period, in the 1920s, the Klan adopted the burning cross as a symbol and began holding grand rallies like the one you heard about at the start of this episode.
[00:11:47] The uniforms were also standardised, and the white robes and pointed hoods became more common.
[00:11:54] And during this second phase of the Klan, there were more members than ever. By one estimate there were over 4 million members.
[00:12:05] If we take population data from the 1920 US census, which reports that the population was roughly 106 million people at the time, that means that a staggering 4% of the American population were members of the KKK.
[00:12:23] And if we take the state of Indiana, which had around a quarter of a million members in 1925, around 30% percent of the state’s entire white male population were Klansmen.
[00:12:36] Mad, right? And this is less than 100 years ago.
[00:12:41] But after a series of scandals, including the conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon D.C Stephenson for rape and murder in 1925, the Klan lost moral credibility, membership started to dwindle, started to reduce, and it entered the 1930s much weaker.
[00:13:00] And the Great Depression of the 1930s substantially cut its membership, and the group was even disbanded, or shut down, in 1944, when the Internal Revenue Service began demanding taxes from the Klan.
[00:13:16] Partly as a result of this, it would remain dormant for the next two decades, with occasional bursts of localised violence, largely in the rural South.
[00:13:27] The second phase was over.
[00:13:30] But the Klan emerged from the ashes again in the 1950s, in opposition to the civil rights movement, the movement to give people of all races equal rights.
[00:13:41] Klan activity in the South surged again, and a deadly campaign of harassment, intimidation, burnings, beatings, bombings, lynchings and shootings of African-Americans and white pro-civil rights campaigners began.
[00:13:57] Like in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in response to government action: in the mid-nineteenth century it was against Reconstruction policies, in the mid-twentieth century, it was in reaction to the Civil Rights movement.
[00:14:14] In 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, and therefore illegal, a wave of violence spread across the south, membership of the Klan grew again, and by the late-1950s it was holding rallies with thousands of people.
[00:14:33] And as the Civil Rights movement fought on, trying to dismantle the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws, the laws outlining racial segregation, the Klan’s violence became more gruesome, and shocking.
[00:14:47] In Alabama, in 1957, a group of KKK members abducted Edward “Judge” Aaron, a black handyman from Birmingham, in Alabama.
[00:14:58] They castrated him, they cut off his testicles, and poured boiling chemicals into his wounds.
[00:15:06] The KKK also began to use bombs, something that was first done in 1956 when Klan leaders bombed the house of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
[00:15:17] During the Civil Rights era, it's thought the Klansmen were responsible for around 70 bombings in Georgia and Alabama and the burning of 30 black churches in Mississippi alone.
[00:15:30] By the early-1960s the Klan had grown into a loosely connected collection of white supremacist groups spread out across the southern states and all operating under the Klan name - the Invisible Empire was back, although it wasn’t particularly structured or well-organised.
[00:15:50] And unfortunately, just like during the Klan’s first two phases, often at the local level law enforcement did little to stop the group’s terror campaign.
[00:16:01] Like in the post-Civil War era and during the 1920s, there were plenty of police officers in the south who were themselves Klansmen, and many more were unsupportive of the Civil Rights movement.
[00:16:14] As a result, there was a response at a federal, a national level, a move from above to infiltrate and destroy the Klan once and for good.
[00:16:25] In 1964, the FBI began a major operation and by September of 1965 had informants in 7 of the 14 different Klan groups across the country.
[00:16:38] Amazingly, of the 10,000 or so active Klan members, it’s thought that as many as 2,000 were giving information to the government, and as a result its leaders began being sent to prison.
[00:16:51] This more prominent and violent iteration was condemned from the very top of the American state.
[00:16:58] In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson publicly attacked the Klan and announced the arrest of four members following the murder of a white Civil Rights campaigner in Alabama.
[00:17:10] And as the late 1960s moved into the 1970s, the combination of the FBI operation, public rejection of its violence, and its leaders going to prison, the Klan became even more of a fringe group with an increasingly dwindling membership.
[00:17:28] Now, one name you probably associate with the KKK is David Duke, who was the charismatic and supposedly respectable face of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1970s.
[00:17:41] His life is too bizarre to do justice in a short section of this episode, so we are actually going to do a full episode on his life and his impact on the Ku Klux Klan. That’s going to be the next episode, so, a follow-up to this one.
[00:17:57] But, in brief, although he was only leader of the KKK for four years, he did a huge amount to portray it as a semi-respectable organisation, and disguised its hideous beliefs behind a respectable smile and a suit and tie.
[00:18:14] He was a dangerous man indeed, and we’ll go deep into the reasons why in the next episode.
[00:18:20] But moving on.
[00:18:21] The KKK enjoyed very brief localised revivals in the late-1980s and then again in the early 2000s, but nothing close to the levels of the 1960s, 1920s, or Reconstruction Era, when it all started.
[00:18:37] Ever since the 1980s, really, the group has continued to become more fragmented, lacking in organisation, diluted by the emergence of newer skinhead and neo-Nazi groups.
[00:18:49] The Southern Poverty Law Center estimated in 2017 that there were, and I’m quoting directly, "at least 29 separate, rival Klan groups currently active in the United States, and they compete for members, dues, news, media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan.”
[00:19:11] And all of this brings us back to the modern day - the age of the internet and social media.
[00:19:18] Huge cross burning rallies like the one in Seattle you heard about at the start thankfully no longer exist, and the Klan’s organising and meeting spaces are now mostly virtual - among a tiny minority of competing online radicals.
[00:19:34] This makes it much more difficult to accurately assess how many active members the Klan has today, but most estimates put it at a few thousand.
[00:19:44] But clearly, the hateful ideas and values of the Ku Klux Klan have gone nowhere.
[00:19:51] You might remember the events of August of 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd, killing one and injuring 35.
[00:20:03] This wasn’t the Klan per se, but a far-right ‘Unite the Right’ rally, which was an attempt to merge the various far-right groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:20:15] So, while the organisation might be a shadow of its former self, this event served as one of many grim reminders to all Americans, and to the world, that its hateful ideology lives on to this very day.
[00:20:33] OK then, that’s it for today’s episode on the Ku Klux Klan, America’s most infamous hate group.
[00:20:39] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about the KKK, or this was the first time you’d really heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:20:49] As a quick reminder, we are going to be following up this one with a members-only episode on the very strange life of David Duke, the man who took over the KKK when it was in decline and tried to change its image.
[00:21:02] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:06] What do you think can and should be done about these kinds of hate groups?
[00:21:10] Are there similar types of groups in your country?
[00:21:13] And how has this changed over the years?
[00:21:15] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:19] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:27] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:32] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about the uncomfortable topic of white supremacy.
[00:00:27] And specifically, a white supremacist group that emerged from the ruins of the war-torn United States, the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:00:36] By day, their members appeared as normal members of society - doctors and lawyers, judges, politicians and policemen.
[00:00:45] By night they were an underground group who murdered, lynched, tortured and terrorised people different to them.
[00:00:53] You will no doubt have heard of the Ku Klux Klan, or the KKK, but in today’s episode we’ll go a little deeper, talking about where they came from, what they actually did, why the group was tolerated for so long, and their repeated rises and falls throughout the past 150 years of American history.
[00:01:12] OK, let’s get right into it and talk about the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:01:21] It is a warm summer night.
[00:01:24] It’s dark, but you can see the outline of four enormous crosses on the hillside, and rows and rows of hooded figures beyond them.
[00:01:34] They wear white robes, and the silhouettes of their hoods spread along the hill as far as the eye can see.
[00:01:42] There is anticipation in the air, and you realise they are waiting for something.
[00:01:47] To your left are hundreds of cars, and people lounging around, drinking beers, observing the spectacle.
[00:01:55] Then, coming over the hill, a man on horseback appears.
[00:02:00] “Every Klansmen will salute the Imperial Cyclops,” says a voice from under its hood, though it’s hard to tell exactly where it came from.
[00:02:10] Slowly thousands of hands start to rise up in the air.
[00:02:14] Then the man on horseback takes a torch and lights the crosses, one by one.
[00:02:21] They burn bright, the smell of smoke in the air.
[00:02:24] Their flickering flames light up the night sky, and you see that the rows of hooded figures extend for hundreds and hundreds of metres.
[00:02:33] There are thousands of them, their hands raised in the air.
[00:02:38] It is July 1923, and you are in Seattle, Washington, in the northwestern United States, at a rally of the Ku Klux Klan, the most infamous hate group in American history.
[00:02:52] The Ku Klux Klan, to put it plainly, has terrorised the United States for over 150 years, but in ebbs and flows, we can split the Klan into three specific periods of history.
[00:03:06] The first phase started in 1865 and ended in 1872.
[00:03:12] The second started in 1915 and ended in around 1944.
[00:03:19] And the third started in the 1950s, grew in strength during the Civil Rights movement, before gradually reducing in size to the fringe movement that it is today.
[00:03:31] So, to understand these phases, we must first go back to where it all started.
[00:03:37] The Ku Klux Klan, was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865.
[00:03:44] The name is believed to come from a combination of the Greek word for circle, kyklos, and the Scottish word clan, meaning group.
[00:03:53] Now, if you know anything about American history, you will probably have noticed that the year of its founding, 1865, was quite a significant year.
[00:04:04] It was, of course, the year the American Civil War ended, and the origins of the KKK, its very founding and existence, come from those Civil War divides.
[00:04:17] In fact, the first KKK branch, or chapter, was started by former Confederate soldiers - those who fought for the south and the states that were pro-slavery.
[00:04:29] By the summer of 1867, a few different branches had opened up across the south, so they met up and established what they called the “Invisible Empire of the South.”
[00:04:42] Sounds a little strange, perhaps, a little mysterious.
[00:04:45] Well, wait until you hear about the names they gave members of this Invisible Empire.
[00:04:51] The first leader of the KKK, a Confederate general named Nathan Bedford Forrest, was known as the “grand wizard,” of the Klan, and was top of a hierarchy of various different grand dragons, grand titans and grand cyclopses.
[00:05:09] A cyclops, by the way, is the gigantic monster with only one eye, the type of creature that Odysseus outsmarted by hiding under a sheep.
[00:05:19] At this early stage, some Klan members, or Klansmen as they are known, wore masks or hoods and occasionally white robes, but there was no established uniform as there was in later years.
[00:05:34] Now, it’s important to remind ourselves of the historical and political context in which the KKK was born.
[00:05:42] The KKK was born during, and in response to, the Reconstruction Era.
[00:05:48] As you might have guessed from the name, this was the federal government’s attempt to reconstruct, or put back together, the war-torn South after this part of the country had been destroyed by the Civil War.
[00:06:01] As part of Reconstruction, the South was split up into five districts, and each state was told to pass the 14th and 15th Amendments of the US constitution, which gave “equal protection” to former slaves and the vote to black men.
[00:06:20] After this, newly freed black southerners began to become involved in politics, sometimes winning election to state and even federal government.
[00:06:30] It was, clearly, a large change in American society.
[00:06:35] One day the law stated that a man could own another man. The next day, the law stated that this previously owned man could legislate over his former owner.
[00:06:46] Now, to state the obvious, this is by no means trying to lessen the horror of this previous system of slavery, but simply reminding you of what a change in American society this was.
[00:06:59] And for those ex-slave owners, people who had profited greatly from and still supported slavery, there was a violent backlash.
[00:07:08] And nowhere was this stronger than with the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:07:13] From 1867 to the early 1870s, it began a terror campaign against politicians and voters, black and white, in an effort to overturn Reconstruction policies and restore white supremacy in the South.
[00:07:30] But it wasn’t just the KKK that was opposed to Reconstruction, and the KKK was far from the only white supremacist group.
[00:07:39] During this period, there were many other white supremacist organisations, such as the Knights of the White Camelia and the White Brotherhood.
[00:07:49] Whatever the name of the group, their methods and violence were the same.
[00:07:54] Klansmen and other white supremacist groups whipped, shot and hung black Americans and their white supporters in the night.
[00:08:03] They burned down the houses of black families as they slept, and wore their masks or robes not only to avoid being identified, but to spread terror among the community.
[00:08:15] So, who actually joined this hate organisation in its first iteration?
[00:08:22] When people think of the KKK, many often think of poor, rural, often less-educated, white southerners.
[00:08:31] Now, though it’s true that the Klan’s first phase was largely made up of poorer, rural members, this stereotype of its members is exactly that, it’s a stereotype, and it doesn’t include all the types of people who were attracted to white supremacism.
[00:08:48] In reality, the KKK drew its members from all social classes, from the poorest of farmhands right up to lawyers, doctors and church ministers, highly educated people.
[00:09:02] What’s more, many police officers and politicians were also members or at least supportive of the group, meaning that the crimes it committed very often went uninvestigated.
[00:09:14] Now, fortunately, their efforts to overturn these Restoration policies failed, the Klan was too disorganised, weak and inexperienced to do much lasting damage, and is now regarded as something of a political failure during this first phase.
[00:09:32] But, as we’ll see, the racial tensions that gave birth to the KKK were still bubbling away beneath the surface.
[00:09:41] After forming again in 1915 in Georgia, the Klan then registered itself as a ‘fraternal organisation’, trying to portray itself less as an explicitly white supremacist group and something closer to the Freemasons.
[00:09:58] Importantly, by doing this, the Klan was allowed to claim tax-exemption - meaning that it wasn’t required to pay taxes. The relevance of this will become apparent in a minute.
[00:10:09] But this second iteration, or form, of the Klan was slightly different to the first - it had expanded its hate.
[00:10:18] Now the group was not only anti-black but also anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, generally anti-immigrant and opposed to organised labour and trade unionism, groups with traditionally big black and Catholic representation.
[00:10:35] As you will know, at the turn of the twentieth-century the United States experienced a surge in immigration, especially from Europe, with huge numbers of Catholics and eastern-European Jews arriving in the country.
[00:10:49] The vast majority of this was concentrated in the North, and the Klan’s revival, its second phase, was largely born in reaction to this.
[00:11:00] It also explains, in part at least, why the group’s membership was slightly different and spread northwards.
[00:11:08] Though the KKK still had its traditional southern stronghold, the Klan of the 1920s was more northern, more middle-class, with a political wing and even women’s groups.
[00:11:21] For white supremacists in the north, the migration of black southerners northward, combined with the new arrival of Catholics and Jews, was changing the America they knew.
[00:11:34] During this period, in the 1920s, the Klan adopted the burning cross as a symbol and began holding grand rallies like the one you heard about at the start of this episode.
[00:11:47] The uniforms were also standardised, and the white robes and pointed hoods became more common.
[00:11:54] And during this second phase of the Klan, there were more members than ever. By one estimate there were over 4 million members.
[00:12:05] If we take population data from the 1920 US census, which reports that the population was roughly 106 million people at the time, that means that a staggering 4% of the American population were members of the KKK.
[00:12:23] And if we take the state of Indiana, which had around a quarter of a million members in 1925, around 30% percent of the state’s entire white male population were Klansmen.
[00:12:36] Mad, right? And this is less than 100 years ago.
[00:12:41] But after a series of scandals, including the conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon D.C Stephenson for rape and murder in 1925, the Klan lost moral credibility, membership started to dwindle, started to reduce, and it entered the 1930s much weaker.
[00:13:00] And the Great Depression of the 1930s substantially cut its membership, and the group was even disbanded, or shut down, in 1944, when the Internal Revenue Service began demanding taxes from the Klan.
[00:13:16] Partly as a result of this, it would remain dormant for the next two decades, with occasional bursts of localised violence, largely in the rural South.
[00:13:27] The second phase was over.
[00:13:30] But the Klan emerged from the ashes again in the 1950s, in opposition to the civil rights movement, the movement to give people of all races equal rights.
[00:13:41] Klan activity in the South surged again, and a deadly campaign of harassment, intimidation, burnings, beatings, bombings, lynchings and shootings of African-Americans and white pro-civil rights campaigners began.
[00:13:57] Like in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in response to government action: in the mid-nineteenth century it was against Reconstruction policies, in the mid-twentieth century, it was in reaction to the Civil Rights movement.
[00:14:14] In 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, and therefore illegal, a wave of violence spread across the south, membership of the Klan grew again, and by the late-1950s it was holding rallies with thousands of people.
[00:14:33] And as the Civil Rights movement fought on, trying to dismantle the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws, the laws outlining racial segregation, the Klan’s violence became more gruesome, and shocking.
[00:14:47] In Alabama, in 1957, a group of KKK members abducted Edward “Judge” Aaron, a black handyman from Birmingham, in Alabama.
[00:14:58] They castrated him, they cut off his testicles, and poured boiling chemicals into his wounds.
[00:15:06] The KKK also began to use bombs, something that was first done in 1956 when Klan leaders bombed the house of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
[00:15:17] During the Civil Rights era, it's thought the Klansmen were responsible for around 70 bombings in Georgia and Alabama and the burning of 30 black churches in Mississippi alone.
[00:15:30] By the early-1960s the Klan had grown into a loosely connected collection of white supremacist groups spread out across the southern states and all operating under the Klan name - the Invisible Empire was back, although it wasn’t particularly structured or well-organised.
[00:15:50] And unfortunately, just like during the Klan’s first two phases, often at the local level law enforcement did little to stop the group’s terror campaign.
[00:16:01] Like in the post-Civil War era and during the 1920s, there were plenty of police officers in the south who were themselves Klansmen, and many more were unsupportive of the Civil Rights movement.
[00:16:14] As a result, there was a response at a federal, a national level, a move from above to infiltrate and destroy the Klan once and for good.
[00:16:25] In 1964, the FBI began a major operation and by September of 1965 had informants in 7 of the 14 different Klan groups across the country.
[00:16:38] Amazingly, of the 10,000 or so active Klan members, it’s thought that as many as 2,000 were giving information to the government, and as a result its leaders began being sent to prison.
[00:16:51] This more prominent and violent iteration was condemned from the very top of the American state.
[00:16:58] In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson publicly attacked the Klan and announced the arrest of four members following the murder of a white Civil Rights campaigner in Alabama.
[00:17:10] And as the late 1960s moved into the 1970s, the combination of the FBI operation, public rejection of its violence, and its leaders going to prison, the Klan became even more of a fringe group with an increasingly dwindling membership.
[00:17:28] Now, one name you probably associate with the KKK is David Duke, who was the charismatic and supposedly respectable face of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1970s.
[00:17:41] His life is too bizarre to do justice in a short section of this episode, so we are actually going to do a full episode on his life and his impact on the Ku Klux Klan. That’s going to be the next episode, so, a follow-up to this one.
[00:17:57] But, in brief, although he was only leader of the KKK for four years, he did a huge amount to portray it as a semi-respectable organisation, and disguised its hideous beliefs behind a respectable smile and a suit and tie.
[00:18:14] He was a dangerous man indeed, and we’ll go deep into the reasons why in the next episode.
[00:18:20] But moving on.
[00:18:21] The KKK enjoyed very brief localised revivals in the late-1980s and then again in the early 2000s, but nothing close to the levels of the 1960s, 1920s, or Reconstruction Era, when it all started.
[00:18:37] Ever since the 1980s, really, the group has continued to become more fragmented, lacking in organisation, diluted by the emergence of newer skinhead and neo-Nazi groups.
[00:18:49] The Southern Poverty Law Center estimated in 2017 that there were, and I’m quoting directly, "at least 29 separate, rival Klan groups currently active in the United States, and they compete for members, dues, news, media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan.”
[00:19:11] And all of this brings us back to the modern day - the age of the internet and social media.
[00:19:18] Huge cross burning rallies like the one in Seattle you heard about at the start thankfully no longer exist, and the Klan’s organising and meeting spaces are now mostly virtual - among a tiny minority of competing online radicals.
[00:19:34] This makes it much more difficult to accurately assess how many active members the Klan has today, but most estimates put it at a few thousand.
[00:19:44] But clearly, the hateful ideas and values of the Ku Klux Klan have gone nowhere.
[00:19:51] You might remember the events of August of 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd, killing one and injuring 35.
[00:20:03] This wasn’t the Klan per se, but a far-right ‘Unite the Right’ rally, which was an attempt to merge the various far-right groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:20:15] So, while the organisation might be a shadow of its former self, this event served as one of many grim reminders to all Americans, and to the world, that its hateful ideology lives on to this very day.
[00:20:33] OK then, that’s it for today’s episode on the Ku Klux Klan, America’s most infamous hate group.
[00:20:39] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about the KKK, or this was the first time you’d really heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:20:49] As a quick reminder, we are going to be following up this one with a members-only episode on the very strange life of David Duke, the man who took over the KKK when it was in decline and tried to change its image.
[00:21:02] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:06] What do you think can and should be done about these kinds of hate groups?
[00:21:10] Are there similar types of groups in your country?
[00:21:13] And how has this changed over the years?
[00:21:15] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:19] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:27] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:32] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
