Who were the Victims of Klan Violence?
The Klan, commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan, was a distinct movement in the United States that advocated for white extremism that stood to support white nationalism, supremacy, anti-immigration, anti-Catholicism, Nordicism, and anti-Semitism. Their main victims were nonwhite people living in the United States. Their major hate, however, was against the black people as they struggled to fight for their civil rights (Elliott 441).
The group also worked to respond to issues of declining morality that were typified by adultery, divorce, criminal gangs, and defiance of prohibition that was rampant in the news then. The Klan group would use any type of force and other immoral rituals and acts to fight off and even kill people from other clans. The early victims came from North Carolina, which revealed some of the worse types of clan violence against black people and even black American children in school (Lang 150).
There were also white victims of the Klan violence especially those who embraced civil rights, foreign religions, and those who did not accept the clan’s activities.
Why were Whites sometimes attacked by the Klan in addition to African Americans?
Most whites who were attacked during the Klan movement were the ones who sympathized with the blacks and other foreign races by giving them access to various amenities, good housing, and safety whenever they heard of attacks (Swanson 339). Those who allowed them to share the same church and other public places were also attached and victimized. Most of these whites were referred to as the ‘carpetbaggers’ and ‘scalawags’.
In most cases, the Klan would attack these white groups because they would provide black people with protection (Lang 151). Elsewhere, white missionaries were also attacked for accepting to preach in black churches. White men who were married to black women or women who had children with black men were enemies of the Klan movement.
Under what Political Circumstances did the Klan arise?
The Klan found life as a white supremacist terrorist group during the American reconstruction. This was mainly the course of the Republican Party, which had the agenda of destabilizing the growing black economy at the time and ensuring that the social, racial, and economic superiority of the white people prospered in the south (Elliott 442). These actions were, however, countered by the Force Acts and the Ku Klux Klan act of 1871, which ruled the group that promoted violence and political intimidation.
Thus, it rendered it illegal under the feral government law (Hoffer 3). For this reason, the Klan lost hold of the south due to the increased violence that it had perpetrated. Due to the maintenance of order that followed, it was later morphed into Jim Crow.
What were the Stated Goals of the Klan? What were its Goals as you can infer them by its Members’ Actions? Was the Klan successful? Why or why not?
The stated goals of the clan were first to maintain and regain white supremacism in the United States (Coffey 1021). Their other objective was to diminish the rising economies of the freed slaves of the south as they believed this would make black people equal to them. Also, they did not want black people to enjoy the same civil rights to voting, education, and social amenities provided by the federal government (Rodriquez 6). Its founder, Nathan Bedford Forrest, spearheaded the movement with the aim to ending Radical republicanism and reconstruction to maintain the white supremacy in the south, which was highly dominated by the free slaves.
Works Cited
Coffey, Michele. “Klansville, USA: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku KIux Klan.” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 80, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1021.
Elliott, Mark. “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons.” Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 2, 2017, pp. 441-442.
Hoffer, Williamjames. “Plessy V. Ferguson: The Effects of Lawyering on a Challenge to Jim Crow.” Journal of Supreme Court History, vol. 39, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1-21.
Lang, Andrew. “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons.” The Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 7, no. 1, 2017, pp. 150-153.
Rodriquez, Alicia. “No Ku Klux Klan for Kern.” South Calif Quarterly, vol. 99, no. 1, 2017, pp. 5-45.
Swanson, Drew. “Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains by Steven E. Nash.” The Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 7, no. 2, 2017, pp. 339-340.