Ku-Klux

The Ku Klux Klan, like a turd that won't flush, keeps coming back. But how did it first start? The answer to that can be found in Elaine Frantz Parsons' highly detailed Ku-Klux, which pinpoints where and when the organization started.

"Wedding small-scale organization with an insistent discursive claim to regional coherence, the many small groups that comprised the first Ku-Klux Klan would together become the most widely proliferated and deadly domestic terrorist movement in the history of the United States. From 1866 through 1871, men calling themselves “Ku-Klux” killed hundreds of black southerners and their white supporters, sexually molested hundreds of black women and men, drove thousands of black families from their homes and thousands of black men and women from their employment, and appropriated land, crops, guns, livestock, and food from black southerners on a massive scale," Parsons writes. But it's beginnings were much more innocuous.

The Ku-Klux, as it was stylized back then, began in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866. It was started as a social club by six white men, and the initial design was not for violence. "The idea of the Ku-Klux Klan emerged from a set of discursive conventions more cultural than political. It was influenced by an array of cultural practices and popular figures of the day, including sensationalist fiction, the minstrel stage, phonetic writing, contemporary fashion, Sir Walter Scott, Mardi Gras, and bureaucratese." The name came from the Greek word for "circle," and a penchant for beginning words that started with C with a K. The costumes, which were at that time colorful, were inspired by minstrel shows and circuses, as they were more like clown outfits. Later, they would be disguises.

Parsons goes on to write about how the Ku-Klux became a political organization, devoted to harassing black people and white Republicans. She spends a few chapters on how Northern newspapers devoted several column inches to reports on them, and then spends her last two chapters on the activity of the Klan in Union County, South Carolina. She warns us that we :may find this chapter boring."

This is an academic tome, and is not easy reading, as there is much given over to names and dates. However, there are some nuggets of information here. One is a debunking of the myth that Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest had anything to do with founding the organization. But one of the founders, coincidentally, was named James Crowe.

The first period of Klan history lasted only about five years. There were congressional inquiries and government action, during the Grant administration, to stamp it out. It wouldn't reappear until the late 1910s, when it was glorified in D.W. Griffith's film Birth Of A Nation. It wasn't until then that they adopted their familiar white uniforms and burned crosses.

Though this book is dry, Parsons does not hide her distaste for the organization and what it stands for. "The Klan is solidly entrenched as part of our national narrative, where it has come to represent the most violent aspect of white racial oppression." Anyone with any interest in the origins of this blight in American history would do well to read it, at least the first few chapters.