Ku Klux Klan Sheet Music


Book Description

The Ku Klux Klan has received much attention for its violent activities, but comparatively little research has been done on its musical legacy. The printed music that still exists is spread throughout the nation in both public and private collections. This work presents, chronologically, the music associated with the Klan from 1867 to 2002, thus enabling readers to sense the arguments and attitudes of the Klan as they developed and changed over time. Because of the relative scarcity of Klan-related music, non-Klan music that mentions the word "Klan" is included. These obscure references help place the Klan in a larger social perspective and are very important in documenting anti-Klan musical reaction. In instances where a song merely mentions the Klan, usually in only one verse or in the chorus, then only that verse containing the Klan reference, plus appropriate context, is included. The catalogue also includes Klan-related music that does not have lyrics, such as marches, waltzes, two-steps, and several Klan-related pieces that were published in Europe. Sheet music was virtually nonexistent after the 1930s, so in order to capture a feeling of Klan-related music today, a limited discography of Klan-related recordings from 1920 to 2002 is also included.




One Hundred Percent American


Book Description

In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan burst into prominence as a self-styled defender of American values, a magnet for white Protestant community formation, and a would-be force in state and national politics. But the hooded bubble burst at mid-decade, and the social movement that had attracted several million members and additional millions of sympathizers collapsed into insignificance. Since the 1990s, intensive community-based historical studies have reinterpreted the 1920s Klan. Rather than the violent, racist extremists of popular lore and current observation, 1920s Klansmen appear in these works as more mainstream figures. Sharing a restrictive American identity with most native-born white Protestants after World War I, hooded knights pursued fraternal fellowship, community activism, local reforms, and paid close attention to public education, law enforcement (especially Prohibition), and moral/sexual orthodoxy. No recent general history of the 1920s Klan movement reflects these new perspectives on the Klan. One Hundred Percent American incorporates them while also highlighting the racial and religious intolerance, violent outbursts, and political ambition that aroused widespread opposition to the Invisible Empire. Balanced and comprehensive, One Hundred Percent American explains the Klan's appeal, its limitations, and the reasons for its rapid decline in a society confronting the reality of cultural and religious pluralism.




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.




The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland


Book Description

"Who is an American?" asked the Ku Klux Klan. It is a question that echoes as loudly today as it did in the early twentieth century. But who really joined the Klan? Were they "hillbillies, the Great Unteachables" as one journalist put it? It would be comforting to think so, but how then did they become one of the most powerful political forces in our nation's history? In The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, renowned historian James H. Madison details the creation and reign of the infamous organization. Through the prism of their operations in Indiana and the Midwest, Madison explores the Klan's roots in respectable white protestant society. Convinced that America was heading in the wrong direction because of undesirable "un-American" elements, Klan members did not see themselves as bigoted racist extremists but as good Christian patriots joining proudly together in a righteous moral crusade. The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland offers a detailed history of this powerful organization and examines how, through its use of intimidation, religious belief, and the ballot box, the ideals of Klan in the 1920s have on-going implications for America today.




Religion and the Ku Klux Klan


Book Description

As with other terrorist and extremist organizations, religion forms the basis of the Ku Klux Klan's dogmatic philosophy, providing justification for its beliefs and actions. The Klan represents a link to America's cultural past. While America has undergone tremendous social change, the secretive order has, since the end of the Civil War, kept alive the antiquated values--predicated on racism and religion--of white supremacism. Covering nearly a century of Klan ideology, this book examines the group's religious rhetoric in its literature and songs, from its heyday during the 1920s to 2014.




The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition


Book Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection An urgent examination into the revived Klan of the 1920s becomes “required reading” for our time (New York Times Book Review). Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon’s disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this “second Klan” spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant “hordes” landing on American shores. “Part cautionary tale, part expose” (Washington Post), The Second Coming of the KKK “illuminates the surprising scope of the movement” (The New Yorker); the Klan attracted four-to-six-million members through secret rituals, manufactured news stories, and mass “Klonvocations” prior to its collapse in 1926—but not before its potent ideology of intolerance became part and parcel of the American tradition. A “must-read” (Salon) for anyone looking to understand the current moment, The Second Coming of the KKK offers “chilling comparisons to the present day” (New York Review of Books).




Klan-Destine Relationships


Book Description

Driven by the need to understand those who despise him because of the color of his skin, Daryl Davis sets his sights on meeting Klan members to get to the heart of their hate. With rare courage, Davis exposes his own anger, along with his compassion, in his attempt to unearth the roots of prejudice and foster harmony between the races.




Women of the Klan


Book Description

Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and Christian supremacy.




The Informant


Book Description

An FBI’s informant’s role in the murder of a civil rights activist by the KKK is explored in this “suspenseful and vigorously reported” history (Baltimore Sun). In 1965, Detroit housewife Viola Liuzzo drove to Alabama to help organize Martin Luther King’s Voting Rights March from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. But after the march’s historic success, Liuzzo was shot to death by members of the Birmingham Ku Klux Klan. The case drew national attention and was solved almost instantly, because one of the Klansman present during the shooting was Gary Thomas Rowe, an undercover FBI informant. At the time, Rowe’s information and testimony were heralded as a triumph of law enforcement. But as Gary May reveals in this provocative book, Rowe’s history of collaboration with both the Klan and the FBI was far more complex. Based on previously unexamined FBI and Justice Department Records, The Informant demonstrates that in their ongoing efforts to protect Rowe’s cover, the FBI knowingly became an accessory to some of the most grotesque crimes of the Civil Rights era—including a vicious attack on the Freedom Riders and perhaps even the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. A tale of a renegade informant and a tragically dysfunctional intelligence system, The Informant offers a dramatic cautionary tale about what can happen when secret police power goes unchecked.




Klansville, U.S.A


Book Description

In 'Klansville, U.S.A.', David Cunningham tells the story of the astounding trajectory of the Klan during the 1960s by focusing on the pivotal and under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina. Why the KKK flourished in the Tar Heel state presents a puzzle and a window into the complex appeal of the Klan as a whole.