The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies by jon e. lewis

Author:jon e. lewis
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780762442713
Publisher: Constable Robinson
Published: 2012-02-15T23:00:00+00:00

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Did the Klan sponsor the assassination of Martin Luther King?

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Was the Klan behind the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995?

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Did the Klan, as some believe, inject popular foods and drinks to make black men impotent?

Deriving its name from “kyklos” the Greek for “circle”, the Ku Klux Klan was founded by six Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865. Initially the Ku Klux Klan – invariably called the “Klan” or the “KKK” – was a high-spirited quasi charity which looked after Civil War veterans, but it soon turned into a violent network opposed to Reconstruction and for Segregation. The KKK costume of an all-white robe, mask and pointed hood became a symbol of fear and loathing across the ex-Confederacy.

By the end of the decade, the KKK had tens of thousands of members in the South, prominent among them the former Reb cavalry general, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Under Forrest’s headship, the Klan evolved a whole set of Masonic-like names and rituals, with the South becoming the “Invisible Empire”, and the leader the “Grand Wizard”. Each state was titled a “Realm”, headed by a “Grand Dragon”. Forrest, however, was unable to stop the KKK’s hood-long lurch towards terrorism, and in 1869 ordered the Klan to disband. The membership ignored him, and if anything ramped up its night attacks on the black community in the Southern states. With the South burning, President Ulysses Grant passed laws in 1870 and 1871 to outlaw and suppress the organization. Thousands of Klansmen went to the pen. Within a decade the Klan was merely a bad memory.

Bizarrely, the Klan was reborn by a movie, Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griff th’s 1919 epic but racist masterpiece in which an heroic South stands proud against Northern no-gooders and lascivious blacks. After watching the movie, a certain failed preacher by the name of William J. Simmons determined to resurrect the Klan. Astutely, Simmons got on board the project the savvy Indiana businessman David Curtiss Stephenson. The new Klan grew exponentially; by 1924, the KKK had four million members nationwide; in Indiana one in four adult males was a Klansman. The key to Simmons’s/Stephenson’s success was to widen the hate-base of the Klan: Catholics, Jews and union activists joined blacks in the KKK’s gallery of loathing. Underneath the public political campaign of legitimate voting drives, hustings and boycotts, the Klan widely indulged in violent intimidation in the old-style white hoods with the dramatic addition of flaming crosses.

Then, in 1925, the Klan II’s bubble burst as quickly as it had inflated. Stephenson, who was by now the Grand Dragon of twenty-two states (and a rich man on Klan membership dues), was found guilty of the rape and murder of his secretary; one of the causes of her death was from septicaemia, caused by Stephenson’s multiple bites to her body. Embarrassed Klan members could not rip up their membership cards quickly enough; by 1930, Klan membership, hit by the double whammy of the Stephenson scandal and the moneyless Depression, had sunk to 30,000.

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