Jim Crow
Ku Klux Klan
- Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest founded the original Ku Klux Klan in order to protect the widows and orphans of the Confederate dead. He named the group "Kuklos Klan," a mixture of Greek and Scottish meaning "family circle." Yet many white Southerners, frustrated over Federal Reconstruction policies, used the cover of the Klan to lash out against blacks who were benefitting from Reconstruction's open racial policies. The federal government crushed the Klan by 1871.
- The Ku Klux Klan was reformed in 1915 by William J. Simmons, a preacher influenced by Thomas Dixon's book, The Ku Klux Klan (1905). D.W. Griffith turned the book into the movie The Birth of a Nation, 1915. Thomas Dixon's The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan can be read online.
- The Birth of a Nation
- Griffith, the director of the movie, blames the entirety of America’s problems from before the Civil War to the film’s present on African Americans. The movie is pervaded by the belief that African Americans are less human than Anglo-Americans and the Ku Klux Klan members are the heroes, appropriating the concepts of honor and nobility to suit their racist ends.
- Watch "The Birth of a Nation" online
- General Information