Ku Klux Klan Members Quotes

I want you to stop being subhuman and become 'yourself'. 'Yourself,' I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but 'yourself.' I know, and you don't, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight.

Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, had murdered them.[8]

At day’s end, he was sitting on his front porch when a member of the Klan walked up the steps of a house nearby and plopped into a chair on the veranda. Once the mask was off, the boy could see that the now visible congregant of the Invisible Empire was his neighbor, Mrs. Crousore.

Akron, was home to almost 50,000 members, including the mayor.

In the South, through the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement, it was well known locally that many police officers were also members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mmm, a futile discussion. So my problem child is adequate?” “Well … he’s not a member of the Ku Klux Klan—” “I never thought he was! Zebbie isn’t that sort.” “—but he’s a wizard under a sheet!

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had ‘changed its bedsheets for a policeman’s uniform

seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend. In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. writes that his worst enemies are not the members of Citizens’ Councils or the Ku Klux Klan but “the white moderate” who claims to support the goals of the movement but deplores its methods of protest and deprecates its timetable for change: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”10

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members. The last one, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 and was eulogized by President Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton called him her “mentor.” The sordid history of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century is also married to the sordid history of the progressive movement during the same period. Progressives like Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood and a role model for Hillary Clinton—supported such causes as eugenics and social Darwinism. While abortion was not an issue in Sanger’s day, she backed forced sterilization for “unfit” people, notably minorities. Sanger’s Negro Project was specifically focused on reducing the black population.

No matter how much Steve and I preached about staying legal, most of these men never believed us, and some would grin or wink as we spoke. They thought the CKKKK was like the Klan group their grandfathers belonged to back in the 1920's or 30's, when members could get by with just about anything. That ignorance about the CKKKK extended to the masses of people as well. I received hundreds of phone calls from people wanting me to go out and assault this or that person, for wrongs perceived by the callers. One 65 year old White man called, and after informing me his wife of 67 had left him and moved in with a younger man, demanded that I get some men together and, as the caller put it, "Go Klux 'em," meaning to commit some violent act upon them. A Black girl from Angier called once, saying her boyfriend was dating a White girl, and asked me, "Whut you gone do bout it?" Another elderly White lady called and said that her Black maid was stealing her jewelry, as if that was a classic crime for which the CKKKK should render traditional and just "Klan punishment." It's really incredible.

Then a white man raised his hand and said that, in those days, he had been involved in the Ku Klux Klan. Immediately after that, a black man sitting next to him—but a stranger to him—raised his hand and said that he had been a member of the Black Panthers! The two of them laughed and hugged while the audience cheered. That is how Jesus deals with racial hatred and prejudice, by changing the heart and bringing reconciliation, not by violent confrontation.

Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction.

Traditionally, the burning of a cross, or a ‘cross-lighting ceremony,’ is considered a religious celebration. The burning of a religious symbol has never been seen by Klan members as a sign of desecration; it has always been considered an honorable representation of their Christian faith and beliefs. But they historically used it to strike terror in those who feared the force and wrath of the Klan. In other words, from its very beginning the Ku Klux Klan and it’s members were dedicated to the cause of domestic terrorism.

It was the large number of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight. And it was against this nocturnal organization that the newspapers of the North cried out most loudly, never realizing the tragic necessity that brought it into being. The North wanted every member of the Ku Klux hunted down and hanged, because they had dared take the punishment of crime into their own hands at a time when the ordinary processes of law and order had been overthrown by the invaders.

Fuller Warren had won the 1948 election by running as a moderate and promising to ease racial tension and violence in Florida. He’d denounced the Klansmen who paraded through Lake County on election night (with Sheriff Willis McCall following behind) as “hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks,” and Moore cautiously held out some hope for the new governor. Warren had admitted to being a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, but renouncing his past, like many a politician before and since, he’d stated that he had joined years before “as a favor to a friend” and that he “never wore a hood.” Moore did not adopt a wait-and-see approach with the new governor.

I recall a podcast featuring American white nationalist Jared Taylor. He claims that every important decision in their lives - where to live, whom to marry, where to send their children to school - 'liberals are not different from members of the Ku Klux Klan'. And, if you believe the Age article, in the only federal electorate held by the Greens, families are making their schooling decision as if they're in the UPF.

It is already apparent that the word 'Fascist' will be one of the hardest-worked words in the Presidential campaign. Henry Wallace called some people Fascists the other day in a speech and next day up jumped Harrison Spangler, the Republican, to remark that if there were any Fascists in this country you would find them in the New Deal's palace guard. It is getting so a Fascist is a man who votes the other way. Persons who vote your way, of course, continue to be 'right-minded people.' We are sorry to see this misuse of the word 'Fascist.' If we recall matters, a Fascist is a member of the Fascist party or a believer in Fascist ideals. These are: a nation founded on bloodlines, political expansion by surprise and war, murder or detention of unbelievers, transcendence of state over individual, obedience to one leader, contempt for parliamentary forms, plus some miscellaneous gymnastics for the young and a general feeling of elation. It seems to us that there are many New Deal Democrats who do not subscribe to such a program, also many aspiring Republicans. Other millions of Americans are nonsubscribers. It's too bad to emasculate the word 'Fascist' by using it on persons whose only offense is that they vote the wrong ticket. The word should be saved for use in cases where it applies, as it does to members of our Ku Klux Klan, for instance, whose beliefs and practices are identical with Fascism. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there is a certain quality in Fascism which is quite close to a certain quality in nationalism. Fascism is openly against people-in-general, in favor of people-in-particular. Nationalism, although in theory not dedicated to such an idea, actually works against people-in-general because of its preoccupation with people-in-particular. It reminds one of Fascism, also, in its determination to stabilize its own position by whatever haphazard means present themselves--by treaties, policies, balances, agreements, pacts, and the jockeying for position which is summed up in the term 'diplomacy.' This doesn't make an America Firster a Fascist. It simply makes him, in our opinion, a man who hasn't grown into his pants yet. The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet. Once you see it, you never forget it.

Ferguson, Missouri. When riots broke out over the August shooting death of Michael Brown, armed members of the Oath Keepers took to the city’s rooftops, appearing out of the smoke and shattered glass of ransacked buildings. Their supposed duty was to secure the local businesses from looting. In the first days of the protests, demonstrators had broken out windows of storefronts, set arson fires, and torched a beauty supply store. ABC News reported that a number of business owners embraced the Oath Keepers’ armed presence. Group members boarded up storefronts and kept buckets of water and fire extinguishers handy in case nearby arson attacks escalated. This was the vigilante group’s moment in the media sun. Still, rumors flew. Some protestors thought the armed men in camouflaged fatigues were members of the Ku Klux Klan. The St. Louis County police ordered the Oath Keepers to leave the rooftops of Ferguson, threatening them with arrest for acting as a security force without a license. This only added fuel to the right-wing group’s conspiracy that the government is not protecting its people. The volunteer security force packed up and left Ferguson, leaving people wondering exactly who these heavily armed mystery men were.

Fuller Warren had won the 1948 election by running as a moderate and promising to ease racial tension and violence in Florida. He’d denounced the Klansmen who paraded through Lake County on election night (with Sheriff Willis McCall following behind) as “hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks,” and Moore cautiously held out some hope for the new governor. Warren had admitted to being a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, but renouncing his past, like many a politician before and since, he’d stated that he had joined years before “as a favor to a friend” and that he “never wore a hood.

Amber was shocked and amazed, in this day and age, people could still think like this. The crowd around her was screaming insults and threats, but she wanted them to shut up so she could hear what crazy thoughts were issuing from the mouths of the Ku Klux Klan members standing on the Baton Rouge Capitol Building steps. She’d read on Yahoo this was the first Klan rally in the Louisiana state capital since 1969. Only hours ago they’d won a court hearing about freedom of speech and were now allowed to talk for two hours, before a crowd of mostly hostile people.

Horwitt describes an occasion in the spring of 1972 when Alinsky organized a student protest at Tulane University’s annual lecture week. A group of anti–Vietnam War protesters wanted to disrupt a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, and an advocate for President Nixon’s Vietnam policies. While the students planned to picket the speech and shout antiwar slogans, Alinsky told them that their approach was wrong because it might get them punished or expelled. Besides, it lacked creativity and imagination. Alinsky advised the students to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan—complete with robes and hoods—and whenever Bush said anything in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and holler and wave signs and banners saying: “The KKK Supports Bush.” This is what the students did, and it proved very successful, getting lots of media attention with no adverse repercussions for the protesters.17 On

When you see a nun, you do not inquire as to the health of her kids, nor do you invite 86-year-old men on a parachute jumping party, even though a few of such age, like Bernard MacFadden, may sometimes do such things. You might fairly expect a Chinaman in a small town to be in the laundry or restaurant business, and a Sicilian member of the Mafia to be mixed up in some kind of crime. Nor is it sensible to insist that skirts are not an indication of females, just because Scotsmen are found in skirts, too, although they are called "kilts". Nobody would be considered mad for presuming a member of the Ku Klux Klan to be a racist, nor a member of the Americans for Democratic Action to hate the Klan. By the same token, simply because we base our views on the weight of previous evidence, we are not crazy or 'hate-mongers' when we presume that any given, unknown Jew is a Zionist or a Communist. The probability that he is one of the two, and at least sympathetic to Communism, is overwhelming. About

Responsibility rests not only with a wicked leader but also in the hearts of Klan members in farm communities and cities, social clubs and churches, political offices and businesses. The men and women who pulled on their robes and hoods did so with knowledge and pride. They marched with purpose. They stood reverently as the burning crosses lit their pale faces. They knew that they were 100 percent Americans and others were not. They were not rubes. They were not manipulated. The Klan was not a fluke outburst to be dismissed as an unfortunate glitch in American history.

White native-born Protestants were the Klan. They believed themselves to be 100 percent Americans as they claimed the righteousness of their religion, the purity of their race, and the sanctity of their patriotism. All others were suspect, even dangerous, as chapter 2 contends. To Hoosier Klan members, the most dangerous enemies were Catholics and immigrants. Less important were African Americans and Jews, though they, too, were certainly not 100 percent Americans. The Klan hierarchy placed pure, white Americans at the top with lesser peoples below—people Klan members believed were sending the nation to hell in a handbasket, as chapter 3 describes.

It’s easy to abdicate responsibility by saying it’s a generational thing, but that isn’t an excuse, not when other people’s lives are involved. If so, where does it end? Slave masters were misunderstood do-gooders trying to give immigrants a purpose? Ku Klux Klan members didn’t know any different? Sometimes a line has to be drawn to say that it’s not about generations or a change in attitudes. It isn’t younger people versus older, men against women or straight versus gay. It’s about arseholes being arseholes.

Such violence in Kentucky did not end in the 1950s. In 1985, Robert and Martha Marshall bought a home in Sylvania, another suburb of Louisville that had remained exclusively white. Their house was firebombed on the night they moved in. A month later, a second arson attack destroyed the house, a few hours before a Ku Klux Klan meeting at which a speaker boasted that no African Americans would be permitted to live in Sylvania. The Marshall family then sued a county police officer who had been identified as a member of the Klan. The officer testified that about half of the forty Klan members known to him were also in the police department and that his superiors condoned officers’ Klan membership, as long as the information did not become public.

In several interviews, Byrd acknowledged that he had briefly 'briefly' been a member of the KKK, and blamed it on 'youthful indiscretion'. In fact, his involvement with the KKK was far more extensive than he ever admitted. In the early 1940s, Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Crab Orchard, West Virginia.

horror of the post-Reconstruction South, local police sometimes joined in on the terrorizing of black communities that left thousands of black Americans dead.9 In the South, through the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement, it was well known locally that many police officers were also members of the Ku Klux Klan. Through much of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, American police forces were one of the greatest threats to the safety of black Americans. Our police force was not created to serve black Americans; it was created to police black Americans and serve white Americans

*I’ve always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel’s, Kaufman’s, and Ferrara’s). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen really bears out this sinister interpretation. If you’re one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you’re more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You’re reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are they inhuman? Of course, they’re vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don’t have a sense of humor, they’re unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That’s a rather species-centric point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it’s a stretch to say it’s what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions—love, joy, happiness, amusement—come negative emotions—hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. For instance, with all the havoc that Donald Sutherland causes in the Kaufman version, including the murder of various Pod People, there never is a thought of punishment or vengeance on the Pod People’s part, even though he’s obviously proven himself to be a threat. They just want him to become one of them. Imagine in the fifties, when the Siegel film was made, that instead of some little town in Northern California (Santa Mira) that the aliens took root in, it was a horribly racist, segregated Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the heart of Mississippi. Within weeks the color lines would disappear. Blacks and whites would be working together (in genuine brotherhood) towards a common goal. And humanity would be represented by one of the racist Kluxers whose investigative gaze notices formerly like-minded white folks seemingly enter into a conspiracy with some members of the county’s black community. Now picture his hysterical reaction to it (“Those people are coming after me! They’re not human! You’re next! You’re next!”). *Solving the problems, both large and small, of your actors—lead actors especially—is the job of a film director.

Kokomo has seen with its own eyes the class of people who comprise the Klan,” the Fiery Cross wrote in its report of the biggest day in the history of the Ku Klux Klan. “It saw staunch American farmers with their wives; merchants of repute; bankers of integrity; honest and hard-working mechanics, and ministers and devout church members.

The fastest-growing faction, comprising 40 percent of all Klan members, came from just three states—Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois,

Mayor-elect Duvall promised to stuff city hall with members of the hooded order—from the parks department to the police rolls. In hundreds of small ways these loyalists could make things worse for those who were not white Protestants. In where you could live and where you could send your kids to school, in enforcement of the law, in deciding who would be hired and who would be shunned, in garbage pickup and parade permits and health department inspection of restaurants—all of this would have to go through Klan filters. On January 1, “city hall will be turned over to the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote the Indianapolis Times.

Among the 150 members of the General Assembly of 1925, only two were women and four were Catholics; there were no Black or Jewish representatives.

If they were not all Klansmen, surely they sympathized with the Klan. Their neighbors were Klan. Their kin were Klan. Their ministers were Klan. They attended churches where Klan values were preached and Klan members blessed. They shopped in stores with “TWK” stickers. They subscribed to the Fiery Cross. They voted the straight Klan ticket, following the guidance on clothespin-clipped ballots sent out by the man on trial for murder. They boycotted Catholics, berated Jews, shunned Blacks, feared immigrants.

They pored over a list of Klan-backed candidates for high office next year—governors in the West, the South, and the Midwest, senators from ten more states, and the presidential ticket. About seventy members of Congress were faithful to the hooded order,

Even though no liquor was found, the boy was hauled off to jail and charged with possessing intoxicating drink. Two months later, the teenage girl died—from “shock sustained on the day of the raid,” in the opinion of her doctor. The boy was tried in a courtroom overseen by the leader of the raid, Judge Tague, and prosecuted by another member of the invading party.

Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.

The Klan claimed fifteen United States senators under its control, and seventy-five members of the House of Representatives. Many had sworn allegiance in secret Klan initiation rituals, becoming “naturalized,” as it was called.

Nationwide, the Klan had expanded to nearly three million members, and most of the growth was in the Northern states, Steve’s domain—Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Out West, Colorado and Oregon were adding to their Klan rolls just as quickly.

The Oxwagon Guard was very similar to the Ku Klux Klan only it included the English in with Jews and Kaffirs as the corrupters of pure Afrikanerdom. The war had helped them to grow into a powerful secret society which would one day become the covert ruler of South Africa and the major influence in declaring it a republic. I heard all this from Snotnose whose father was a member.

The Ku Klux Klan, which admitted roughly 75,000 members—almost 15 percent of the native-born whites in the state—between 1921 and 1925, held anti-Catholic rallies with white robes and burning crosses throughout the state. One such rally in Manchester, Connecticut, attracted nearly ten thousand people, another in Branford nearly fifteen thousand.

The UDC’s monument campaigns were always supported by a narrative that Confederate veterans fought nobly and that defeat did not erase the justness of their cause. These monuments also reflected the beliefs held by the Jim Crow generation—whites who regarded African Americans as second-class citizens and whose leaders sought to preserve the racial status quo through both legal and extralegal means. And if there were any doubts about the larger meaning and purpose of Confederate monuments within the context of the Lost Cause, the Daughters made it clear in the minutes of their meetings, in the essays they wrote, in the speeches they gave, and in the actions they took. Moreover, the men they selected to give speeches at monument unveilings or on Confederate Memorial Day, as they reiterated the message of honor and sacrifice, also furthered the Lost Cause narrative about slavery, the war, and Confederate soldiers as valiant heroes who not only fought to defend the South against an invading North but who withstood Reconstruction and became stalwart defenders of white supremacy, sometimes as members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Black Muslim cooperation with Rockwell and the Ku Klux Klan went beyond ideology and rhetoric. There were practical implications. Like his white racist counterparts, Elijah Muhammad believed that interracial sexual relations were morally depraved and genetically destructive, for interracial sex "ruins and destroys a people." Rhetoric aside, he wanted to establish a truce between racists and his Southern mosques. To this end he sent Malcolm X to Atlanta to accompany Jeremiah X, the local Muslim minister of Atlanta, to a secret meeting with members of the Klan. Both sides discussed race relations. Malcolm described the integration movement as a Jewish conspiracy carried out by black stooges. The parties eventually hammered out the main issue: a nonaggression pact. If the Muslims did not aid the civil rights movement in the South, the mosques would be undisturbed.

To D. C. Stephenson, it wasn’t strange at all. Steve’s 1922 epiphany in Evansville—that he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress—was brilliant. And true.

The USA is the leading country for lodges, secret societies, the Ku-Klux-Klan, sects, and spiritualists. There are about 4,178,000 Free Masons in the entire world; 3.3 million of them live in the USA. All leading men of the government, from the president on down, belong to lodges, and all the lodges of course belong to and are led by the Jews. There are 49 major lodges in the USA with 16,518 branches. One cannot even count the sects and secret societies. We see that the Jew has understood how to break the USA down into individual particles and atoms, killing any kind of national life. The parties belong to him entirely, for over half of those in Congress — 213 members of the House — and more than half of the Senators, 48 in all — are Freemasons. Gangsters and criminals along with stock brokers are other manifestations of decay brought about by Jewry. The legal system in the USA is fragmented and disunified. The benefactors are the plutocrats, corrupt politicians and businessmen without consciences. Judges are elected to their offices for a limited time. It is clear than they are dependent on the corrupt parties. Major insurance swindles, corrupting juries, and making false statements under oath are the order of the day.

Colorado was not far behind. Rocky Mountain Klansmen kidnapped two prominent attorneys—one a Jew who defended bootleggers, the other a Catholic whose crime was his faith—then clubbed them nearly to death. They tried to force a Black family out of their home in Grand Junction, warning that if they did not leave, their lives would be in danger. But the violence did nothing to curb popularity. The Klan mayor of Denver, elected in 1923, named fellow members of the Invisible Empire as police chief and city attorney. One night alone, the Klan set seven crosses ablaze throughout Denver. They would soon be “the largest and most cohesive, most efficiently organized political force in the state of Colorado,” wrote the Denver Post.

In that spring of 1925, a posse of hooded Klansmen on horseback rode up to the house of Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a Baptist preacher who led the local chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Nebraska Klan had swelled to an all-time high, 45,000 members, with a women’s brigade and a Ku Klux Kiddies as well. The marauders waved torches and smashed windows at the house. They demanded that the preacher come out and face the mob. His pregnant wife, Louise, with three small children at her side, said her husband was not home. Had he been in the house, he might have faced a lynching. The Klansmen told her that “good Christian white people” would not tolerate a troublemaker stirring things up among “the good negroes.” They smashed every window in the house before galloping off into the night. A few days later, the preacher’s wife gave birth to a son—the boy who would become Malcolm X.