Ku-Klux-Klan

The Klan, a violently racist organization, was founded twice. The first Klan which was marked by a deep hatred of Blacks and unrestrained terror against them was founded in Tennessee in 1865. At the end of the American Civil War, a group of defeated Confederate soldiers formed their secret society with its weird rituals, its white sheets and hoods, which in two years time had grown into the “Invisible Empire of the South”. The Klan’s bloodstained record constitutes one of the ugliest chapters in the annals of American history. With the appearance of this organization the terror against Blacks assumed a particularly large scope. Tortures and lynching burnings were quite common methods of dealing with the newly emancipated Negroes of the South, who had fought for their freedom.

By 1871 the wave of lynching alarmed the nation. US Congress passed anti-Klan legislation, many were arrested and the Klan activity died down. In 1915 it was re-established under the leadership of a Colonel Simmons as a “high-class mystic, social and patriotic society devoted to the protection of White womanhood and the supremacy of White Protestants”. Simply speaking, that meant that Jews and Catholics were now the target, as well as Negroes and the rapidly growing Labour movement. Ku-Klux-Klan became one of the most powerful organizations in the USA, and began to fight all liberal influences and movements of the left.

In the 1920s the Klan grew to immense size, even organizing mass, hooded parades through Washington, but then declined again in the 1930s to revive in postwar years, when the Klan became active again. Murder, arson, kidnapping, bombing attempts were re-established as the standard methods of this extremist organization. One of the most notorious examples of its activities was the murder of three young civil rights fighters in Philadelphia in 1964. Its membership is estimated at about 50, 000 to 100,000 and the influence of the ‘United Klan’s of America” stretches over the States of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas and Virginia.

Task 5. Reread the first paragraph of the text and say how the Ku-Klux-Klan organized the terror against the Blacks.

Task 6. Look through the rest of the text and point out the sentences describing the changes of the Ku-Klux-Klan orientation.

Task7. On the basis of the text try to explain:

1) why the Ku-Klux-Klan was founded twice;

2) why the Ku-Klux-Klan is considered to be a permanent figure on the American political scene.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20