Quotes About Klan

The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.

for many Northern whites, the struggle with the Klan simply underscored the fact that Reconstruction, for all its initial promise, had turned into a long, violent slog.

The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.

Sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white southern women.

The military is a microcosm of American society, so it really is not unusual that they would have Klan people and white supremacy people connected to them.

the Klan birthed in Indiana—a state that had lost 25,000 men fighting the Confederacy just a half century earlier—would soon have more Klansmen than any other state.

The Klan wanted to make an example of anyone who threatened the 'sanctity of the home.

Hear, hear! Thereafter, the Klan and the private militias would make common cause. The Klan that spread to the North was steeped in homegrown Christianity practiced by everyday folks. But instead of love your neighbor, these Klansmen hated many a neighbor. At

The second-wave Klan could return to its roots of terror because it had survived the kind of scrutiny that would have killed off any other secret society in a democracy

The Klan owned the state, and Stephenson owned the Klan. Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors—they all answered to the Grand Dragon.

The biggest achievement of the Oregon Klan—the vote by a majority of the people to essentially outlaw Catholic schools in the state—also fell.

In Muncie, the "Constitution had ceased to function," wrote the Chicago Tribune, after the Klan had established a "super-government" not based on the rule of law.

the most powerful Klan in history, the only realm that had complete political control of a state.

Stephenson would oversee a Klan map that stretched from the Atlantic coast to well beyond the Great Lakes, from the Ohio River to the Canadian border. In a candid moment with a reporter, he had said he was "just a nobody from nowhere—but I've got the biggest brains." Now

The fastest-growing faction, comprising 40 percent of all Klan members, came from just three states—Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois

America cannot remain half-Christian and half-agnostic." Thereafter, the Klan lobbied for teaching the biblical story of seven days of creation in public school science classes

All it took were a few good Hoosiers to put an end to Klan "influence" in Indiana, as it was phrased.

They pored over a list of Klan-backed candidates for high office next year—governors in the West, the South, and the Midwest, senators from ten more states, and the presidential ticket. About seventy members of Congress were faithful to the hooded order

The female Klan of Indiana held its first statewide convention in July 1923, with a parade of white-robed women on horseback, bands and floats, initiation ceremonies, speeches on virtue and temperance, and a cross burning at night.

Nationwide, the Klan had expanded to nearly three million members, and most of the growth was in the Northern states, Steve's domain—Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Out West, Colorado and Oregon were adding to their Klan rolls just as quickly.

Still, he was the leader of a violent hate group. The profile in the paper had painted the Grand Dragon as the relatively benign boss of Indiana, with Stephenson asserting that his "Klan is not based on racial, religious or other prejudice.

The Klan claimed fifteen United States senators under its control, and seventy-five members of the House of Representatives. Many had sworn allegiance in secret Klan initiation rituals, becoming "naturalized," as it was called.

At the peak of his power, D. C. Stephenson wanted to wipe the dirt of the Midwest from his shoes. He would say goodbye to India-no-place, Naptown, as the swells in his circle called the capital city. This was the year to do it, depending on when that Senate seat opened. All that would stand between him and Klan control over much of the United States was Madge Oberholtzer.

The Klan of the 1920s had enough control of the legal system to ensure that those who gutted the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a mass murder of American citizens, would not face justice.