Depending on how such efforts coincided with individual lives, such elements could forge and cement, or alternately deter, the UKA's connections to potential adherents. Keywords: Ku Klux Klan , participation , competition , racial threat , framing.
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To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us. All Rights Reserved. OSO version 0. University Press Scholarship Online. Sign in. Not registered? The story of how a black police officer infiltrated the KKK is at first so hard to wrap your mind around that you may question how it can possibly be true. No internet, no smart phones: resurgent underground terrorist organisations have to rely on letter writing and telephone calls for their secret communications.
Ken falls for it. What happened next is the proudest, most off-the-wall moment of his career in law enforcement. Ron, now 65, is living a comfortable married life. Ron was 21 when he joined the police as a patrol officer — the only black person working in the entire department. The Klan investigation came out of the blue, four years later — what a gift to a spirited and ambitious young cop.
At one point in our conversation he opens his wallet to show me a memento: his Klan membership card, issued in But shortly before I first made contact with Ron, the director Spike Lee had finally given the project the green light. Lee cast John David Washington as the younger Ron. The question arises, how could Ron, a black man, have possibly embedded himself in a white supremacist organisation?
What happened when he had to meet these people in the flesh? It was never actually intended to be a sting, explains Ron. The police were worried at the time, and wanted to find out more about Klan activities, so Ron did some homework. Chuck now enters, stage left. White supremacist groups and, at the other extreme, Black Panthers , covertly or not, advocated armed combat.
In Denver, the Klan had recently burned several 14ft crosses in strategic locations; a black man escorting a white woman to the cinema had been shot dead; antisemitism was on the rise. The grocery and bicycle store on Main Street, Colorado Springs, are no longer there, but the Kwik Inn is still standing.
I might add two caveats to that reassuring portrait, however. The first is that marginal, isolated extremist cells themselves can become breeding grounds for unpredictable violence.
At the peak of his s influence, Bob Jones would often tell reporters that, if they were truly concerned about violence perpetrated by Klan members, their greatest fear should be that he would disband the KKK, leaving individual members to commit mayhem free from the structure imposed by the group.
As Jones' followers committed hundreds of terrorist acts authorized by KKK leadership, his claim was of course disingenuous, but it also contained a grain of truth: Jones and his fellow leaders did dissuade members -- many of whom combined rabid racism with unstable aggression -- from engaging in violence not approved by the KKK hierarchy. In the absence of a broader organization with much to lose from a crack-down by authorities, racist violence can be much more difficult to prevent or police.
The second caveat stems from KKK's history of emerging and receding in pronounced "waves. But in each case, some "reborn" version of the KKK has managed to rebound and survive. So, while today the KKK appears an anachronism and, perhaps, less of a threat than other brands of racist hate, we still should vigilantly oppose racist entrepreneurs who seek to exploit the historical cachet of the KKK to organize new campaigns advancing white supremacist ends.
To me, this is one primary lesson from the KKK's past, and a compelling reason not to forget or dismiss the enduring relevance of that history. Has the KKK had any lasting political impact? By most straightforward measures, the KKK appears a failed social movement. Despite the Klan's political inroads during the s, when millions of its members succeeded in electing hundreds of KKK-backed candidates to local, state, and even federal office, the group proved unable to preserve its influence at the ballot box beyond that decade.
Later KKK waves have never been able to deliver on promises to rebuild this influential Klan voting bloc. Bob Jones' Carolina Klan came the closest to winning such influence, with mainstream candidates currying favor sometimes publicly, and more often covertly at Klan rallies and other events with Jones and other leaders in and But that effort appeared short-lived, with both Jones and the Carolina Klan all but disappearing by the early s.
More generally, the KKK's commitment to white supremacy, most clearly realized through Jim Crow-style segregation that endured for decades in the South, has by any formal measure receded as a real possibility in the U.
However, in less overt ways, the KKK's impact can still be felt. Recent studies that I've undertaken with fellow sociologists Rory McVeigh and Justin Farrell have demonstrated how counties in which the KKK was active during the s differ from those in which the Klan never gained a foothold in two important ways.
First, counties in which the Klan was present during the civil rights era continue to exhibit higher rates of violent crime. This difference endures even 40 years after the movement itself disappeared, and certainly isn't explained by the fact that former Klansmen themselves commit more crimes. Instead, the Klan's impact operates more broadly, through the corrosive effect that organized vigilantism has on the overall community.
By flouting law and order, a culture of vigilantism calls into question the legitimacy of established authorities and weakens bonds that normally serve to maintain respect and order among community members. Once fractured, such bonds are difficult to repair, which explains why even today we see elevated rates of violent crime in former KKK strongholds.
Second, past Klan presence also helps to explain the most significant shift in regional voting patterns since the South's pronounced move toward the Republican Party.
While support for Republican candidates has grown region-wide since the s, we find that such shifts have been significantly more pronounced in areas in which the KKK was active. The Klan helped to produce this effect by encouraging voters to move away from Democratic candidates who were increasingly supporting civil rights reforms, and also by pushing racial conflicts to the fore and more clearly aligning those issues with party platforms.
As a result, by the s, racially-conservative attitudes among southerners strongly correlates with Republican support, but only in areas where the KKK had been active.
Is the KKK a movement mostly in the rural South? While many of the Klan's most infamous acts of deadly violence -- including the Freedom Summer killings , the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, and the lynching of Michael Donald that led to the lawsuit that ultimately put the United Klans of America out of business for good -- occurred in the Deep South, during the s the KKK was truly a national movement, with urban centers like Detroit, Portland, Denver, and Indianapolis boasting tens of thousands of members and significant political influence.
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