Skip Navigation. Expand search Search. General Hate Symbols. Ku Klux Klan Symbols. Additional Images:. More from this Section. Hate Symbol. SS Bolts. Recent studies that I've undertaken with fellow sociologists Rory McVeigh and Justin Farrell have demonstrated how counties in which the KKK was active during the s differ from those in which the Klan never gained a foothold in two important ways.
First, counties in which the Klan was present during the civil rights era continue to exhibit higher rates of violent crime. This difference endures even 40 years after the movement itself disappeared, and certainly isn't explained by the fact that former Klansmen themselves commit more crimes.
Instead, the Klan's impact operates more broadly, through the corrosive effect that organized vigilantism has on the overall community. By flouting law and order, a culture of vigilantism calls into question the legitimacy of established authorities and weakens bonds that normally serve to maintain respect and order among community members.
Once fractured, such bonds are difficult to repair, which explains why even today we see elevated rates of violent crime in former KKK strongholds. Second, past Klan presence also helps to explain the most significant shift in regional voting patterns since the South's pronounced move toward the Republican Party.
While support for Republican candidates has grown region-wide since the s, we find that such shifts have been significantly more pronounced in areas in which the KKK was active. The Klan helped to produce this effect by encouraging voters to move away from Democratic candidates who were increasingly supporting civil rights reforms, and also by pushing racial conflicts to the fore and more clearly aligning those issues with party platforms.
As a result, by the s, racially-conservative attitudes among southerners strongly correlates with Republican support, but only in areas where the KKK had been active.
Is the KKK a movement mostly in the rural South? While many of the Klan's most infamous acts of deadly violence -- including the Freedom Summer killings , the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, and the lynching of Michael Donald that led to the lawsuit that ultimately put the United Klans of America out of business for good -- occurred in the Deep South, during the s the KKK was truly a national movement, with urban centers like Detroit, Portland, Denver, and Indianapolis boasting tens of thousands of members and significant political influence.
Even in the s, when the KKK's public persona seemed synonymous with Mississippi and Alabama , more dues-paying Klan members resided in North Carolina than the rest of the South combined.
KKK leaders found the Tar Heel State fertile recruiting ground, despite -- or perhaps because of -- the state's progressive image, which enabled the Klan to claim that they were the only group that would defend white North Carolinians against rising civil rights pressures.
While this message resonated in rural areas across the state's eastern coastal plain, the KKK built a significant following in cities like Greensboro and Raleigh as well.
Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports active KKK groups in 41 states, though nearly all of those groups remain marginal with tiny memberships. So, while the KKK originated after the Civil War as a distinctly southern effort to preserve the antebellum racial order, its presence has extended well beyond that region throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Why do KKK members wear white hoods and burn crosses? Some of the most recognizable Klan symbols date back to the group's origins following the Civil War. The KKK's white hoods and robes evolved from early efforts to pose as ghosts or "spectral" figures, drawing on then-resonant symbols in folklore to play "pranks" against African-Americans and others.
Such tricks quickly took on more politically sinister overtones, as sheeted Klansmen would commonly terrorize their targets, using hoods and masks to disguise their identities when carrying out acts of violence under the cover of darkness.
Fiery crosses, perhaps the Klan's most resonant symbol, have a more surprising history. No documented cross burnings occurred during the first Klan wave in the 19th century.
However, D. Dixon, Jr. The symbol was quickly appropriated by opportunistic KKK leaders to help spur the group's subsequent "rebirth.
Through the s, Klan leaders regularly depicted the cross as embodying the KKK's Christian roots -- a means to spread the light of Jesus into the countryside. A bestselling 45rpm record put out by United Klans of America included the Carolina Klan's Bob Jones reciting how the fiery cross served as a "symbol of sacrifice and service, and a sign of the Christian Religion sanctified and made holy nearly 19 centuries ago, by the suffering and blood of 50 million martyrs who died in the most holy faith.
Has the KKK always functioned as a violent terrorist group? It took the influences of Hollywood and a mail-rder catalogue to establish the white supremist's garb of choice, Alison Kinney writes in her book Hood Object Lessons , excerpted for the New Republic.
While the white robes—which were later mythologized by Klan members as depictions of Confederate ghosts—did show up in early costumes, it was initially more common for members to don costumes that came from a wide variety of folk traditions and pageants. Kinney writes:. Klansmen wore gigantic animal horns, fake beards, coon-skin caps, or polka-dotted paper hats; they imitated French accents or barnyard animals; they played guitars to serenade victims.
Some Klansmen wore pointed hats suggestive of wizards, dunces, or Pierrots; some wore everyday winter hoods, pillowcases, or flour sacks on their heads. Many early Klansman also wore blackface, simultaneously scapegoating and mocking their victims. During the Reconstruction era , this variety was what helped keep early versions of the Klan a secret. While testimonies from witnesses referenced the outlandish costumes, people in power denied that these attacks were evidence of efforts by a coordinated hate group.
In , with the ushering in of the Jim Crow laws , the Klan's first iteration mostly disbanded , as their prejudices had been successfully codified into law— meaning there was no need for lynch mobs to hide their faces and identities.
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