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<h1 id="blox-asset-title"> <span class="blox-headline entry-title">VCU
history professor maps spread of second Ku Klux Klan</span> </h1>
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<div class="frame"> <a title="20151214_MET_KLANp1"
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<p>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.</p>
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Explore the map</div>
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<p>See the interactive map online at <a
href="http://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/" target="_blank">labs.library.vcu.edu/klan</a></p>
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<p class="story-times dtstamp"> Posted: <span class="updated"
title="2015-12-13T23:30:00-05:00">Sunday, December 13, 2015
11:30 pm<br>
<b><small><small><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="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">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</a></small></small></small></small></small></b><br>
<br>
</span> </p>
<p class="byline"> <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">By
KARIN KAPSIDELIS
Richmond Times-Dispatch</span></span> </p>
<div class="content"> <span class="first-paragraph"> <span
class="paragraph-0">
<p>The digital dots on the map document pockmarks of racism
that spread to every state between the two world wars.</p>
</span> </span> <span class="paragraph-1">
<p>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.</p>
</span>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>“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.”</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>The map is a joint project with VCU Libraries’ digital team,
which created an online resource of Klan data intended to
invite further research.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>“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.”</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>He sees the map as a tool that will help people understand
the institutional racism that still exists.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>***</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p><strong>The map is</strong> 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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>***</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p><strong>The first Klan</strong> 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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>That highly publicized trial, “given that the Klan paraded
its dedication to protecting the virtue of white womanhood,”
wounded the organization but not fatally.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>“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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>Even after all his research, “it was still a profound
experience to see that map fill up with dots,” he said.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>The dots disconcertingly connect to today’s heated rhetoric
about immigrants, Kneebone said.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>“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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>If you can take the second Klan’s anti-Catholic rhetoric and
substitute Islam, “it would be quite familiar,” he said.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>“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.</p>
</div>
<div class="encrypted-content" style="">
<p>“In fact, it’s present everywhere, and it’s not that long
ago.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:kkapsidelis@timesdispatch.com">kkapsidelis@timesdispatch.com</a>
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