| 单词 | ku klux klan | |||
| 释义 | Ku Klux KlanKu Klux KlanK0113400 (ko͞o′ klŭks klăn′, kyo͞o′)Ku Klux Klan(ˈkuː ˈklʌks ˈklæn)Ku Klux Klan(ˈku ˈklʌks ˈklæn)n. Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux KlanKu Klux Klan(ko͞o' klŭks klăn), designation mainly given to two distinct secret societies that played a part in American history, although other less important groups have also used the name. The first Ku Klux Klan was an organization that thrived in the South during the ReconstructionReconstruction,1865–77, in U.S. history, the period of readjustment following the Civil War. At the end of the Civil War, the defeated South was a ruined land. The physical destruction wrought by the invading Union forces was enormous, and the old social and economic ..... Click the link for more information. period following the Civil WarCivil War, in U.S. history, conflict (1861–65) between the Northern states (the Union) and the Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy. ..... Click the link for more information. . The second was a nationwide organization that flourished after World War I. Subsequent groups calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan sprang up in much of the South after World War II and in response to civil-rights activity during the 1960s. The First Ku Klux KlanThe original Ku Klux Klan was organized by ex-Confederate elements to oppose the Reconstruction policies of the radical Republican Congress and to enforce a second class status upon former slaves. After the Civil War, when local government in the South was weak or nonexistent, there were fears of black outrages and even of an insurrection but also strong opposition to civil and economic rights for African Americans. Informal vigilante organizations or armed patrols were formed in almost all communities. These were linked together in societies, such as the Men of Justice, the Pale Faces, the Constitutional Union Guards, the White Brotherhood, and the Order of the White Rose. The Ku Klux Klan was the best known of these, and in time it absorbed many of the smaller organizations. It was organized at Pulaski, Tenn., in May, 1866. Its strange disguises, its silent parades, its midnight rides, its mysterious language and commands, were found to be most effective in playing upon fears and superstitions. The riders muffled their horses' feet and covered the horses with white robes. They themselves, dressed in flowing white sheets, their faces covered with white masks, and with skulls at their saddle horns, posed as spirits of the Confederate dead returned from the battlefields. Although the Klan was often able to achieve its aims by terror alone, whippings and lynchings were also widespread and vicious, not only against blacks but also against the so-called carpetbaggerscarpetbaggers, A general organization of the local Klans was effected in Apr., 1867, at Nashville, Tenn. Gen. N. B. ForrestForrest, Nathan Bedford, Control over local Dens was not as complete as this organization would seem to indicate, and reckless and even lawless local leaders sometimes committed acts that the leaders could not countenance. General Forrest, in Jan., 1869, seemingly under some apprehension as to the use of its power, ordered the disbandment of the Klan and resigned as Grand Wizard. Local organizations continued, some of them for many years. The Klan was particularly effective in systematically keeping black men away from the polls, so that the ex-Confederates gained political control in many states. Congress in 1870 and 1871 passed legislation to combat the Klan (see force billforce bill, The Second Ku Klux KlanThe second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William J. Simmons, an ex-minister and promoter of fraternal orders; its first meeting was held on Stone Mt., Ga. The new Klan had a wider program than its forerunner, for it added to "white supremacy" an intense nativism and anti-Catholicism (it was also anti-Semitic) closely related to that of the Know-Nothing movement of the middle 19th cent. Consequently its appeal was not sectional, and, aided after 1920 by the activities of professional promoters Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Y. Clarke, it spread rapidly throughout the North as well as the South. It furnished an outlet for the militant patriotism aroused by World War I, and it stressed fundamentalism in religion. Professing itself nonpolitical, the Klan nevertheless controlled politics in many communities and in 1922, 1924, and 1926 elected many state officials and a number of Congressmen. Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Oregon, and Maine were particularly under its influence. Its power in the Midwest was broken during the late 1920s when David C. Stephenson, a major Klan leader there, was convicted of second-degree murder, and evidence of corruption came out that led to the indictment of the governor of Indiana and the mayor of Indianapolis, both supporters of the Klan. The Klan frequently took extralegal measures, especially against those whom it considered its enemies. As was the case with the earlier Klan, some of these measures, whether authorized by the central organization or not, were extreme. At its peak in the mid-1920s its membership was estimated at 4 million to 5 million. Although the actual figures were probably much smaller, the Klan nevertheless declined with amazing rapidity to an estimated 30,000 by 1930. The Klan spirit, however, was a factor in breaking the Democratic hold on the South in 1928, when Alfred E. SmithSmith, Alfred Emanuel, The Klan after World War IIAfter World War II, Dr. Samuel Green of Georgia led a concerted attempt to revive the Klan, but it failed dismally as the organization splintered and as state after state specifically barred the order. Southern civil-rights activities during the 1960s gave the Klan a new impetus and led to revivals of scattered Klan organizations. The most notable of these were Mississippi's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Robert Shelton. The newly revived Klan groups were responsible for violent attacks against blacks and civil-rights workers in cities throughout the South, including Jacksonville and St. Augustine, Fla., Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala., and Meridian, Miss. In spite of its efforts, the new Klan was not strong, and by the end of the decade its power and membership had declined to practically nothing. Although a resurgence of support for the Klan was manifest in the surprising popularity in the early 1990s of David Duke of Louisiana, actual membership in Klan organizations is estimated to be in the low thousands. BibliographyA. W. Tourgée's Fool's Errand (1879) and T. Dixon's Clansman (1905), on which D. W. GriffithGriffith, D. W. Ku Klux Klana secret racist organization founded in the Southern United States in 1865 to promote and uphold ‘white’ supremacy. It has been (and is) the most virulent white racist organization in the US, and has international links. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK or Klan) is devoted to maintaining the alleged superiority of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP).This highly secretive underground organization has been responsible for lynching, killing, bombing and intimidating blacks and other opponents throughout the last 125 years. The KKK manifesto states: ‘Our main and fundamental objective is the maintenance of the supremacy of the white race… History and physiology teach us that we belong to a race which nature has endowed with an evident superiority over all other races…’ It is best known for its members’ wearing of white robes and hoods as they publicly terrorize their victims. However, the KKK engages in less violent, if covert, political activity, and while it is impossible to be accurate about the extent of its membership, at times estimated to be over one million, the influence of the Klan is still considerable.  Ku Klux KlanThe Ku Klux Klan, born in 1865, had nearly died out until Hollywood resurrected it in 1915. On December 24, 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee, General Nathan Bedford Forrest and a small band of former Confederate soldiers decided that they had to do something to restore the Democratic Party in the South after the Civil War and to help Dixie shake off the oppressive yoke imposed upon it by Radical Republican carpetbaggers who were taking advantage of the era of Reconstruction by lining their own pockets. And there was the matter of the Federal troops who backed up the Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress in 1865, in looking after the former slaves. In 1866 the bureau spent $17 million building four thousand schools, a hundred hospitals, and an undeclared number of homes for the blacks who had once toiled in the fields for their food and shelter as enslaved people. Now war-ravaged southern white families were poor and, in their view, were being treated like slaves. Something had to be done. The name Ku Klux Klan (KKK) comes from the Greek word for “circle,” kyklos, and the Scots-Gaelic clan. Klansmen dressed in white robes because they represented the ghosts of the brave Confederate dead; hoods protected the anonymity of individuals who were performing good deeds for their neighbors. Some researchers have said that the robes and hoods were an imitation of the Knights Templar and a symbol of humility. General Forrest was the first grand wizard, and he presided at a convention of the Klan held in Nashville in 1866. There was growing concern in the South that elevating the political and social status of the blacks would threaten white supremacy. Southerners especially feared the schools being constructed: the image of the former slaves as educated men and women was not an easy one for them to accept. The Klan set out to curb black education and advancement by fear tactics and violence, and those white southerners who attempted to interfere, especially if they were Republicans, were punished with the same brute force. The KKK became the strong-arm enforcers of the Democratic Party in the South. As the federal government withdrew its control of the former Confederate states, local white governments reestablished their power and put segregation laws in place. The blacks may have been freed, but they soon found that their freedom had definite boundaries that must be honored. General Forrest had protested the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed adult male suffrage, and he wished to do everything in his power to stop blacks from voting. Essentially an antebellum southern gentleman, Forrest declared that his main purpose in establishing the Klan was the protection of southern womanhood. However, as the Klan became more powerful and brutal, Forrest was appalled at the violence and hatred perpetrated by the group that he had organized. The KKK had become synonymous with torture, destruction of private property, and even murder. In 1869 Forrest disbanded the Ku Klux Klan. By then, however, the Klan had become a many-headed monster and had established itself in too many locations to be easily controlled, much less halted. Some Klansmen who cherished a gallant view of the South followed their general’s order to disband, but by 1870 the Klan had scattered into dozens of individual groups that paid no heed to General Forrest’s order to abandon violent night raids and the practice of organized fear and intimidation. In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant made the Klan an illegal terrorist group by signing the Ku Klux Act. The authorization and use of federal force against the Klan destroyed those who wore the hood and white robe in South Carolina and virtually eliminated the nightriders in the rest of the nation. The Klan faded into the shadows. White supremacy and strict segregation laws eventually became firmly established throughout the South, so there was no real need for the White Brotherhood, the Men of Justice, the Constitutional Union Guards, or the Knights of the White Camelia to sow death and destruction on a regular basis. The Ku Klux Klan practically disappeared until 1915 when a preacher named William J. Simmons was influenced by Thomas Dixon’s book The Clansman (1905) and D. W. Griffith’s film adaptation, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and re-formed the White Brotherhood. Ku Klux Klan Timeline1918: After World War I, the Klan turns its attention to immigrants, singling out Jews, Roman Catholics, socialists and communists, and other “foreigners.” 1920: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) defies the Klan by holding its annual convention in Atlanta, at that time a stronghold of the KKK. 1922: Hiram W. Evans becomes the imperial wizard of the KKK. Under his leadership the KKK grows rapidly and elects state officials in Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Oregon, and Maine. 1925: KKK membership reaches 4 million. They are nearly impervious to arrest, much less conviction, in small southern communities. 1944: The organization is disbanded again after a number of Klan leaders are arrested for corruption and murder and the nation weathers first a Great Depression and World War II. 1950s: The KKK is revived when the civil rights movement heads south. Robert Shelton organizes the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and nightriders once again terrorize those blacks who want to vote. Lynching is still used as a method of controlling the black population. September 15, 1963: A bomb explodes under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, injuring twenty-three and killing four girls—three fourteen-year-olds and one eleven-year-old. October 8, 1963: Robert Chambliss, a member of the KKK identified as the man who placed the Birmingham, church bomb, is found not guilty of murder, fined one hundred dollars, and sentenced to six months in jail for possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. Summer 1964: The KKK instigates the firebombing of thirty black homes, thirty-seven black churches, and the beatings of over eighty civil rights volunteers. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner are murdered by the KKK on June 12 in Mississippi. March 21, 1981: Henry Hays, son of the second-highest-ranked Klansman in Alabama, and James Knowles abduct nineteen-year-old Michael Donald and lynch him. Local police claim Donald’s death is the result of drug deal gone bad. June–December 1983: Knowles is found guilty and sentenced to life and Hays is found guilty and sentenced to death for the murder of Michael Donald. February 1987: Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) support Beulah Mae Donald, who launches a civil suit against the KKK for the lynching death of her son Michael. The all-white jury finds the KKK responsible and orders it to pay damages of $7 million, resulting in the Klan’s turning over all its assets, including the national headquarters in Tuscaloosa. June 6, 1997: Henry Hays is the first white man executed for a murder of an African American since 1913. May 17, 2000: The FBI announces that a splinter group of the KKK, the Cahaba Boys (Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton, and Frank Cherry), carried out the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and the murders of Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. May 2002: Seventy-one-year-old Frank Cherry of the Cahaba Boys is sentenced to life in prison. June 22, 2005: Forty-one years to the day that the civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared, former Klansman Ray Killen, eighty, is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years in prison for each killing. Today the name Ku Klux Klan has become public domain, and dozens of groups use all or part of the name in their titles. Ku Klux Klana secret racist terrorist organization in the USA. It was established in 1865 in Pulaski, Tenn., and was directed against the Negroes and their white sympathizers. Under pressure from progressive public opinion the American government was compelled to ban the organization in the early 1870’s. The Klan went underground but did not stop its activities. It has become active during periods of an upswing in the Negro liberation movement: after World War I (1914–18), in the years of the world economic crisis (1929–33), and during the first few years after World War II (1939–45). Terrorist acts by the Ku Klux Klan have been directed against progressive organizations in the USA. REFERENCESFoster, W. Negritianskii narod v istorii Ameriki Moscow, 1955. (Translated from English.)Aptheker, H. (ed.). A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. New York, 1962. Ku Klux KlanKu Klux Klan (KKK)Ku Klux KlanKu Klux KlanKu Klux KlanKu Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a white supremacist organization that was founded in 1866. Throughout its notorious history, factions of the secret fraternal organization have used acts of terrorism—including murder, Lynching, Arson, rape, and bombing—to oppose the granting of Civil Rights to African Americans. Deriving its membership from native-born, white Protestant U.S. citizens, the KKK has also been anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, and has opposed the immigration of all those it does not view as "racially pure." Other names for the group have been White Brotherhood, Heroes of America, Constitutional Union Guards, and Invisible Empire. Origins and Initial GrowthEx-Confederate soldiers established the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. They developed the first two words of the group's name from the Greek word kuklos, meaning "group or band," and took the third as a variant of the word clan. Starting as a largely recreational group, the Klan soon turned to intimidating newly freed African Americans. Riding at night, the Klan terrorized and sometimes murdered those it opposed. Members adopted a hooded white costume—a guise intended to represent the ghosts of the Confederate dead—to avoid identification and to frighten victims during nighttime raids. The Klan fed off the post-Civil War resentments of white southerners—resentment that centered on the Reconstruction programs imposed on the South by a Republican Congress. Under Reconstruction, the North sought to restructure southern society on the basis of racial equality. Under this new regime, leading southern whites were disfranchised, while inexperienced African Americans, carpetbaggers (northerners who had migrated to the South following the war), and scalawags (southerners who cooperated with the North) occupied major political offices. Shortly after the KKK's formation, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave trader and Confederate general, assumed control of the organization and turned it into a militaristic, hierarchical entity. In 1868, Forrest formally disbanded the group after he became appalled by its growing violence. However, the KKK continued to grow, and its atrocities worsened. Drawing the core of its membership from ex-Confederate soldiers, the KKK may have numbered several hundred thousand at its height during Reconstruction. In 1871, the federal government took a series of steps to counter the KKK and its violence. Congress organized a joint select committee made up of seven senators and 14 representatives to look into the Klan and its activities. It then passed the civil rights act of 1871, frequently referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made night-riding a crime and empowered the president to order the use of federal troops to put down conspirators by force. The law also provided criminal and civil penalties for people convicted of private conspiracies—such as those perpetrated by the KKK—intended to deny others their civil rights. Hugo L. Black and the KKKHugo L. Black is remembered as a distinguished U.S. Supreme Court justice, a progressive U.S. Senator, and an able trial attorney. Black also was a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the 1920s. Public disclosure of this fact came shortly after his appointment to the Supreme Court was confirmed by the Senate in 1937. The resulting public uproar would probably have doomed his Court appointment if the disclosure had come just a few weeks earlier. In 1923 Black was a trial attorney in Birmingham, Alabama, which at the time was controlled by members of the Klan. After rebuffing membership several times, he joined the KKK on September 23, 1923. Black later claimed to have left the group after several years, but no clear evidence documented his departure. In 1937 there were allegations he had signed an undated letter resigning from the Klan, which was to have been used to establish a false resignation date if public scandal occurred. In 1937 Black made a radio address to the nation, in which he admitted his Klan membership but claimed he had resigned and had not had any connection with the group for many years. He also stated he harbored no prejudice against anyone because of their race, religion, or ethnicity. During his Court career, Black was reluctant to discuss his KKK membership and offered various reasons for why he had joined. To some people he admitted it was a mistake, whereas to others he said the KKK was just another fraternal organization, like the Masons or Elks. It is clear, however, that as an ambitious politician, Black had sought Klan support for his political campaigns. In the 1920s KKK support had been critical to a Democratic politician in Alabama. Despite his later denial of holding any prejudices, Black was an active member of the KKK for several years. He participated in Klan events throughout Alabama, wearing the organization's characteristic white robes and hood, and initiated new Klan members into the Invisible Empire, reading the Klan oath, which pledged the members to "most zealously and valiantly shield and preserve by any and all justifiable means … white supremacy." Cross-referencesBlack, Hugo Lafayette. Also in 1871, President ulysses s. grant relocated troops from the Indian wars on the western plains to South Carolina, in order to quell Klan violence. In October and November of that year, the federal Circuit Court for the District of South Carolina held a series of trials of KKK members suspected of having engaged in criminal conspiracies, but the trials resulted in few convictions.The Klan declined in influence as the 1870s wore on. Arrests, combined with the return of southern whites to political dominance in the South, diminished its activity and influence. ResurgenceThe KKK experienced a resurgence after World War I, reaching a peak of 3 or 4 million members in the 1920s. David W. Griffith's 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman, served as the spark for this revival. The movie depicted the Klan as a heroic force defending the "Aryan birthright" of white southerners against African Americans and Radical Republicans seeking to build a Black Empire in the South. In particular, the movie showed a gallant Klan defending the honor of white women threatened by lecherous African American men. William J. Simmons renewed the KKK at a Stone Mountain, Georgia, ceremony in 1915. Later, Christian fundamentalist ministers aided recruitment as the Klan portrayed itself as the protector of traditional values during the Jazz Age. As its membership grew into the millions in the 1920s, the Klan exerted considerable political influence, helping to elect sympathetic candidates to state and national offices. The group was strong not only in southern states such as Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, but also in Oklahoma, California, Oregon, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Strongly opposed to non–Anglo-Saxon immigration, the Klan helped secure the passage of strict quotas on immigration. In addition to being racist, the group also espoused hatred of Jews, Catholics, socialists, and unions. By the end of the 1920s, a backlash against the KKK had developed. Reports of its violence turned public sentiment against the group, and its membership declined to about 40,000. At the same time, Louisiana, Michigan, and Oklahoma passed anti-mask laws intended to frustrate Klan activity. Most of these laws made it a misdemeanor to wear a mask that concealed the identity of the wearer, excluding masks worn for holiday costumes or other legitimate uses. South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia later passed similar laws. Anti-Civil Rights InvolvementThe KKK experienced another, less successful resurgence during the 1960s as African Americans won civil rights gains in the South. Opposed to the Civil Rights Movement and its attempt to end racial Segregation and discrimination, the Klan capitalized on the fears of whites, to grow to a membership of about 20,000. It portrayed the civil rights movement as a Communist, Jewish conspiracy, and it engaged in terrorist acts designed to frustrate and intimidate the movement's members. KKK adherents were responsible for acts such as the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four young African–American girls were killed and many others injured, and the 1964 murder of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, in Mississippi. The Klan was also responsible for many other beatings, murders, and bombings, including attacks on the Freedom Riders, who sought to integrate interstate buses. In many instances, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), then under the control of J. EDGAR HOOVER, had intelligence that would have led to the prevention of Klan violence or conviction of its perpetrators. However, the FBI did little to oppose the Klan during the height of the civil rights movement. By the 1990s, the Klan had shrunk to under ten thousand members and had splintered into several organizations, including the Imperial Klans of America, the Knights of the White Kamelia, and the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. These factions also sought alliances with a proliferating number of other white supremacist groups, including the Order and Aryan Nations. Like these groups, the KKK put new emphasis on whites as an "oppressed majority," victimized by Affirmative Action and other civil rights measures. The Klan's campaign of hatred has spurred opposition from many fronts, including Klanwatch, an organization started by lawyer and civil rights activist Morris Dees in 1980. The group is affiliated with Dees's Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million civil suit against the Alabama-based United Klans of America for the 1981 murder of a 19-year-old man. The suit drove that Klan organization into Bankruptcy. In 1998, Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center won a civil suit against the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who were accused of burning down the Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville, South Carolina. The center won an unprecedented $37.8 million in damages. The KKK suffered other setbacks. For example, in 1990 the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that state's Anti-Mask Act (Ga. Code Ann. § 16-11-38) by a vote of 6–1 (State v. Miller, 260 Ga. 669, 398 S.E. 2d 547). The case involved a Klan member who had been arrested for wearing full Klan regalia, including mask, in public and had claimed a First Amendment right to wear such clothing. The court ruled that the law, first passed in 1951, protected a State Interest in safeguarding the right of people to exercise their civil rights and to be free from violence and intimidation. It held that the law did not interfere with the defendant's Freedom of Speech. Further readingsAllen, Wayne R. 1991. "Klan, Cloth, and Constitution: Anti-Mask Laws and the First Amendment." Georgia Law Review 25 (spring). Chalmers, David Mark. 2003. Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Grossman, Mark. 1993. "Ku Klux Klan." Civil Rights Movement. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO. Johnson, Sandra E. 2002. Standing on Holy Ground: A Triumph Over Hate Crime in the Deep South. New York: St. Martin's Press. Phillips, John W. 2000. Sign of the Cross: The Prosecutor's True Story of a Landmark Trial Against the Klan. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press. Cross-referencesJim Crow Laws. Ku Klux Klan
Synonyms for Ku Klux Klan
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Ku Klux Klan - a secret society of white Southerners in the United States; was formed in the 19th century to resist the emancipation of slaves; used terrorist tactics to suppress Black people