The sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and finally even of our right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us.
Those who maintained the old standards did so only in the face of constant ridicule. The old-stock Americans are learning, however. They have begun to arm themselves for this new type of warfare. Most important, they have broken away from the fetters of the false ideals and philanthropy which put aliens ahead of their own children and their own race.
One more point about the present attitude of the old-stock American: he has revived and increased his long-standing distrust of the Roman Catholic Church.
It is for this that the native Americans, and the Klan as their leader, are most often denounced as intolerant and prejudiced. The Ku Klux Klan, in short, is an organization which gives expression, direction and purpose to the most vital instincts, hopes, and resentments of the old-stock Americans, provides them with leadership, and is enlisting and preparing them for militant, constructive action toward fulfilling their racial and national destiny.
Norman, a negro, from the custody of Deputy Sheriff W. Jordan, and lynched him. In his charge to the jury Judge Turner declared that there was now more lawlessness in Bowie County than ever before during the fifty years he had sat on the bench; and he denounced the Ku Klux Klan as an enemy of constituted government.
He did not charge that the Ku Klux Klan had any connection with the activities of the masked men, but declared that the very nature of the organization opens the way for any lawless element to operate, seemingly with very little molestation.
It is proper to say that the Klan has denied its responsibility for this crime. But whether such denial be true or not, there is no escape from the moral responsibility for the acts so committed; and I have heard of no criminal in the garb of the Klan who has been brought to justice by the Klan, who alone can know whether he is a member of the Klan or not. The Grand Wizard is profuse in assurances that the Klan will assist officers of the law. When officers of the law in any community become so helpless and impotent that they have to be backed up by sheeted Klansmen at night, that community is in a bad way.
The garb of the Klan does not lend itself to uphold the law; it never was devised for that purpose. The men who first devised it devised it to conceal their identity when doing the lawless deeds that they felt justified in doing. Men who are aiding officers of the law in doing a right thing do not disguise themselves and go about after nightfall. This organization tries a man on hear-say evidence, without giving him an opportunity of being confronted by his accusers, and without lawful authority proceeds to enforce its judgments.
The foundation-stone of government and constitutional liberty in our land is the right of a man to be confronted by his accusers and to hear the evidence brought against him. This organization poses as the representative and sole defender of Protestant Americanism. Its methods bear no semblance to those of any government except Bolshevist Russia.
A decree of the Ku Klux Klan, handed down by Simmons of Atlanta, is as abhorrent to democracy and Americanism as a decree of the Soviet government handed out by Lenin. One is as much a menace to orderly government as the other. Either is a menace to law, order, and freedom. What is the lure that draws men to membership in such an organization?
Why do they fall such easy victims to the cheap oratory of hired itinerant speakers? Partly because of the desire of exercising power in secrecy and without responsibility. But in this section and in others the chief appeal has been to religious intolerance. Good men, Christian men, pastors of churches, have enrolled themselves as members, feeling that in some way through this mysterious order they would be able to combat the forces of evil, and especially the political activities of the Roman Catholic Church, portrayed in such lurid colors by these new evangelists There has been a recrudescence of that puritanical meddlesomeness which seeks to regulate the habits, lives, and consciences of other people.
The secret methods of the Inquisition all but destroyed the Church of Rome, and for hundreds of years. Protestants, whatever might be their denomination, have gloried in freedom of discussion and publicity; prayer and Christian suasion have been recognized as the means of reaching the erring sinner; yet, to-day, Christian ministers are found endorsing the idea that men can be made more righteous by a tar treatment applied at night by masked inquisitors.
Assuredly no word of the Man of Galilee can be quoted in extenuation of the unutterable cruelty and cowardice of such treatment.
I was daily with you in the Temple, teaching, and ye took me not. They fail to realize that our government has been established by free American people, who will handle it without interference by, or dictation form, church or clan; that it is to be governed by neither priest nor wizard, knights nor klansmen. Whatever may be its aspirations, it can breed only suspicion and distrust among the members of a community. It is violative of every principle of Christianity, repugnant to every sense of right, justice, and fair dealing between man and man.
There were several reasons for this increased support:. Whites felt they were superior to black immigrants. They were separated into ghetto communities in Northern cities. There were riots between black and whites in the North and housing conditions were very poor. In the National Democratic Convention defeated a motion denouncing the Klan after a bitter party platform controversy.
The organization formally disbanded in when it was unable to pay back federal taxes. Samuel Green, an Atlanta physician, headed the revival. However, the group was a shadow of its earlier incarnations. Membership peaked in the s at about 17, The new Klan offered hard-core opposition to the civil rights movement. 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.
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