The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota


Book Description

Minnesota might not seem like an obvious place to look for traces of Ku Klux Klan parade grounds, but this northern state was once home to fifty-one chapters of the KKK. Elizabeth Hatle tracks down the history of the Klan in Minnesota, beginning with the racially charged atmosphere that produced the tragic 1920 Duluth lynchings. She measures the influence the organization wielded at the peak of its prominence within state politics and tenaciously follows the careers of the Klansmen who continued life in the public sphere after the Hooded Order lost its foothold in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.




The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota


Book Description

"An exhaustively researched history of the KKK in Minnesota"--




The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan


Book Description

In The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Rory McVeigh provides a revealing analysis of the broad social agenda of 1920s-era KKK, showing that although the organization continued to promote white supremacy, it also addressed a surprisingly wide range of social and economic issues, targeting immigrants and, particularly, Catholics, as well as African Americans, as dangers to American society.




Ku Klux Klan in Kansas City, Kansas, The


Book Description

Introduction -- Chapter 1: The contours of local history -- Chapter 2: Crashing the city -- Chapter 3: "Methods and operations" -- Chapter 4: Reform and reaction; Part I: A tendency to split; Part II: The persistence of anti-Catholicism -- Chapter 5: Kith Kin Klan; Part I: Who?; Part II: How many? -- Chapter 6: Politics -- Chapter 7: "Everything that is good -- A glossary of Klanspeak -- Appendix A: Klan political candidates, 1921-1930 -- Appendix B: Wyandotte Klan No. 5 membership roster and occupational status comparison -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author.




The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey


Book Description

This revealing history chronicles the rise of the KKK in 1920s New Jersey and the backlash it faced from the state’s immigrant communities. As one of the nation's most diverse states, New Jersey is celebrated for its strong communities built across religious and ethnic lines. But the Mid-Atlantic state is not immune to the ills of bigotry and racism. When the Ku Klux Klan began to reemerge in the first half of the twentieth century, it found a home for a time in New Jersey. Arthur H. Bell, a former vaudevillian turned KKK Grand Dragon, used the tactics of public theater to advertise and recruit for the secret society. In a time of heightened xenophobia during World War I, many white Protestants were already suspicious of their Catholic and Jewish neighbors—a trend Arthur used to his advantage. But the organization’s rise was soon met with a forceful backlash. At a massive riot in Perth Amboy, thousands of immigrants besieged a few hundred Klansmen and ran them out of town. This detailed history chronicles the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and how brave New Jersey residents collectively stood up to bigotry.




The Modern Ku Klux Klan


Book Description

A memoir of the author's involvment with the Ku Klux Klan. He introduced the KKK to Tennessee while recruiting new members there and later became disenchanted with the group after learning about their racist ideology. The book begins with a history of the origins of secret societies in medieval Germany and the KKK.




Ku Klux Kulture


Book Description

In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization. In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement. Ku Klux Kulture reveals the extent to which the KKK participated in and penetrated popular American culture, reaching far beyond its paying membership to become part of modern American society. The Klan owned radio stations, newspapers, and sports teams, and its members created popular films, pulp novels, music, and more. Harcourt shows how the Klan’s racist and nativist ideology became subsumed in sunnier popular portrayals of heroic vigilantism. In the process he challenges prevailing depictions of the 1920s, which may be best understood not as the Jazz Age or the Age of Prohibition, but as the Age of the Klan. Ku Klux Kulture gives us an unsettling glimpse into the past, arguing that the Klan did not die so much as melt into America’s prevailing culture.




Life of a Klansman


Book Description

"A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review A 2020 NPR staff pick | One of The New York Times' thirteen books to watch for in August | One of The Washington Post's ten books to read in August | A Literary Hub best book of the summer| One of Kirkus Reviews' sixteen best books to read in August The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award–winner Edward Ball Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family’s anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail. Sifting through family lore about “our Klansman” as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages—all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by “our Klansman” and his comrades, and shares their stories. For whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of white Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished. In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Ball’s family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror.




Sundown Towns


Book Description

"Powerful and important . . . an instant classic." —The Washington Post Book World The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of "sundown towns"—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren't welcome—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. Written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America. In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face "second-generation sundown town issues," such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.




The Lynchings in Duluth


Book Description

On the evening of June 15, 1920, in Duluth, Minnesota, three young black men, accused of the rape of a white woman, were pulled from their jail cells and lynched by a mob numbering in the thousands. Yet for years the incident was nearly forgotten. This updated, second edition of The Lynchings in Duluth includes a new preface by the author, additional research and notes, and suggestions for further reading. “This account of racial violence in the early twentieth century is a genuinely startling and illuminating contribution to our understanding of racial justice in the United States in the twenty-first. Many Americans have found it convenient to think that episodes like this come only from the Jim Crow–era Deep South. The Lynchings in Duluth is a powerful reminder of the broader American pattern.” James Fallows, The Atlantic “A chilling reconstruction of a 1920 racial tragedy. . . . Combining hour-by-hour, day-by-day narrative with expert scholarship based on interviews, suppressed documents and news reports, Fedo skillfully portrays Northern prejudice and violence.” Los Angeles Times “This tense book punches out a story of devastating fury. . . . As pointed as a Klansman’s cap, this book conveys the horror of mob action—and the disturbing truth that it knows no region.” Milwaukee Journal