Quotes About Racism

What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.

With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people. In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.

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

Isn't it strange that with all our educational advantages," noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many "Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?

The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should "build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven" against immigrants.

the Klan had "changed its bed sheets for a policeman's uniform.

With a campaign slogan that railed against what he called "The Three C's—Corporations, Carpetbaggers, and Coons," Murray won by a huge margin, 301,921 votes to 208,575.

Murray hated Jews as well. Blacks had some virtues, but Jews had none, in his view.

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

A Klan mayor ruled Anaheim, California; the city was nicknamed "Klanaheim.

With a snicker, the cop said that the editor could always take his complaint to higher-ups—Muncie's chief of police or the Delaware County sheriff, both Klansmen who'd recently passed by in front of them. Or he could go directly to the prosecutor, the one hidden by mask and robe at the head of the Klan parade.

The house was thick with politicians and thick with Klansmen, one and the same.

To avoid trouble, one large manufacturing company made membership in the Ku Klux Klan a qualification for employment

In Marion County, every major elected official but two was a Klansman.

Fully half the town of 30,000 belonged to the Klan, including mayor, prosecutor, police force, and school board.

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

The Republican Party as now constituted is the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana," he wrote in his influential paper, the Indianapolis Freeman. "The nominees for governor, house, the senate and city offices are all Klansmen.

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

By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

And here was yet another plum: Ed Jackson, the Republican whose name had first appeared on membership rolls of the Klan in 1923, had been swept into the governor's office. He owed it all to D. C. Stephenson.

I want to put all the Catholics, Jews and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft," said a Klan speaker in rural Whitley County, just outside Fort Wayne. His suggestion was met with wild applause.

When the grandchildren of these leading citizens later discovered hoods in the attic, or membership lists that included their kin, they could not fathom how such a thing came to pass. They knew the Ku Klux Klan was born in the murk of blood-spilling hate, built around a racial order that would find its most ghastly expression in the laws of Nazi Germany.

The 6,000 or so Black residents were forced into tenements and shacks in Baptisttown, a shank of the city without electricity or indoor plumbing. They were constantly harassed. Memories of a 1903 slaughter—twelve Blacks murdered and four saloons burned to the ground by a white mob—still haunted.

D. C. Stephenson was telling the state's top elected officials what to do. And they followed the Klansman's every order.