The Ku Klux Klan, created in the wake of the granting of civil rights to former African slaves in the American South, had died out by the time an American filmmaker resurrected their mythology in a motion picture in 1915 that would spark a resurrection of the society of hooded bigots.
The Birth of a Nation depicted the Klan as heroic saviors of the white woman’s virtue, galloping in their white robes to the rescue of a Southern belles beseiged by predatory black Union occupation troops intent of looting and rape man and bringing white audiences to their feet in cheers and tears:
Oh, and one of those galloping Klansman, a young aspiring actor named John Ford, would later become a famous filmmaker in his own right,
The film ends with Klansmen arrayed outside polling places, intimidating the freed slaves from exercising their newly won right to vote.
In the wake of D.W. Griffith’s film, praised by then President Woodrow Wilson as “like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” It wasn’t, true, of course, but that hardly mattered to a white Southerner like Wilson.
An ambitious young Missouri haberdasher would later join the Klan, though Harry S. Truman would also become the president who, with a stroke of a pen, abolished segregation in the nation’s armed forces. Another recruit, Hugo Black, would later write or concur with his fellow Supreme Court justices in decisions affirming the grant of full civil rights to all Americans.
The Klan also gained strong footholds in the North, capturing completed control of all branches of Colorado government from the governor’s mansion on down, by 1925 and leading to scenes such as this, via the archives of the Cañon City Public Library:
The Klan faded briefly following the burst of post World War II prosperity, then surged again with the civil rights movement’s rise in the 1950s and 1960s, before fading again as integration became the accepted [but never actual] norm.
So whilst the boys in the white sheets have been largely relegated to the dustbin of history, does any of their presence remain?
From Brandeis University:
The Ku Klux Klan’s failure to defeat the black civil rights moment is well documented, but the group’s lesser-known legacy may be its lasting impact on the U.S. political system, according to a paper published in the December issue of the American Sociological Review.
David Cunningham, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at Brandeis University, Rory McVeigh of the University of Notre Dame and Justin Farrell of Yale University report that KKK activity played a significant role in shifting voters’ political party allegiance in the South in the 1960s — from Democratic to Republican — and it continued to influence voters’ activities 40 years later.
The researchers studied county voting records in 10 southern states in which the KKK actively recruited members in the 1960s. The analysis of five presidential voting outcomes, between 1960 and 2000, showed that southern counties with KKK activity in the 1960s had a statistically significant increase in Republican voting compared to counties with no established KKK chapter, even after controlling for a range of factors commonly understood as relating to voting preferences. They also found that conservative racial attitudes among voters in the 1992 election strongly predicted Republican voting, but only in counties where the KKK was organized in the 1960s.
“The Klan’s efforts to link voting behavior to its social agenda in the 1960s disrupted long-established voting patterns in the South,” Cunningham explains. “The fact that such efforts continue to predict partisan allegiances today demonstrates how the impact of a social movement can endure long after the movement itself has declined, as well as providing a new explanation of political polarization in the U.S.”
Cunningham says their findings may have implications beyond providing a better understanding of how political agendas can have lasting societal impact. “Our research also illustrates how racial conflict can have wide-ranging effects that resonate across generations in ways that today’s voters might not easily or directly recognize.”
Recall too that the Republican Party and its financial enablers have been driving the push to disenfranchise people of color by imposing increasingly onerous burdens on the voting franchise, a tactic that is proving nearly as effectively as those ranks of hooded bigot and bigoted hoods to cinematically eulogized by D.W. Griffiths in the film that gave birth to the 20th Century Klan.
