Down slightly from a year ago, there are currently just over thirty active Klan groups in the United States, most of them very small. However, the association of Klan members with criminal activity has remained consistent. The long-term decline of Ku Klux Klan groups is due to several factors, including increasing societal rejection of what the Klan stands for; a growing perception by white supremacists that Klan groups are outdated; and competition with other white supremacist movements, from racist skinheads to white supremacist prison gangs, over the small pool of potential recruits.
In recent years, one of the clearest signs of the declining state of Ku Klux Klan groups has been in their complete inability to maintain anything resembling stability. More than half of the currently active Klan groups were formed only in the last five years.
While a few longstanding Klan groups still exist, they continue to fade away. Today, all three are mere shadows of their former selves. It was in the s that the Klan was revived, its popularity spread through the infamous film Birth of a Nation, and soon became a truly massive social movement in the North, with some five million members.
The Klan as it exists today is a more direct offshoot of the iteration that emerged during that time period in North, often in locations with very small African-American populations. What those places did have was a surge of immigrants coming to the U. Soon, the racist rhetoric of the original KKK was joined by anti-immigrant rhetoric directed at Catholics accused of worshiping a Pope who sought to impose authoritarian rule , non-white immigrants like the Chinese and Japanese, and European immigrants not considered white enough, i.
Italians and Eastern European Jews. These new targets did not evolve unaided as part of the white-nationalist sphere. Rather, they were the result of a dedicated public-relations campaign designed to aid recruitment for the KKK, under the recommendation of public-relations professionals Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Clarke of the Southern Publicity Association, who advised the Klan to focus on drawing out prejudices that they suspected were already latent in American society.
As a result of that decision, the new 20th century KKK was actually bigger in the North than it was in the South. In the early s, the two states with the highest per capita Klan membership were Indiana and Oregon. Though Portland, Ore. Modern progressives may also be surprised to learn that the Klan called for a federal department of education at this time, because they wanted to be able to control curricula, Gordon points out.
My hunch is that many people in the Klan had really never met a Catholic. It became even more diverse and cosmopolitan after the war, especially after Japan became a major manufacturer and began to ship more of its products into the U. The group got 16 members elected to the U. Senate, claimed it elected 75 to the U. House of Representatives and at least 11 Democratic and Republican governors to state houses. It was behind the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, in , the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in , and the murder of Viola Liuzzo, a voting rights volunteer from the North, in The passage of civil rights laws and surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation led to a further decline in membership.
In the s, the Klan sought respectability by accepting women members and setting up youth groups. It largely abandoned its opposition to Roman Catholics. Some Klan leaders even ran for public office in the South. David Duke, a former Grand Wizard, was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in and ran unsuccessfully for governor as a Republican in The Klan and Klan activity have been at the heart of many First Amendment cases.
Demonstrations and counter-demonstrations and racially provocative statements by Klansmen have often produced controversy. In overturning the conviction of a Klansman in Brandenburg v. Pinette , the Court upheld the right of the Klan to display a Latin cross on state capitol grounds.
Paul , the Supreme Court struck down a hate speech law that had been applied to youth who had burned a cross on a lawn, ruling that the law contained a form of viewpoint discrimination prohibited by the First Amendment. However, in Virginia v. Black the Court ruled that the First Amendment did not prohibit laws that penalized individuals who burned crosses with the intent of intimidating others. This article was originally published in Chalmers, David Mark.
Durham, N. Seattle, Wash. MacLean, Nancy K. New York: Oxford University Press, Newton, Michael, and Judy Ann Newton. New York: Garland Publishing,
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