The Klu Klux Klan's Popularity Today
The Klu Klux Klan's Popularity Today
In 1821, a man by the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest was born near Chapel Hill, Bedford County, Tennessee. As a young man, Forrest worked as a horse and cattle dealer in Mississippi. Eventually, Forrest became a slave trader in Memphis, Tennessee, and built two grand plantations. In 1861, the United States was torn in half as the South fought the North in the Civil War. At the start of the war, Forrest enlisted as a private in the Confederate army. He slowly gathered men and raised a battalion of cavalry, and was named a lieutenant colonel. Forrest proved to be one of the most effective generals in the Confederate army during the Civil War.
After the war, Forrest settled back in Memphis. Along with five other former Confederate army generals, Forrest organized a social organization, called the Ku Klux Klan, whose activities were directed against the Republican Reconstruction governments and their leaders, black and white. In 1869, Forrest attempted to disband the organization when its members became increasingly violent. The Ku Klux Klan continued its violence, even though President Ulysses S. Grant proclaimed for all members of illegal organizations to disband and disarm in 1871. Thousands of Klansmen were arrested and the remaining Klaverns gradually faded as the political and social subordination of blacks was reestablished.
Although the Ku Klux Klan faded, it did not entirely go away. In the late 1870’s, after the Yankee troops moved out of the South at the end of the Reconstruction period, the Ku Klux Klan started expanding. The Klansmen wanted to reclaim local and state governments and reestablish white domination over blacks. The Ku Klux Klan continued their violence and spread fear throughout the South.
To prevent blacks from speaking to white women, using the same facilities as whites, voting, running for a political office, or even exercising their new political rights, the Ku Klux Klan went to extreme measures. Burnings of crosses on hillsides, lynching, floggings, mutilations, kidnappings, threatening parades, and even burning their victims alive were all ways of defending white supremacy and the inviolability of womanhood. Lynching was the Ku Klux Klan’s choice of death for blacks. Between 1884 and 1900, over two thousand blacks were lynched. Lynching sometimes went out of control and turned into wholesale riots....