[News] VCU history professor maps spread of second Ku Klux Klan

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  VCU history professor maps spread of second Ku Klux Klan

20151214_MET_KLANp1 
<http://www.richmond.com/news/article_d09ea43f-9d40-5262-9a76-3f3ab842c6b5.html?mode=image&photo=0> 


Virginia Commonwealth University's “Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan, 
1915-1940” pinpoints where more than 2,000 local "klaverns," as they 
were known, were organized across the nation.

Explore the map

    See the interactive map online at labs.library.vcu.edu/klan
    <http://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/>

Posted: Sunday, December 13, 2015 11:30 pm
*http://www.richmond.com/news/article_d09ea43f-9d40-5262-9a76-3f3ab842c6b5.html?fb_action_ids=10206838494695457&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_ref=.VnGO-6sIQ_E.like*

By KARIN KAPSIDELIS Richmond Times-Dispatch

The digital dots on the map document pockmarks of racism that spread to 
every state between the two world wars.

Virginia Commonwealth University’s “Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan, 
1915-1940” pinpoints where more than 2,000 local “klaverns,” as they 
were known, were organized across the nation as if they were just 
another fraternal society.

The map is “a powerful smack in the forehead,” said John Kneebone, a 
professor of history who researched the second wave of the Klan after it 
was reborn in Atlanta in 1915 with the premiere of “The Birth of a Nation.”

“The comforting notion that the Klan was made up of ignorant hillbillies 
or backward Southerners, that won’t wash,” Kneebone said. “It had an 
appeal everywhere.”

The map is a joint project with VCU Libraries’ digital team, which 
created an online resource of Klan data intended to invite further research.

A click of the dot shows the community where a klavern was located, but 
the sites should not be viewed just as physical locations, said Shariq 
Torres, the Web developer who worked on the project with Web designer 
Alison Tinker and Web systems librarian Erin White, the project manager.

“These are social spaces,” Torres said. The klavern members were 
everyday people who were “spread out, going to church and living their 
lives, and also doing violence to people they didn’t want in the country.”

After 1940, they didn’t “just all of a sudden have a change of heart,” 
he said. “And they didn’t all disappear either. They were still in the 
community. They were still making laws. They were police officers, they 
were teachers, they were politicians, doctors and employers.”

He sees the map as a tool that will help people understand the 
institutional racism that still exists.

Kneebone said the project was inspired by Cabell Library’s invitation to 
faculty to collaborate on digital humanities research and by the 100th 
anniversary of “The Birth of a Nation,” a film he describes “as 
pornography for racists.”

***

*The map is* a rough chronology with incomplete data that underestimate 
numbers, Kneebone said, and yet still reflects how mainstream the openly 
anti-black, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic group was.

He estimates that the second Klan had between 2 million and 8 million 
members, including in the Panama Canal Zone and Alaska, which was not 
yet a state.

Kneebone was able to track individual klaverns because the Klan not only 
had a sales force to recruit new members but also chronicled their 
activities in its publications, listing new chapters by the sequential 
numbers given when they were chartered.

His research suggests Virginia had 132 chapters — he found a reference 
to Lawrenceville Klan No. 132 in the Fellowship Forum of July 1929. But 
he has found documentable references so far to fewer than 50 units in 
Virginia.

The Richmond Klan No. 1 was organized in 1920 but went through internal 
conflicts and leadership changes during the next few years, he said. The 
Klan Kourier refers to it in the April 1931 issue, suggesting it was 
still active at that point.

He also found references to the William Byrd Klan No. 99 in Richmond, 
which according to the Fellowship Forum was chartered on Nov. 2, 1925, 
with 300 members. South Richmond Klan No. 128 is also referred to in the 
Kourier for April 1931.

The Klan was widespread but not without resistance, Kneebone said. The 
second wave coalesced efforts of black, Catholic and Jewish groups to 
counter the Klan.

When the Klan announced plans to march on Broad Street sometime after 
dark on Armistice Day 1920 and “in full costume,” Richmond Planet editor 
John Mitchell Jr. urged white businessmen to curb the menace.

No march was held, Kneebone said. Later, Mitchell would suggest that 
black residents prepare their shotguns “as time for hunting season is 
here,” clearly a warning of black resistance to the Klan, he said.

But in 1925, the Klansmen did march, wearing white robes and hoods, down 
Grace Street toward the state Capitol, as Richmonders lined the sidewalk 
to watch.

***

*The first Klan* was a terrorist group formed during Reconstruction and 
glorified in “The Birth of a Nation,” which along with anti-immigrant 
fervor during World War I fueled the KKK resurgence, Kneebone said.

The second Klan began to decline in 1925 after a series of scandals, 
including the conviction of one of its leaders in the Midwest for the 
kidnap, rape and torture of a woman who died as a result of her ordeal.

That highly publicized trial, “given that the Klan paraded its 
dedication to protecting the virtue of white womanhood,” wounded the 
organization but not fatally.

“The map tells us local Klans continued to exist for years after, so 
there are a multitude of local stories yet to be told,” Kneebone said.

The IRS officially ended the second KKK in the 1940s for failure to pay 
taxes, though its activities continued under other names. A third 
incarnation would emerge during the civil rights movement.

But while the first and third Klans were concentrated primarily in the 
South, Kneebone said, the VCU map shows how “deeply embedded in our 
culture” the second KKK wave became.

Even after all his research, “it was still a profound experience to see 
that map fill up with dots,” he said.

The dots disconcertingly connect to today’s heated rhetoric about 
immigrants, Kneebone said.

“I’m generally an optimist, but this country has not done real well with 
diversity in the past, and I’m not surprised that we’re having arguments 
about it today,” he said.

If you can take the second Klan’s anti-Catholic rhetoric and substitute 
Islam, “it would be quite familiar,” he said.

“I hope the map will have the power of raising awareness that when we 
talk about our country’s heritage of prejudice, of exclusion, of 
separation from one another, we can’t excuse it by saying, ‘Oh, that’s 
backwards people living down (South),’” he said.

“In fact, it’s present everywhere, and it’s not that long ago.”

kkapsidelis at timesdispatch.com
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