From the Washington Post, “'Klansville U.S.A: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan' by David Cunningham," reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, on 2 November 2012 -- A personal note may be in order here. In the summer of 1964, after three years of journalistic apprenticeship in Washington and New York, I returned to North Carolina, where I had spent four years of college, and joined the editorial staff of the Greensboro Daily News (now the Greensboro News-Record) as an editorial writer. It was a time of intense and often emotional activity on the civil rights front, and, as the city where the sit-in movement had begun three years earlier, Greensboro was right in the middle of it. The Daily News, like all the other major papers in the state’s medium-size cities, was moderate by inclination though rather more conservative on the subject of civil rights than I. Still, I wrote about civil rights and related matters throughout the decade I was there and was pretty much given a free hand.
By coincidence, my arrival in Greensboro coincided almost exactly with the quite startling revival of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. “By the summer of 1964,” David Cunningham writes in “Klansville, U.S.A.,” “the Carolina Klan established a demanding schedule of nightly rallies across the state, where they enlisted thousands of dues-paying members.” More than that, “at its mid-1960s peak the [Klan’s] presence in North Carolina eclipsed klan membership in all other southern states combined.” (Cunningham puts “klan” in lowercase because it was a diverse organization, or disorganization, with many offshoots, some of them mutually incompatible.) For obvious reasons Cunningham’s book is of great interest to me, albeit a great disappointment, about which more later.
That North Carolina should have been the state where the KKK thrived most during the mid-1960s — Cunningham reports that in mid-1966 it had 192 Klaverns and 52.2 percent of the total Klan membership in the 10 states of the South — was a mystery to many and a source of considerable dismay to the state’s leadership, which prided itself on its nonviolent response to the challenges posed by the civil rights movement. The state had been described by V.O. Key, in his immensely influential (if now somewhat dated) “Southern Politics in State and Nation” (1949), as “energetic and ambitious” with “a reputation for progressive outlook and action in many phases of life, especially industrial development, education, and race relations,” a judgment that had been confirmed by the election in 1960 of a notably capable and progressive governor, Terry Sanford.
But North Carolina has always been a much more complicated (and interesting) place than its publicists have claimed. If Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Charlotte generally shunned confrontation over civil rights and mostly avoided violence, their efforts at amelioration were largely token in nature and did not disturb the fundamental social, economic and political order. The university at Chapel Hill and its cohorts in Raleigh and Greensboro (there was as yet no multi-branched Consolidated University of North Carolina) were nationally known for their academic excellence and open-mindedness, but it was well into the 1980s before any of them became more than tokenly integrated.
15 year-old Dorothy Geraldine Counts was one of the first 3 African American students to attend a previously all white high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Angry white mobs yelled and taunted her on the way to school.
Most important, east of Raleigh all the way to the Atlantic coast was an area as entrenched in antediluvian racial customs and animosities as any place in the Deep South. “North Carolina’s eastern counties were the [United Klans of America’s] stronghold,” Cunningham writes. “Mark their klaverns on a map, [UKA leader] George Dorsett quipped, and it looked like the area had the measles. A sweeping congressional inquiry found that ninety-five of the UKA’s North Carolina units — nearly 60 percent of the state’s overall total — were located there, though the region housed only a third of the state’s residents.”
Greensboro and its surrounding area had plenty of Klan members, more than a few of whom made their feelings known to editors and writers at the Daily News — at least one of whom, to my recollection, found a fiery cross planted in his front lawn — but the east was the KKK’s most fertile ground.
Why, then, did the KKK thrive in ostensibly “liberal,” or at least “progressive,” North Carolina? In the specific case of Greensboro, Cunningham suggests “the combustible admixture of pride and anger stemming from the city’s status as ground zero for the sit-in movement, and the resulting political conservatism concealed by a veneer of civility.” Precisely why the city’s indisputable conservatism should be ascribed to the sit-in movement is a mystery — Greensboro was conservative long before that — but it is true that beneath the city’s “veneer” of moderation seethed animosities just waiting to find expression. (source; the Washington Post)
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Just finished watching "Klansville, USA." I all but knew it would just be a matter of waiting for the purposely deceptive attempt to link the Klan to the Republican Party, and sure enough, that occurred near the end, without any attempt by the filmmakers to support the allegation they knew was false as could be.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, the Klan was created to intimidate and kill Republicans, white and (especially) black.
Republicans exalt more than any other person Abe Lincoln, who permanently emancipated slaves over fierce opposition from Dems at that time and now.
Dem heroes begin with Andrew Jackson, the bloodiest and most vigorous slayer of native Americans in American history and a hater, slaver and torturers of blacks -- the owner of more unemancipated slaves than any other U.S. president.
Dems venerate Andrew Johnson, who sought to undercut Lincoln and who effectively sabotaged much of Reconstruction under the first Johnson administration.
Many Dems still idolize the second Johnson, LBJ, who blocked civil rights legislation the entire time he was Senate majority leader. He was an inveterate user of the N-word, as White House secret tapes proved.
And his sole mission toward blacks was to re-enslave them as wards of the state. He famously said, in elaboration on his Great Society and his total reversal on civil rights, that he'd have (N-word) voting Dem for 200 years.
The documentary made reference to Griffiths' iconic (in the universe of prejudice) silent flick "Birth of a Nation," which became by far the most effective recruiting tool the Klan ever had. And why was the film so successful? In no small measure because it was eagerly promoted by Dem idol Woodrow Wilson, the most vitriolic hater of blacks to ever occupy the White House. He eradicated all vestiges of Reconstruction reforms and made segregation official U.S. policy.
Wilson, of course, was a co-founder of progressivism, or hard-core liberalism. So was Margaret Sanger, another icon of Dems and queen of the eugenics movement -- the leftist pseudo-scientific doctrine of white superiority. Der fuhrer's favorite American, Sanger was architect of his "ethical defense" for genocide. She created Planned Parenthood in large part to expedite the process of ridding the American gene pool of all minority genetic material. She envisioned a final solution for blacks in the same way der fuhrer introduced his final solution for Jews.
Other Dem heroes include FDR, who sent shiploads of Jewish refugees to the Third Reich to be tortured and executed; JFK, who as senator voted against civil rights reforms and as president slow-walked civil rights and wiretapped Martin Luther King; and Harry Truman, who -- with Japan essentially defeated by the Allies -- decided to drop the first A-bombs not on military or other strategic targets but on hundreds of thousands of innocent women, children, oldsters and disabled victims BECAUSE THEY WERE ASIAN.
Harry Reid and Joe Biden have made overtly racist comments in recent years and haven't harmed their standing among Dems/leftists one hair.
Klansters have virtually all been Dems, from Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (appointed by segregationist FDR) to senators like Jim Eastland to Harry Truman to David Duke, whose most recent bit of activism was participating enthusiastically in the extreme leftist organization Occupy Wall Street, at OWS invitation. Anyone surprised by that information might also be unaware that OWS was very welcoming to the country's biggest not-see groups, who all marched in lockstep with OWS leaders. National Socialists and "liberal" socialists differ only in their trappings.
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Back to the subject of the documentary: The KK and K. The most infamous Klanster ever was probably Robert Byrd, who not only formed his own klavern (Klan chapter) but personally recruited hundreds of members for it. A high-ranking Klan officer, Byrd never refrained from using the N-word (check him on Youtube), even from the floor of the Senate. He opposed civil rights and voted against every black nominee to the Supreme Court, be they left or right.
ReplyDeleteHow have Dems responded? Why, he ruled the Senate's Dems, by their own vote, throughout the 1980s, a generation after the civil rights movement. During part of the decade he was the highest-ranking Democrat in the United States and third or fourth in line for the presidency.
Here's where we cinch it: Leftists, in the form of Dems and other forms, have always provided the heart and soul of extreme bigotry; classification and persecution of ethnic and racial groups is just another form of collectivism, which is synonymous with leftism.
So, despite the desperate efforts by Dems to deflect fault for racism, it's etched most deeply in their own tissue.
In 1972, the very face of racism, George Wallace, not only won the Dem presidential primary in my state of Michigan, but he outpolled all of his adversaries COMBINED. Hard-hitters like Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, George McGovern, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Gene McCarthy and others. Wallace garnered more Dem votes than all of them TOGETHER.
This was in Michigan, one of the most liberal states in the union -- a state ruled by the NEA and the UAW, led by far-left activist Walter Reuther and his Marxian brother, Victor. A state in which the Marxist Students for a Democratic Society was founded and where the Port Huron Statement, a 1960s Marxian manifesto, was adopted.
On the same day Wallace won the Dem primary in Maryland. In fact, until he was gunned down, he was well on his way to winning the Dem presidential nomination, claiming more first- and second-place finishes than any of his Dem opponents, in states southern and northern, such as Minnesota and/or Wisconsin.
The publicity for "Klansville, USA" notes that North Carolina, which witnessed a blooming of Klan membership in the 1960s, was the most "progressive" of southern states.
Of course. Where else would one expect the Klan and other racist movements to prosper most?
Incidentally, the last state leader of Michigan's Klan was Robert Miles, who resided in rural Livingston County. He maintained his shrinking organization until the 1980s. He was a Democrat.
Here's a guarantee: Ask any leftist to repudiate the racists I've chronicled, the Dem Party for continuing to lionize them and the racists who voted for them and even today stand firmly with them, and they will refuse. If you get in a verbal volley with them you'll find they won't just defend this nation's worst and bloodiest bigots but they will withhold condemnation by name of segregationists, slavers, lynchers, white supremacists, ethnic cleansers, genociders and their fellow travelers in all of modern world history. You cannot get them to renounce Arafat or Ahmadinejad, Goebbels or Goering, Honecker or Himmler, Hamas or Hezbollah, Castro or Ceaucescu, Stalin or Saddam, Mao or Mengele, Bowe Bergdahl or John Walker Lindh, James Earl Ray or Ernst Rohm.
I've tried for years. When threatened with exposure of their racism, leftists circle their Volks wagons and defend their white supremacy.