Klu Klux Klan

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Klu Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan was a brutal, suppressive cult organization which fought to deny the basic civil rights and human liberties granted to citizens of the U.S. by the Bill of Rights to African-Americans, immigrants, Roman-Catholics, Jews, socialists, communists, and anyone else who went against its beliefs or interfered in its work.

The Klan was first established in Pulaski, Tennessee in May 1866 by Nathan Forrest, just two years after the end of the Civil War. Some white southerners, however, were still fighting the war and felt they would be until their death. Forrest was the Klan’s first “Imperial Wizard”, and the Klan quickly spread to other southern states. At the time there were other white supremacy organizations such as the White Brotherhood, the Men of Justice, and the Knights of the White Camelia, but the KKK was the most influential and widely recognized of the groups.

At the beginning, the main goal of the Klan was to keep blacks from voting and establish exclusive white government, in the southern states to keep blacks at the level of servitude they were at during slavery. Black trade organizations, protection groups, black sympathizers, and successful black business men were inhumanly terrorized and brutally murdered in the night. Any attempt for a black person to get ahead in the world was threatening to the Klan and quickly put to an end. “There were numerous large bands of organized marauders called the Ku Klux Klan, who were dressed in fantastic uniforms, and who rode at night and inflicted unnumbered and horrible outrages upon the negro so that he could not dare to come to the polls. Indeed, the men of the South seemed to think themselves excused in these outrages because they wanted to insure a white man's government in their States.”1

The Klan believed it their duty to ensure that America was kept for the Americans and not overrun by “negroes and the foreign devils.” To accomplish this goal the Klan used horrific tactics to intimidate blacks and anyone else who got in their way of a white-government. The Klan would murder whole families in the middle of the night, burn down homes, hold public lynchings and beatings, and conduct other tortures to keep their power. “A lad whipped with branches until his back was ribboned flesh: a Negress beaten and left helpless to contract pneumonia from exposure and dies; a whit...

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...ixteenth Street Baptist Church in which four young black girls were killed and twenty three others were injured, the violent targeting of Freedoms Schools, and the bombing and burning of thirty black homes and thirty-seven black churches. FBI involvement in the investigation of hate crimes committed in the Deep South, along with several convictions of high ranking Klan officials and members has caused it to largely die out in most areas, but still today in the twenty first century, neither the Klan nor its ignorant, racist, hate filled beliefs have not yet completely disappeared.

The supremacy of any race cannot exist or last long. The ridiculous idea didn’t work with Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, or even the ancient Romans; they all soon came to and end. Different people have different views of a perfect race, of which all are not only wrong, but ignorant. There can be no supreme, perfect race, and killing off an entire people is not any type of civilized solution. Without variety of people, cultures, philosophies, religions and the rest of the like, the world would be boring. And anyway, who would we have left to argue with if we all looked, thought, acted, and belived the same?

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