History Minute (094): Charles Caldwell versus violent White mobs

Charles Caldwell was born to enslaved parents and as an adult in Mississippi was a skilled blacksmith, a job very much in demand, and this gave him high status. During the Reconstruction era, more than 400 Black artisans like him served in public office. Caldwell was the most accomplished politically of the 16 Black men who participated in Mississippi's Constitutional Convention in 1868. With his support, this Convention established an integrated public school system, legalized interracial marriages, and granted the vote to all adult men, regardless of property and race.

During this Convention’s debates. Caldwell testified that Black people had no protections from their property being seized by Whites. He persuaded them to include such protections in the Mississippi state constitution, but the constitution narrowly failed to pass in the later referendum that was reportedly plagued by fraud and violent intimidation of Black voters.

The Ku Klux Klan was active and violent, killing hundreds of Black people.

Caldwell was arrested for shooting a White man but was acquitted when the judge learned that the White man fired first and Caldwell shot in self-defense. This was noted as the first time a Black man was allowed to go free after killing a White man.

While opponents of Reconstruction had made it clear that they would use violence to have their way in the election of 1875, Caldwell took a stand to ensure the integrity of the Constitutional process, and tried, but failed, to calm the violence. Meanwhile, a mob of Whites robbed and vandalized Caldwell’s home while he was away, and killed several of his neighbors, telling his wife they would be back to kill Caldwell no matter how long it took.

After multiple White riots that killed dozens of Blacks, Governor Ames endeavored to disarm the paramilitary bands behind the violence. He also established a State Militia of two White companies and five Black companies. Vocal Whites complained that they were terrified of the Black companies, so Ames quickly disbanded them. Without the militias, violence and fraud prevailed in the election.

Christmas Day 1875, Caldwell met a friend named Cabell in a tavern at Cabell’s invitation — apparently a setup. As they raised their classes in a toast, at the clinking of the glasses, a marksman standing outside the window shot Caldwell in the back of his head. 

Read more!

• https://projects.kora.matrix.msu.edu/app/files/16/23/126863/1658930845.Charles-Caldwell_AANB.pdf  
• https://historianspeaks.org/f/charles-caldwell-assassination-of-a-state-senator-1875
• https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/caldwell-charles-c-1831-1875/
• https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/06/the-assassination-of-senator-charles.html
• https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/charles-caldwell/

History Minute (093): The Six Premises and Spirituality of the Ku Klux Klan

In prior posts, we have covered a variety of KKK views about what races are and where races come from, including what they believe to be God's intent. 

Regardless of which of these various threads of thought, as Gustaf Forsell explains in his article -- Blood, Cross and Flag: The Influence of Race on Ku Klux Klan Theology in the 1920s -- 

“...the general goal for the Ku Klux Klan was to maintain the Founding Fathers’ religious and racial ideals as imagined in order to counteract the alleged defilement of American society. To do so, the Klan formulated six premises."

He lists them as these:

1. The Republic was established by white men. 
2. It was established for white men. 
3. It should never fall into the hands of an ‘inferior’ race. 
4. Blacks must be kept outside of politics. 
5. Blacks ought to comprehend that Whites are the ones who rule in America. 
6. Purity of the white blood must be maintained.

He further states, 

"Two important Klan documents from each of these eras—Constitution and Laws of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (1922) and Klansman’s Manual (1924)—establish that one of the fundaments of the Klan was ‘to maintain forever the God-given supremacy of the white race’."

Spirituality, Forsell tells us, was (is) the most important aspect of Klan thought. It "contributed to strengthen Klansmen’s ambitions to mobilize a vanguard of white, native-born, Protestant Americans, to make them follow Christ as the Klan’s ‘Criterion of Character’ and thereby to enhance the resurgence of American nation in accordance with the Founding Fathers’ alleged religious and racial ideals. Such a religious nationalist and racial exegetical positioning was reflected in the burning cross, a defining symbol for the Klan ever since."

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

 

History Minute (092): The origins of Races in KKK thought -- part 3

A third theory of race in KKK thought -- the one most frequently articulated by Klansmen -- is that of all the world's races and their distinct nations, God chose superior British men of the Nordic race and guided them intimately in establishing the United States as racially pure people that is to be devoted to God. Americans of the Nordic race, this view holds, are the new "chosen people" and in America would regenerate the defiled Nordic race through racial purity and adherence to what they view as the "Word of God" in the Bible.

By the second half of the 19th century, in light of the outcome of the Civil War, this interpretation of American history pervaded American society. Many White Protestants articulated the racial myth that they are a people chosen by God to pursue the sacred mission to glorify the United States as the Promised Land for the people of the Nordic race. This meant they had (have) a divine mission to prevent miscegenation, and thereby preserve the "divine order". Every Klansman should act as a patriotic Christian.  

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (091): The origins of Races in KKK thought -- part 2

A second view of race in KKK thinking -- British Israelism -- dates to the early 19th century, and sees the so-called Anglo-Saxon race as the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The Bible indicates that Jacob's twelve sons were each to be the founders of tribes in Israel, but after 930 BCE, civil war divided Israel into two kingdoms -- Israel in the north with ten tribes, and Judah in the south with two tribes. Two hundred years later, Assyria invaded the northern kingdom and imprisoned its people, and what happened to them after that is a mystery of history. 

Contrary to what would commonly happen, promoters of the British-Israelist theory assert that the people of the Ten Tribes never assimilated, nor did they ever return to Israel, but instead migrated to lands now known as Turkey, Greece, southern regions of the former Soviet Union, and Western Europe, where they eventually ended up on the British Isles and became the ancestors of British people.

There are KKK members -- including the White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan -- and churches that hold to this Christian Identity theology of race: Aryans (Nordics) are the descendants of of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and Jews are their God-ordained arch-enemies.

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (090): The origins of Races in KKK thought -- part 1

After Noah and his family survive the flood in Genesis 9 of the Bible, his three sons -- Shem, Ham, and Japheth -- became the fathers of peoples who spread out over the earth. However, before they did so, Noah  lay drunk and naked in his tent. After Ham tells his brothers that he saw Noah drunk and naked, Noah finds out and curses Ham's son, Canaan, that he should be the lowest of slaves to Japheth and Shem.

From this reading, KKK thought leaders proclaim that Ham is the originator of the Black race, Shem of the Semitic race, and Japheth of the Aryan / Nordic race. This line of KKK thinking is that this story proves God predestined Black people to be slaves, or at least, subordinate to White people, and was part of legitimizing slavery in the United States. The "kreed" of the Klan states, “We avow the distinction between the races of mankind as same has been decreed by the Creator, and we shall ever be true in the faithful maintenance of white supremacy and will strenuously oppose any compromise thereof in any and all things.”

So much for one of three competing views of race in KKK literature. More to follow.

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (089): Christian Theology and Race in the Ku Klux Klan

Three theories of the origins of humankind are discussed in KKK literature:

• Monogenesis -- every race derives from Adam and Eve.
• Polygenesis -- only the White race descends from Adam and Eve.
• Evolutionary biology.

Evolutionary biology is dismissed out of hand as "emphatically the theory of infidels, skeptics, and atheists -- the pet philosophy of all the fools who say in their hearts, there is no God".

Monogenesis is a theory that relies on these hidden assumptions:

• Race is defined based on differences in body characteristics as well as inherent differences in fixed mental and moral traits.
• There is a natural preference to marry within one's own race and it is not merely a social habit. This instinct is God-given, natural law, wise, morally right, and unchangeable.
• Mixing races through intermarriage produces inferior outcomes: morally confused, physically weakened, or socially unstable offspring. This results in the overall lowering of the quality and dignity of humankind.

To be sure, there is no scientific basis for these assumptions. They are mere speculations of KKK thought leaders, expressing their preferred world view. All of their assumptions are presumed, not demonstrated to be true. 

Monogenesis, they say, would mean God made humans with built-in contradictions. On the one hand, if God created humanity as one, which would promote intermarriage leading to degradation of humankind, and simultaneously built in a preference to marry within one's own race, God would be contradicting themself. On the other hand, if humankind is one family coming from one set of parents in Adam and Eve, then God has destined humanity to failure through continual decline via intermarriage. Based upon these assumptions, they reject monogenesis as a theory because it would make God seem incompetent; it therefore cannot be true, they say, that everyone descended from Adam and Eve. 

KKK thought leaders rely then upon the theory of polygenesis -- that non-Whites are not descended from Adam and Eve but are instead inferior beings created by God before Adam and Eve. This is how, they say, after Cain killed Abel and was ostracized, he was able to meet other people in the land of Nod -- and the people of Nod, according to this theory, are an inferior race and are not part of the descendants of Adam.

In accord with the polygenetic theory, the KKK see the United States as having a God-given mission to regenerate the White race. The Klan claim to represent a holy crusade, and even to be "another form of God", and gave Paul's Letter to the Romans, Chapter 12, prominence as the Law of Life, summing up the sacred principles they seek to promote.

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (088): KKK says "You must join" if you are decent, unlike the Catholics

“You must either join the Klan and throw your influence on the side of decency, Christianity and law enforcement, or join the law breakers, negro preachers, Roman Catholics and Jews,” says the tract Principles and Purposes of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

 

As conveyed by Gustaf Forsell in his article Blood, Cross and Flag: The Influence of Race on Ku Klux Klan Theology in the 1920s, “Hiram Wesley Evans’ chief indictment against Catholicism was ‘that it is, fundamentally and irredeemably, in its leadership, in politics, in thought, and largely in membership, actually and actively alien, un-American and usually anti-American’.”

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (086): The KKK and the Founding Fathers

The Klan asserted that the Founding Fathers of the United States, as ordained by God, intended to establish America as a nation to manifest the ideal social order based upon Protestantism and White racial purity. 

The Klan, then, had a mission to uphold the Founding Fathers' alleged religious and social ideals for the sake of the nation.

Protestantism, according to them, would certainly lead to successful civilizational progress because it fulfilled all spiritual needs of humanity, whereas Catholicism had no ability do so.

As written in a pamphlet published in the early 1920s -- Ideals of the Ku Klux Klan -- "Distinction among the races is not accidental but designed...This distinction is not incidental, but is of the vastest import and indicates the wisdom of the divine mind".

"The Ku Klux Klan would redeem the white race whereby the American nation would rise Phoenix-like from current despair into a spiritual and holy vision that would include only white, native-born, Protestant Americans", says Gustaf Forsell in Blood, Cross and Flag: The Influence of Race on Ku Klux Klan Theology in the 1920s.

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (085): KKK views on separating by race

The thinking of the Ku Klux Klan is that each race was placed in its own geographic area, and should stay where it is, or go back to where it came from, to maintain each race's purity. To the extent that various races live in the United States, each racial group should know its place and not try to mix together, out of concern that race-mixing would pollute the race of white Protestant Americans. 

Klan members often disguise this vision by talking euphemistically about the need to solve social and political issues through a "solidified organization of militant American men".

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (084): KKK concept of the Nordic noble race

The Ku Klux Klan combined its concept of race with contemporary thought about eugenics -- good genes versus bad ones. Klansmen religious nationalist talk about the past is frequently in terms of inherited "Nordic-ness".  White Americans -- at least those of Nordic descent, as a certain percentage of Anglos are thought to be -- are part of a "noble race". In their view, God intentionally gave America to this noble race of superior white men for the purpose of their rebirth and expansion. God has destined them to save white civilization.

Members of this noble race of superior white men can be identified, in their thinking, by their "Nordic" traits: wavy brown or blond hair; light skin; eyes that are blue, grey, or biscuit; a nose that is symmetrical; a sturdy physique; and a skull that is relatively long, with a width of less than 80% of its length. Such people might come typically from eastern Germany, Poland, and Russia, as well as eastern Ukraine -- though not every person from these lands are members of the "noble race".

Members of this Nordic "noble race" allegedly created ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, both of which declined due to intermarriage with non-Nordic people. They say further, that when the Roman Empire fell, it was Nordic Goths who acquired the science, literature, and aesthetics of the Roman Empire and supposedly initiated the Renaissance. They assert that all the great minds of this era -- Dante, Michelangelo, da Vinci, etc. -- were racially Nordic. In our time, they claim that the vast majority of people of the British Isles belong to the Nordic race -- most especially Scotland, where the race is thought to be most pure.

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (083): KKK whiteness versus the demons of darkness

Per Gustaf Forsell in Blood, Cross and Flag: The Influence of Race on Ku Klux Klan Theology in the 1920s, two books expressed Klan self-perception as the saviors of Confederate widows and orphans, and all White men who lost wealth due to the freeing of enslaved people. Their authors, Thomas Dixon and William Joseph Simmons, depict the Reconstruction era as a period of darkness, where the White race is deprived to the point of near extinction -- pauperized, bleeding, prostrated, and defenseless -- while under 'Negro rule' the very demons of darkness, loosed from Hell's most dismal depths, brought blight and devastation to them. The books by Dixon and Simmons romanticize the Klan as heroes of holy whiteness on a Godly mission to overcome evil darkness.

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (082): KKK calls Catholicism a political and cultural threat

• “At the height of the Jim Crow and disfranchisement era, the Klan viciously maintained the sexual and social colour line, but treated Catholicism as a more immediate political and cultural threat, claiming that Catholics sought to take over the political and public school systems.” 

•  “[William Lloyd] Clarke argues [in anti-Catholic The Devil’s Prayer Book] that Catholicism by nature is incompatible with white Protestant social order and that the papacy embodies impurity. Furthermore, he claims that Catholicism seeks to damage traditional family norms and that Catholics seek to replace the President and the American Constitution with the Pope and Catholic tenets.”

Excerpts from:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (081): KKK support from Henry Ford and Hiram Wesley Evans

“In 1920, business magnate Henry Ford introduced the American public to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and published his own article series ‘The International Jew’ (1920–1922), which contributed to enhance anti-Semitism as ideological element for nationalist mobilization. [Grand Dragon Hiram Wesley] Evans on the other hand emphasized political anti-Catholicism and strived to make the Klan a political force in America.”

Excerpt from:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

History Minute (077): The Klan called all these people "threats to white American society"

"From originally being a brotherhood determined to reinstate slavery, the Klan identified myriad alleged threats to white American society after the end of the First World War in 1918. Catholics, Asians, the labour movement, Communists and to some extent Jews were all accused of threatening white American civilization."

Excerpt from:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2020.1809384

Missouri GOP moves to toss 'honorary' member of Ku Klux Klan from governor's race

The candidate, Darrell Leon McClanahan III, said a picture of him apparently giving a Nazi salute was from "a religious Christian Identity Cross lighting ceremony," not a cross burning...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/missouri-gop-moves-toss-honorary-member-ku-klux-klan-governors-race-rcna141237

We Are Living in the Klan’s America Part I (Bradley Onishi and Daniel Miller; Straight White American Jesus podcast)

Brad speaks with Dr. Kelly J. Baker, author of Gospel of the Klan. In the first segment, Brad outlines how TPUSA is akin to the 1920s Klan. 

Then he speaks with Dr. Baker, who outlines how the Klan was seen as a patriotic Christian organization that put God and country first. 

Sound familiar? 

In its time, the Klan was not considered a beyond the pale White supremacist group. It was part of mainstream society. 

Part of churches. 

Part of the American way of life. 

And, as they discuss, we are repeating what happened in the 1920s in the 2020s

Interview: 

https://www.straightwhiteamericanjesus.com/episodes/we-are-living-in-the-klans-america-part-i-bonus-content/

Opinion | From ‘Ku Kluxism’ to Trumpism - The New York Times

…The core ideology of the Klan lives on in a more palatable form, in suits and uniforms, among lawmakers and judges, pushing back against progress and forward in the form of gentrification…

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/opinion/ku-kluxism-trumpism.html

An Alabama newspaper editor wants to bring back lynching - The Washington Post

Two decades ago, the editor of the tiny Democrat-Reporter newspaper in Linden, Ala., was being talked about as a potential contender for the Pulitzer Prize. A congressional citation read on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1998 lauded “his truly American heroism and dedication to the truth” and called him “one of Alabama’s finest and most ethical journalists.” Glowing profiles in the New York Times, People magazine and the American Journalism Review highlighted his tenacious reporting and down-home Southern charm...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/19/time-ku-klux-klan-night-ride-again-an-alabama-newspaper-editor-wants-bring-back-lynching/

How A Rising Star Of White Nationalism Broke Free From The Movement LISTEN· 41:50 (Terry Gross, Fresh Air)

As the son of a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Derek Black was once the heir apparent of the white nationalist movement.

Growing up, he made speeches, hosted a radio show and started the website KidsStormfront — which acted as a companion to Stormfront, the white nationalist website his father, Don Black, created.

"The fundamental belief that drove my dad, drove my parents and my family, over decades, was that race was the defining feature of humanity ... and that people were only happy if they could live in a society that was only this one biologically defined racial group," Black says.

It was only after he began attending New College of Florida that Black began to question his own point of view. Previously, he had been home-schooled, but suddenly he was was exposed to people who didn't share his views, including a few Jewish students who became friends.

Black's new friends invited him over for Shabbat dinner week after week. Gradually, he began to rethink his views. After much soul-searching, a 22-year-old Black wrote an article, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2013, renouncing white nationalism.

Derek Black's "awakening" is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow's new book, Rising Out Of Hatred. Saslow also interviewed Black's father and other leaders in the white nationalist movement.
Interview:
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/24/651052970/how-a-rising-star-of-white-nationalism-broke-free-from-the-movement

William Joseph Simmons: A preacher used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux Klan - The Washington Post

It was approaching midnight on Oct. 16, 1915, when Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons and at least 15 other men climbed Stone Mountain in Georgia. They built an altar, set fire to a cross, took an oath of allegiance to the “Invisible Empire” and announced the revival of the Ku Klux Klan....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/08/the-preacher-who-used-christianity-to-revive-the-ku-klux-klan/