KKK Part 2

The original Ku Klux Klan was disbanded in 1869, but loosely formed groups of Klansmen continued to operate throughout much of the South. Following a government crackdown many of these groups withered away. That is, until 1915 when a wave of nativism, helped along by D.W. Griffith’s brilliant and deeply racist movie, Birth of a Nation, saw America’s first terrorist organization, reborne.

The KKK was officially reincarnated in 1915 by Atlanta businessman William J. Simmons. Simmons was a preacher and Freemason, who was a member of dozen of fraternal groups and two churches. The day before thanksgiving in 1915, Simmons and 15 members of the Knights of Mary Phagan who had been instrumental in the lynching of Leo Frank, lit a cross on Stone Mountain, Georgia. Simmons called for this new program of the Klan to be "100% Americanism.", using terminology that might sound familiar to today’s anti-immigration movements.

Unfortunately, The Birth of a Nation became a recruiting tool for the revived Klan which grew large in part as a result of the popularity DW Griffith’s movie work. Griffith had put his considerable technical talent into the service of a deeply racist book entitled “The Clansmen.”

According to the author of the Clansman, a black is "a thick-lipped, flat nosed, spindle-shanked Negro, exuding his nauseous animal odor."

As a result of following such a book, the underlying assumptions of Griffith’s movie were spectacularly racist, as was the movie itself. Despite this, it was great financial success. When adjusted for inflation, it was one of the top grossing movies of all time. In fact. Woodrow Wilson as sitting president endorsed the movie, writing: "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

His endorsement greatly helped Griffith to defend the movie against legal attack by the NAACP. And the endorsement certainly helped to legitimate the newest version of the Klan, which claimed some 5 million adherents by 1925. Nativist to the core, this new Klan not only opposed black equality but was also anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant.

Tune in for our Next Hidden History, when one of the most recent variations of the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans, loses everything they own to Beulah Mae Donald, the mother of one of their murder victims.