User:JoyceRoyce/History project

The White Brotherhood

Ku Klux Klan members burning a cross

The White Brotherhood is another name for the Klu Klux Klan. This name was used because they thought of themselves as the superior race in America. It was also a good way to identify with each other. The White Brotherhood is a group of Caucasian people, usually men, who discriminated against Blacks, Jews, Immigrants, and anyone else who they saw unfit to live in America. It may seem that the Brotherhood has long been eradicated, but evidence shows that they still live on. There are still people out there that hate certain people and want to keep the flame of Confederacy and Americanism alive.

Origin

The White Brotherhood thought of themselves as a superior race, also known as the Aryan race, which is a descendant of people who spoke Indo-European. They were also non-Jewish. It may seem as though the KKK were one the most sinister groups in history, following the Nazis, but the group was actually developed just for fun. During this period, people became poor and penniless. They needed something to bring their cheerfulness back. '"Boys," one of them said, "Let's start something to break the monotony and cheer up our mothers and girls. Let's start a club of something."' It was started to prank people and to cheer Southern people up after the Civil War. The founders just wanted to be merry. They garbed, or dressed, themselves in costumes, like in a masquerade, because those were very popular. The dressed themselves in white, which would be the traditional clothing of the group for many years to come .

The Klansmen's' Motive

The Brothers would ride around at night. This had a strange effect on the people. People who saw them thought that they were ghosts of dead soldiers from the Civil War. This is where they got the idea to masquerade as dead people from. The Klansmenchose to play with their fears. They decided to use this as an instrument to put their society back to what it had been . One night rider visited a black man and asked for water. After he thanked him, he remarked that it had been "the best water I have had since I was killed at the battle of Shiloh ." People wouldn't believe what they heard. They would make up wild stories from their imagination. These would circulate. This led to the immense popularity of the Klan. They officially took from. Now all they needed was a leader. At first they wanted General Robert E. Lee, but they soon got someone crazier!

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Nathan B. Forrest

Forest was a self-made Mississippi plantation owner. He fought in the Civil War. They promoted him to lieutenant general after realizing his ability. After fighting in the war, he returned to Mississippi. In May,1866 he learned about the Klan and was interested in using them as a counterforce against the Union occupation. He asked to join them, swore some oaths and was soon elected Grand Wizard. He was “Grand Wizard” until he ordered the dissolution of the organization in 1869. Forrest died of diabetes in Memphis on October 29, 1877.

Klan History and Activities

The Ku Klux Klan has a history of vandalism and ferocious acts in the United States. They tried to set examples for certain people to let them know that they didn't belong and that they had to leave. It was their territory. Here is a list of accomplishments of the Klansmen:

• • 1868-The Ku Klux Klan was imported to South Carolina from Tennessee, where it had originated. During South Carolina’s election campaign this year the Klan murdered 8 blacks, two of them state congressmen.
  • 1964 May 2-In Mississippi Charles Moore (19) and Henry Dee (19) were beaten and killed by local members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their mutilated bodies were later found in the Mississippi River while federal authorities searched for civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. Charles Marcus Edwards and James Ford Seale were arrested for the crime, but neither was tried. In 2007 James Ford Seale (71) was arrested and charged with two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. In 2008 an appeals court ruled that the statue of limitations had expired overturning Seale’s conviction.
  • 1965 Mar 25-Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights worker from Detroit, was shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan on a road near Selma, Ala. The later trial of Collie Leroy Jenkins, one of 3 men charged in the killing, ended in a hung jury. Jenkins was also acquitted at a 2nd trial but was later convicted along with Eugene Thomas of civil rights violations in federal court and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
  • 1981 Mar 20-Michael Donald, a black teenager in Mobile, Alabama, was abducted, tortured and killed in what prosecutors charged was a Ku Klux Klan plot. Henry Hays murdered Michael Donald in a random abduction. Donald was beaten, cut, strangled and his body was strung up a tree. Hays was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed Jun 6, 1997. In 1987 A wrongful death suit filed by Donald’s mother gave a $7 million verdict against the United Klans of America, led by Robert Shelton.
  • 1995 Jun 20-The Mount Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, S.C., was destroyed by fire. On the next day the Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville was burned. In 1996 two KKK members, Gary Cox and Timothy Welch, were charged in federal court for setting the fires. They pleaded guilty on 8/14/96. Former Klansmen Hubert Rowell and Arthur Haley pleaded guilty to 4 counts of conspiracy in the fires in Dec 1996. In 1998 the Christian Knights of KKK and Horace King, Grand Dragon of South Carolina, were ordered to pay $37.8 million in damages for the burning of the Macedonia Baptist church
  • 1999 Oct 23-A Ku Klux Klan rally was allowed to proceed in NYC with no masks as thousands of counter-demonstrators jeered them. 16 Klansmen and 2 Klan women appeared at Foley Square along with some 6,000 protestors and 2,000 tourists.
  • 2000 May 17-Two former Ku Klux Klansmen were arrested on murder charges in the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four black girls. Thomas Blanton Junior was convicted and sentenced to life in prison May 1, 2001. Bobby Frank Cherry was indicted in 2000 and later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
  • 2007 Jun 14-In Mississippi Klansman James Ford Seale (71) was convicted on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. Seale faced life in prison with sentencing on Aug 24.
  • 2008 Nov 9-In Louisiana Raymond "Chuck" Foster, 44, shot and killed an Oklahoma woman, who was lured over the Internet to take part in a Ku Klux Klan initiation, after a fight broke out when she asked to be taken back to town. The group tried to cover it up by dumping her body on a rural roadside and setting her belongings aflame. Foster, the local Klan leader was soon in jail on a second-degree murder charge, and seven others were charged with trying to help conceal the crime.