The history of the KKK is rooted in hatred and racism, and it still is today. Learn all about these loathsome rednecks today.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Brian over there, and this is stuff you should know about vile racist jerks. Boo meis jerk. Yeah, so, Chuck. Do you remember when we did our two part episode on The Simpsons and one of the first things I said was like, I didn't want to record because all I wanted to do is sit around and research the Simpsons for the rest of my life. I felt basically the opposite way about researching the Clan, like I didn't want to record because I didn't want to research the clan anymore. Yeah, that wasn't a fun one. Well, here's my personal history here in regards to the clan is and and now I'll this will be peppered throughout a little bit because I grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Oh that sounds familiar, which is very uh uh. You know some of the early days of the second wave of the Clan, which you know, we'll get to all this garbage in this episode. But um, some Mountain was kind of one of the larger national seats and one of the leaders of the clan in Stone Mountain had kids, or it was either kids or grandkids that went. I guess I had to be grandkids that went to my elementary school. Then the Venables, and I was like, you know, I heard about the Venables, and I knew about their story and that his granddad was the grand Wizard, and like, it scared the crap out of me. I was scared. And then I got older and I was like, these are just dumb cosplaying rednecks. And then I got a little older still and I was like, well, that's not fair either, and I tried to start in my life look at things to the lens of minority people's even though you can't you know, as a as a white man, but you can do your best to walk a mile and someone choose and see what it might be like. And then I was like, I can't dismiss it as rednecks cosplaying, because they killed people and lynched people, and it was a fear of feared group two black people, and you know, all kinds of other minorities. As we'll see as they as they kind of progressed. But I felt it was dismissive to say they're just a bunch of dumb rednecks and don't give them that power. Uh So, you know, it's just interesting to sort of go through that evolution as a kid growing up in the South who, no doubt in my lineage and ancestry have horrible things that happened in the Deep South that I had to rectify as like, you know, just because I'm related to great great great grandparents who probably did awful things, doesn't mean that I'm that person or you know, no, not at all, not at all. You certainly aren't that person at all, I can attest, but you have to come to terms with it as someone who is the opposite of those people, for sure. And I think it is wise of you and very thoughtful of you to be like, no, I can't just you know, use I guess white privilege to dismiss the clan because it does kind of infringe on like the impacts that they've had on people of color in the United States. For sure. I think that's very insightful. At the same time, yes, the Clan are dumb, redneck cous players. They're just ones who will also get whipped up into into violence and carry out horrific acts. So they're dumb redneck cause players who you really have to keep an eye on and then break the backup as an organization by putting them in prison whenever they do something like that or start to Yeah, and as we see through their history, depending on when it was and which sort of iteration, because there's there's been at least three, uh, some were more violent and dangerous than others, and some were sort of like cosplaying rednecks. Um not to you know, of course that doesn't excuse it. It's just like a fun social club or anything like that. But um, it is fairly interesting. But I'm ready to be done with this as well, so let's let's do it. Yeah. Well, the thing that kind of strikes me about the clan the most is they the clan enjoys its largest popularity when America is feeling it's most racist. And usually America feels it's most racist at times when um, the rights of minorities or anybody who's not basically white Protestants are being advanced in society. It's not an accident, right, Um, but then the clan always always oversteps because America maybe racist in America might be I can't even say why, America is definitely based on white supremacism um or white supremacy and enforcing that the but the the taste for violence and the willingness to like kill people of color just for being people of color is not a mainstream thing fortunately, So the Clan has always been on the fringe and always will be on the fringes. It's just hopefully eventually society will learn it's less and like, you know, advancing the rights of people of color doesn't mean that there has to be some spasm of anti minority sentiment that inevitably leads to violence carried out by groups like the Clan. I really hope we get to that point, um, rather than just keep existing trapped in this cycle, you know, And I think we will. I think we are approaching that eventually. I don't know when it will be, but I I feel like with each of these cycles that we go through, there's less and less people who react horribly the next time or the next time or the next time, so that eventually that reaction will just kind of fizzle out. That's my hope. Yeah. Uh. And it's also interesting, Uh, I watched a documentary that wasn't really do it's sort of like a uh, several part news show from this British um might have been a BBC crew that about the modern clan just from a couple of years ago during like the ferguson Upper or Missouri. And he went not undercover because he was um, a British guy. He was interviewing him. He went he went in deep uh with the clan there for seven months and it's interesting to see the just the scattered ideology and that kind of is a bit of a hallmark of the clan period through their history. Is it seems like there's never been a very codified thing of this is who we are, because there's people in this documentary that are like, you know, three of the members were arrested for plotting to kill a black man, and the people they talked to and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, they're out man. We're not into that. We don't want to commit violence against black people. And we're not even bigoted. We're just a superior race who who are white separatists, but we don't want to you know, we might burn across for our ceremonies, but we're not doing bombings and lynchings. And we're not down with that at all. Uh, But you also get the feeling that behind closed doors, they're probably like, hey, I wish those guys would have been able to carry that murder out right, and that that seems to have been a transition that kind of went in the seventies. Started in the seventies, I believe, where there's like a a different public face to the clan where they tried different like okay, well that everybody hates the clan, what if we what if we explain it like this? What if we put it like this in society is like, no, that's nice. Try it's not gonna work, all right? Should we get into this in the origins? Yeah, so so, like you said, there's been three iterations of the clan, and this the first iteration of the clan started out is they think basically a social club made up of UM disgruntled Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee in eighteen sixties six. And this group of veterans got together at a time where um, there was a real trend, a craze basically for secret societies in the nineteenth century. UM, apparently in the the eighteen nineties up to the nineteen thirties is called the Golden Age of fraternalism, where something like a third of American men were members of a secret society or something based on like actual, real ancient secret societies like the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians. These are just kind of fake ones that gave you a reason to like leave the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays and go, like, you know, have whiskey down at the Moose Lodge, and groups like the Moose and the Elks and the Knights of Columbus Um, they all grew out of that. And in fact, Woodmen of the World Insurance UM, it's called that. It's kind of a weird name if you think about it, but Woodmen of the World UM was a secret society from the nineteenth century and they would sell their members insurance policies. And that's where that insurance came from. So this is kind of like the context of where the ku Klux klan of originally came from in the nineteenth century, this crazer trend for secret societies. Yeah, and by all accounts, it was started on Christmas Eve, like you said in Pulaski in eighteen sixty five by six men Calvin Jones, Richard Reid, Frank McCord, uh, John Kennedy, and John uh Kessler I think, and then I believe it or not. The final guy's name was Jim crow No James crow No, Yeah, in Pulaski, Tennessee. And um, they they were sort of based on this one of those secret groups called the Sons of Malta, but it seems like it was more inspired by because they weren't around by the time the Civil War ended. But they definitely sort of, um, kind of cribbed some stuff from from the Malton's as far as uh. And this is the whole thing with the secret societies, like outfits and costumes and rights and initiations and dumb names of leadership that you make up. It's all a big part of it. I have never understood the desire, and not just obviously the clan because UH clearly not interested in that, but any fraternal group like that, I just including fraternities in college. I just I never got it. Yeah. Um, that Sons of Malta you mentioned seemed to have been directly impactful. Um. I don't know if there were members who were who were from the Sons of Malta or how they heard of it. But the Sons of Malta and then another group called the Ku Close Adelphin and both of them seemed to have been party cruise or cruise from Marti Gras in New Orleans. And then this all Sons of Malta somehow made their way up to Boston, and that's where they really kind of got hold or got pop ler, I guess, but neither one of those were racist groups from what I could tell, UM, and from also what I could tell, the Ku Klux Klan wasn't necessarily intended to be a racist terrorist political organization, at least at first. But UM shortly after they formed in eighteen sixty five sixty six UM, the federal government passed the Reconstruction Acts UM, and reconstruction definitely deserves its own episode. Really want to do one or two on reconstruction at some point. But when they passed that act, that UM that kind of changed or gave focus to this what may have been like just kind of a UM A group of racist people, and turned them into a racist political terrorist organization. Now they had something to do besides meat at the moose lodge and that was to a forced white supremacy in the Deep South through acts of violence and intimidation and terror techniques. Um. And that was the first incarnation of the clan, and they spread really quick from Tennessee down to um Georgia and other neighboring states, thanks in part to personal visits for organizing by a guy named Nathan Bedford Forrest Uh, a Confederate general who is not a great guy. Yeah he was. Uh, there are a lot of complications with that guy. We'll we'll get to him in a sec. But um the name KKK or ku klux Klan um they think might have and there's no again. It's it's been such a sort of willy nilly organization as far as having a national, sort of codified presence that there's not even like a website that I saw that you can go to. It's all regional. Man, those are some terrible websites. They're pretty bad. Comics sands everywhere. Yeah, they're they're pretty bad. When this like a black background and like pink fonts and stuff that spewing racist bigotry and ideology and oh my god, it's pretty bad. I wanted to like throw my laptop out in the window at one point. UM. But they think it might have derived from the Greek word uh key close k y k l o s, which was basically denotes um what people thought were like the natural cycles of government or types of government that a civilization could have, which is pretty haughty if you think about it. For the k k k I mean of political philosophy that dates back to the third century PC. That's it's really something. But ku close is what it um k u k l os is what it was sort of translated as and and modern and well not the modern era, but back then and uh clan with a K, Like what I saw was it was originally ku klux one word and then clan with a c uh. And they think that may have come from maybe um Scottish clans. They play Scottish music sometimes at their rallies, but that's not affirmed either. But eventually I think that C was replaced with a K. It became kkk and these lodges started popping up um all over right after the Civil War because kind of like you said, once um of my adority gets a little bit of freedom. Uh, there's a bit of an uprising and clan membership. And that's what happened from the first iteration is like, there we have these enslaved people that are now free. We need to basically intimidate them into feeling like they still have no freedoms even though the loss as different. Right. So one of the first things they did was, Um, you know when when reconstruction came along and all of a sudden there were you know, black people in the South could hold political office or be judges or all this Like this was like flipping a switch as far as the South is concerned, um. And it's like I said, it laser focused like the a times of the Ku Klux Klan, and that they now took up an intimidation and terrorism campaign against black people in South, against Republicans in the South. The Republicans at the time were a much different party than they are today, and that they were into the idea of big government to support and enforce social justice. Um. And then years later around the turn of the last century, UM Williams Jenning Bryant was a candidate who was a Democrat who basically ran on the Republican platform a big government to enforce social justice. And then later on it was cemented by FDR is a big kind of transition or um um switch basically of ideologies between the parties. UM. But at the time, if you were a Republican, you were probably if you're in the South, you were probably for UM equal rights for black citizens, and you were a target of their intimidation campaigns as well, big time, because not only were they of battling these politicians, but UM voter intimidation was a very real thing, UH and voter suppression, and they would UM, they would murder people, UM like hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the South, especially Louisiana. UM reports ahead of the eighteen sixty eight election UM where that they murdered people for intimidation and literally to keep them from voting. Yeah, dude. There was one town called opal Loosis, UM, Louisiana, a town of twenty five thousand, so it was pretty big. UM. It was the county seat of the parish. You can't remember what parish. But in two weeks, two hundred people were murdered around the eighteen sixty eight election. Two hundred. That's fourteen people a day in this town of twenty five thousand people, UM, all because of terrorism. Carried out by the KKK. Yeah, and Ed helped us put this together. And Ed is keen to point out and I think we should too, is that a lot of what the Clan has always tried to do is is lead their groups by fear. And you still see that to day, not only through the Clan but other groups, like fear of you know, that the immigrants gonna take your job, or fear of this, fear of that, And back then it was fear of um these enslaved people that are now free rising up, you know, and and getting revenge, and that didn't happen, like even though slavery happened, Like once black Americans earned their freedom, they did not all of a sudden say, oh yeah, well payback time, we're angry, we're gonna come after you. They were happy to be freed and just to try and live as regular people with rights and society. And that wasn't the message that the Clan was putting out. They were like, you need to be afraid of them, even though there are no accounts of that happening. It was just black people trying to be regular, normal people, right. And the other problem with that kind of thing is is like when somebody does stuff like this, when they carry out a terror campaign, um, it makes people wonder like, geez, well, what did the other people do to deserve this? Well, the other people didn't do anything to deserve this. And that's that's what's called the false balance or balance fallacy, where there the idea that there's you know, there's problems on both sides, or there's good people on both sides. It's it's like no, sometimes one side is the problem basically of the problem. And I think that was really important of to point out and for us to point out too, that there was nothing that the the Clan was defending against except white supremacy and black black suppression, the suppression of rights among black people. That was it. It's as despicable as it sounds. There was nothing gallant or good about it. There was nothing honorable bull about it. And in fact, they were so violent and so criminal and so despicable that within three years of their founding, the Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who we Um mentioned earlier, issued his one and only basically executive orders Grand Wizard, saying, we have to disband and burn all of our stuff because this has gotten out of hand. That's how violent they had become and how despicable their acts had been. Yeah, Forrest Gump's namesake. Yeah, Um, he was, like I said, he was a pretty controversial remains a controversial dude. Uh. And that he was one of the generals of the Confederacy. And um, he was in charge when the Fort Pillow massacre happened, which was, uh, something we can get into in detail, maybe in a short stuff maybe, but um, essentially, you know, hundreds of largely black soldiers who had given up and surrendered were just massacred on this day at Fort Pillow. And Um, he was known as a brilliant general, the Wizard of the Saddle, which is what he was called because he was a cavalry guy. Uh. And that later became you know, they kind of gang that for the clan as far as the Grand Wizard, they kind of stole that from there. Um. But he uh, he seemed to be a vile man. But then later in life, like you said, um became disillusioned with the clan. Some people said it was just because he didn't think they were organized enough. Some people said it was because he thought they got too violent. But in Memphis late in life, he gave this big speech about um, you know, basically trying to hold up the black man and give them jobs and put them in positions of important positions in our government, and to make them doctors and lawyers. So I don't know if it was a change of heart. There's been a lot of controversy since since then about like should we honor this guy or you know, or talk about like his entire life up until that moment. No, I think it's it's like he he deserves to have like his like it all spread out on the table. But I feel like once you oversee like a massacre of of unarmed black soldiers came home, oversee like at in a white supremacist terrorist group, that's pretty tough to come back from. Even though I mean, it is definitely worth noting and I think fair to note that he did have at least something of a change of heart, at least publicly. I saw that he wrote to uh, I think the governor of Tennessee or somewhere and offered to help destroy um white vigilantes who were harassing UM black citizens because he thought it was uncalled for. So yeah, he was a a unusual person over the span of his life, but he still did some pretty horrible stuff of course. And this, you know, this pops up anytime there's um a debate over whether they should strip the name from this or that, you know, because there's plenty, plenty of stuff named for him. There's a high school in Jacksonville, Florida that was named Nathan F. Nathan B. Forest High School until two thousand fourteen. Yeah, two thousand fourteen, there was a high school named after the basically the founder of the Ku Klux Klan in Jacksonville, Florida. They should just name all the high schools in Florida, Tom Petty High School. It's he from Florida. He's from Gainesville. I didn't know that. Yeah, big, big time music scene down there back then. Okay, what happened to the music scene? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe there're still this one. Who else came out of Gainesville at that time? The Don Felder, the guitar player for the Eagles, was Tom Petty's guitar teacher. Uh. And then um like Leonard skinnerd hung out in Jacksonville, and I think the Almond Brothers they were making guys, but they hung out down there too. Okay, should we take a break? Sure, all right, let's take a break. I didn't think Tom Petty and the Almond brothers would make a appearance in the Clan episode, but they did. And we'll be back right after it to talk about the enforcement x all right. The enforcement x uh. This is basically when the federal government stepped up starting in eighteen seventy and said, you know what, we can't count on these states, especially in the South, and we should point out and ed Ed makes a good point of pointing out that like there was racism all over the country, always has been. There have been claim groups all over the country, but in the South, it was in the government, it was in the courts, it was in the school systems, like it was nowhere else in the country. So the federal government said, we can't count on the Southern states to do the right thing and to have real investigations and prosecute people and to protect black citizens. So we're gonna pass the Enforcement Acts that basically says, uh, we can go in there and we can kind of take care of business on our own if we have to. Yeah, and take care of business. They did. Um, General Grant Ulysses Grant, who was then President. Grant had an Attorney general named Amos Ackerman Disguss Awesome is awesome. It's one of the heroes of this story. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. He doesn't know. That's pretty lame Wikipedia. It's bad. He's a Georgia boy too. Yeah, yeah, he is so. UM. This guy ended up the attorney general under Grant, and he basically used everything at his disposal, from forming UM like basically the prototype of the FBI to UM to getting federal troops and getting martial law declared down in South Carolina to oversee the presidential election down there. UM like all sorts of different stuff. Everything he had he would throw at the clan and ultimately kind of broke the back of that first clan. That combined with um Bedford Forrest UM. I don't know why you have to say both of those names, but you just kind of do UM. That combined with his executive order disband like the clan, the first clan went away very very quickly. Actually, yeah, and it's hard to tell how big it was at its first peak. Uh. Some people say maybe a half million people, But like you said, it faded out pretty quickly. Um, and you know, we'll talk about when the clan fades out. You know, it doesn't really go anywhere as far as these people go. It's not like everyone all of a sudden was awesome and not racist. It just means the formal clan just lacks membership basically. I don't know. I think I think when when suddenly, like the four the federal government and like you know, maybe your senator or your representative, or you hear the President talking smack about this group that you know, you used to think was pretty cool, but now all of a sudden you realize that the rest of the country thinks you're a backward dummy for looking up to these clan members. It can kind of it can kind of make people self reflect a little bit, you know. So I wonder how many people do change their minds or have historically over over the course of this, not necessarily like, well, I'm not racist anymore, but I think that that's that's a possibility that somebody can reflect like that, or at the very least the next time they're not going to participate or agitate or join in. You know, I don't know, I saw, did you see that mem of the dude in I think Indiana, Illinois, I can't remember. He's I believe, in a wheelchair and he's had a Black Lives Matter rally. He's holding a sign that says, I'm sorry, I'm late. I had a lot to learn, and he apparently was. I don't know if he was racist, but he was certainly not in favor of Black Lives Matter, and I guess started reading about it and looking into it and doing his research and had a complete change of heart and showed up at one of their rallies and support of them, which was pretty cool. Have you seen that? I have not seen that. So it is. I mean, it can't happen. Like people, sentiments about this kind of stuff can change. And I feel like when people are like, oh, oh, I'm in favor of of keeping other human beings down for really no reason whatsoever except they don't look like me, I feel like that that's like a there's a lot of room for improvement that can happen. Um in in that in that sense, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm I'm sure individuals have changed like that. I wish it was on mass Um. There were other violent racist groups when the clan was not as popular during that period. Um, they just didn't have uh, they didn't have that sort of unified Um. Look, well so let's talk Yeah, let's talk about that. Look if you're if you're ready to want to Yeah, I mean you can thank you d W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon Jr. For that, Yeah, because prior to this, the clan um did not really look like what you would think. They they wore masks and hoods and um, you know, disguises, and they tried to disguise their voice. Apparently sometimes they would pretend that they were the ghosts of Confederate soldiers coming to terrorize black families. Um, fooling absolutely no one. But they they didn't wear necessarily what you would think of as like the clan today. And like you said, that strictly came from d. W. Griffith, and I guess Dixon Thomas Dixon do a lesser extent, but Griffith like really put it up there for everybody to see. With the Birth of a Nation. Yeah, Birth of a Nation was a movie based on play that was based on a book from Thomas Dixon Jr. He published The Klansmen with a C. Colon h historical romance of the Ku Klux Klan and where they were depicted as heroic, heroic sort of noble Christian warriors, and that became a play that had was a little bit more popular, and then d W. Griffith based the movie on that play. Um, and it was you know, this is where you saw crosses burning, and this is where you saw those white pointed hoods and horses with robes on them. Those poor poor horses. They have no idea what they're doing. It makes me feel the horses into this show. I wish they wouldn't, but you know what we know as sort of the look of the clan was fully put forth by d W. Griffith on screen. Um. I was kind of curious because I know he was a huge, huge name in Hollywood and a pioneer in Hollywood and was a founding partner of United Artists with Chaplain and Mary Pickford and I think Douglas Fairbanks maybe, um, but I was curious about both those guys, like were they super racist or was this just a movie to them? And uh, Dixon was supposedly really racist. Um, although he supposedly denounced bigotry in the wake of this sort of new clan that was created. I had a harder time finding out what d. W. Griffith was all about. He never apologized for anything, and he seems to have sort of escaped scrutiny, uh in some ways, so in his lifetime I think so, but I'm not really sure because it didn't have time to really do a deep dive into whether or not, like he believed the stuff or he was like, I'm gonna make a salacious movie that's going to be super controversial and get banned and get me a lot of attention. But the the you know, whether his heart was in it or not, the impact that his movie had was astounding. It was like, imagine if when Star Wars came out, all of a sudden, like, um, Jedi schools popped up in real life, and like they would form together and go out and run for office as like Jedies. Basically, sweet, we need a third party, right, yeah, the Jedi party. But imagine if those Jedis were like virulent racists who were um dedicated to suppressing the rights of minorities. What do you think about that? It's much less good. It's much less good, and um, that's yeah, that's kind of what happened. It's a good point. Yeah, but based on this movie. It was a popular movie that kicked off what's what's considered the second wave or second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan and gave us all of that, the symbolism, the grandiose um look and feel, and just kind of like gave it this almost legend that really didn't exist because the first claim was never like that. They were a bunch of hooded um, murderous thugs who would ride around on horseback at night and set people's houses on fire. They didn't look anything like that. Um. So yeah, you can lay you know, the resurgence and interests of the clan almost squarely at the feet of d W. Griffith, and then only because it wasn't as popular to a lesser extent, Tom Dixon's eat. Not Tom Dixon, the great great lighting designer, Tom Dixon, the racist author. Yes, Thomas Dixon Jr. I think right, uh. And in fact, the Birth of a Nation part of it was filmed in the neighborhood I lived in l a and lous felis right there where I remember where we shot the driving around stuff for the Toyota commercial. Yeah. Can I just say one of my favorite gonna say is, well, we were talking, Yes, you didn't look to the right, and you started to pull through a crosswalk and this lady with her husband and like three kids started like, I think, smack the hood of the priest that we were filming in and like yelled at you, and you like yelled back at her and shook your fists. Like you you got in there like a match. You did. You did in every way except physically shaking your fist. But you've got in like a shouting match with some pedestrian while we were filming a Toyota commercial. Beautiful. It wasn't quite a shouting match. It was very brief. She she way overreacted totally. I don't know. I'm not saying you were in the wrong, but it was just reminded me of everything I hated about living in l A. I think in that one moment was like, how bad this lady overreacted? Yeah, it was fun though. That was a great, great memory. Yeah, but Birth of a Nation was filmed like right down the street from there. Part of it. Um the my favorite movie theater in l A. The Vista was right on this corner, and also the movie theater that doubled as Detroit for True Romance for the Karate Kung Fu Theater at the beginning. Um, but yeah, like right out there in front of that, it's this big like convergence of five streets and apparently like some of the huge like marching scenes from Birth of a Nation, we're film right there anyway. Um, this second birth of the clan, a lot of it can be credited also to the actions of William J. Simmons, who was inspired from the movie in in nineteen fifteen went to the top of Stone Mountain here in Georgia and burned across and inspired by a movie. Yeah, well and ass and hate in the previous clan, like you know, it was all still there. Um. But James Venable, who I mentioned earlier, who I went to school with his grandkids, he was a kid on top of the mountain with William Simmons at the time, and he was up there and I think with his uncle and this was kind of looked at it sort of one of the first meetings of the newly reborn Ku Klux Klan and the nineteen fifteen to twenties. Yeah, so in addition to having like a much more unified look and um, I guess uh design ethos um. The this version of the clan, the second version of the clan, seemed more organized. At least they were organized enough to actually become a political force, not just in support of you know, um, say the Democrats at the time, or uh, in support of just whatever local judge was known to be a racist and you know they they would they would support him and intimidate voters against him. They would actually put forth candidates who were members of the clan and publicly members of the clan. Um probably most famously Robert Bird, a senator from uh West Virginia, was a clan member and like never backed away from the clan at at any point. There were other Southerners like from Georgia who were senators, I mean, who were also Southerners from Georgia who were from the clan, some representatives, lots and lots of local officials, and like the clan would actually they became something of a political force as well. Yeah, I mean the local thing is really um was a big deal because it could be and you know politics, we all get worked up over national politics as well. We should but if you really want to see a difference in your life day to day, local politics is where it's at, and you know, county commissions and school boards and boards of directors like that. The local level is really where the Clan could get in there on a more low key basis and do a lot of damage. Um. So that you know, they had official uniforms. Now, they had official ranks and titles, um. They were still sort of like, hey, we're just a a fraternal order, um, and that's kind of all we are. But at the same time they expanded there ethos and it wasn't just black people anymore. It was they were anti anti Semites, they were anti Catholic, they were against communists, they were against anything that wasn't white. And all of this was sort of under the banner of hey, what we really are, uh, because you know they would also like trying out pedophiles and stuff like that. What they said they really were were patriots and heroes and good Americans, which sounds very familiar these days. It really does. This, This this version of the clan very much um reflects the kind of supremacist bs that you see today in America, where it's it's UM very much spread across different groups that that are kind of held together by this thread that you know, white people are losing ground and they need to make it back up through whatever whatever we need to do. UM. That that really seems to reflect a bit. Also the fact that there are crazy nut jobs in Congress today who hold white supremacists values basically publicly really bears a striking resemblance to the second resurgence of the clan. Yeah, who I mean we should point out again at like white Christian, white Protestant Christian, right, that's important. Seemed to be the only thing that was that was okay, like anything else, like anti Catholic, anti Jew, anti everything except white Protestant Christian and so like the the This was the largest UH popularity of the widest popularity of the clan. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that they may have had around the mid nineteen twenties as many as four million members spread across the US. And it wasn't just in the South. I mean, there were plenty in industrial cities in the North. There are plenty on the West coast, plenty in the midwest. UH. Indiana UM was known as a stronghold of the clan, and I read that as many as half a million. UH had half a million members, which would have been a third of the population of white men in Indiana at the time in the nineteen twenties. So you might ask, like, why was everybody in the clan just in the same way that UM. The reconstruction gave I guess purpose to the clan. UM. Massive waves of immigration that had started in the late nineteenth century to the United States was making America generally racist, and they were easily whipped up by things like you're gonna lose your job to all these immigrants. Yeah, Like it was very much based on local grievance, grievances like whatever the local fear was, and a lot of times you're right, that was immigrants coming into the town and taking your jobs, or black men marrying white women, or whatever they felt the local thing was that would be most effective at recruiting. Kind of was what they kind of honed in on. UM. The mystique of it all was very I think intoxicating to a lot of these people, UH and still is in that documentary. It's amazing to see these people two years ago talking about clearly that's an important thing for them, like getting dressed up, meeting together in the woods and burning across, riding around at night on your night rides or midnight rides in your car, putting up flyers under the under the cloak of darkness. Um there, it's like cosplay, it really is. They're they're playing like they're in some important club. Um. It's interesting that the women, the women in this documentary, all of them said, well, you know, this isn't the kind of thing I probably would have been into, but it really improved my marriage when I got on board and uh and joined, and now my husband and I have something to talk about. We have commonalities. And you hear this and you're just like crawling out of your skin at at seeing this marriage which is clearly just you know, a male dominant marriage. And uh, you know, but if you, if you, if you join my clan, or if you like my football team, we'll finally have something common. Right, And I love football, so I don't want to throw a football into the but but but so yeah, so I mean it makes sense like if you don't have much of an identity, or you are looking for something to give your life purpose, like a group or a club, especially one that's you know, and some looked up to it by some people. I can really give your life a real shot in the arm, you know, I guess in good ways. I mean those there are so many great clubs where people that feel like they brother, big sister. Yeah. But I mean it is interesting that so much of it in this documentary ly seems to come from that mystique and that wanting to belong to a group. And I'm just a uh. This one guy, he was like, you know, I'm just a landscaper and I was just out partying and now now I have focused, now have something to do these brothers. So um. One of the one of the things you mentioned was the midnight rides and going on at midnight, and one of the one of the reasons they do that is because the clan has always thrived on anonymity. Like they they don't. I mean, that's that's not to say that they don't show their face in public. Some of them do, but plenty of them don't, and that there's strengthen that. Um. And one of the reasons that they would ride at night was because it afforded that much more anonymity even if they're they weren't particularly anonymous, and that you know, their neighbor who they were terrorizing probably recognized their voice, but the fact that they their face wasn't shown, there was plausible deniability to that. Well. Speaking of anonymous though, in this documentary, Anonymous outed this one group in Missouri. They got shut down and they put their all their information on the web. And it showed a little bit of the video with the guy and the guy fox mask and the uh, the the computerized voice or whatever saying that you know we're coming after you, We're going to put your names online. Uh, And it was it was fairly interesting doing doing God's work. That's actually yeah, for real, And that's actually like a traditional anti clan tactic that groups like the Double A c P or the Anti Defamation League UM used back during this time when the clan was at its peak popularity in the nwies. They would bribe people to get their hands on a membership list. They would send in people to infiltrate to get their hands on a membership list, and then they would publish it. And now all of a sudden, that anonymity and the strength that's afforded by the anonymity is gone, and you just broke up a clan chapter in your local area because nobody wants to be associated with anymore, and they probably have to make some sort of public statement about how they left, you know where they It's all just a misunderstanding, they were never part of it. Or you're in fear of losing your job maybe, but that really helped break up this this version of the clan in the nineteen twenties and then um, the federal government again. If you look at these these successive waves of the Ku Klux Klan, the federal government is the one who steps in to break the back of the clan. And they did it again basically using the same playbook from the enforcement Acts the I R S and the nineteen forties. Somehow the clan had gotten a tax exempt status and the I R S removed it and then sued him for back taxes equal to about ten million dollars in today's dollars um. And the clan broke up real quick after that. So exactly so, the federal government has used a bunch of tactics to basically get rid of the clan and again and then the clan went away, and that was that for a while. Alright, so should we take another break here? Yes? All right, what sucks man? Where this is gonna be a long episode? Hey, giving the clan a long episode. We'll take a break and maybe we'll just come back and sing protest songs and then all right, we'll be right back. If I had a hammer at hammer in the morning, I had hammer in the evening, hell over this ad hammer out Dange danger had him or out the clan, the clan boo outer space? What you get that reference? Is that from Hold On, Hold On Best? No? Uh? Uh? Which one was that one? Coen Brothers? Oh no, I was thinking of the one, um the Christopher guest movie. It was from the Cohen Brothers. The folk music movie that is Escaping mar right now, Isaac, Yeah, yeah. Adam Driver has a really funny part where they're recording in there and he's just doing background speaking like that, and uh, timber Lake is singing about remember our space and he goes outer space. What's the one where Harry Shear ends up joining like a folk group at the end? Oh yeah, uh that was Mighty Wind, Mighty Wind. Yeah, that was a good one, A good movie alright, And for sad we have to wind this up and talk about the third wave of the clan, which was the Civil Rights era. UM. You would think that the Civil Rights era clan would be the biggest iteration, but it actually wasn't. UM. They were one of the more dangerous eras because they were very famous for carrying out bombings UM all over the South, mainly including very sadly the bombing UH in Birmingham. I think there were a hundred and thirty eight bombings over like a seven year period. But the bombing in Birmingham where they bombed the church and Addie May Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson and Carol Denise McNair UM, four young black girls were killed. UH. And if you don't know this story, just go watch the Spike Lee documentary Four Little Girls, because it it really does a great job of kind of retelling what's an awful thing that was? Yeah, and that definitely was the most famous UM and most despicable. But they bombed a lot of other people, murderle lot of other people. There's UM a couple that lived not too far from UM where my place in Florida is UM named Harry and Harriet Moore, whose house was bombed by the clan on Christmas Eve. They chose Christmas Eve because they knew that there I think they're older children would come home. They wanted to kill as many of them as possible. So there there was a real reign of terror that the clan was carrying out during the Civil rights era, and Birmingham apparently was UM called Bombingham for a while because it was just UM so prone to being bombed like where the church was bombed, but also UM because it was where the clan was the strongest and most politically backed up, which to the civil rights UM leaders credit, they said, well then we're going to Birmingham. That's where we're gonna set up shop, which made UM is what brought Birmingham to basically the forefront of the Civil rights War. Yeah. You know, there were some other high profile events, the accession, they assassination with Medgar Evers, obviously the Mississippi burning case. If you saw that movie again, it did a really good job of the case of those three civil rights workers uh in nineteen sixty four who were killed. Uh. And you know there were still lynchings going on and and uh there were still people in seats of power, attorneys and people on juries and it was it was a a very uh it's very mixed up time in this country because rights were being achieved, uh while all this bloodshed was going on. And like you mentioned before, it's like they're trying to hold onto this thing that is, um, not what America is anymore. No, it's like t s America is a multicultural society and it's better off for it. Like let's just all get on the trolley, shall we. Yeah? So um. The FBI, it's worth mentioning, played a dual role. Apparently Jaeger Hoover knew all the way back in nineteen sixty five who carried out the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, but just sat on it because he wasn't like a really big fan of civil rights um or the civil rights movement. But at the same time, the FBI actually did have an integral role in breaking up local clan groups by using like co intel pro Um that program where they would basically infiltrate and start getting people to question the leaders or start accusing each other of disloyalty and just turn a group on each other, like what they did the Black Panthers they did to the KKK to far less frequently, but they did have an impact on helping to to break up the KKK in the Civil rights era as well. Yeah, and since the Civil Rights era kind of to today, UM, the clan has really lost a lot of its membership. UM. It has been and then again as not to say that any of the racism went away, it's been fractured sometimes into more dangerous groups. UM. Further all right, white white supremacist groups and neo Nazis. UM. There have been people in power. David Duke, you know, we have to mention him. He was an actual House member, UM from the state of Louisiana. UM. He was the Grand National Grand Wizard of the clan. And I think they started to kind of push away a little bit from the symbology of you know, these kind of crazy symbols and the hoods and the cross burnings. I mean that stuff still went on on local and state level, but I think nationally they kind of tamp that down a little bit and was like, I think would be better if we could just hold office right so lightly so, And that's basically there's a direct thread to today, this idea where they're just trying to soft sell UM racism and suppression of minority rights. UM, and it just repackaged it in other ways. But it's all the exact same thing. And it doesn't matter how you dress it up. You're trying to UM deny the rights of other human beings. So you say whatever you want to hold with your ideology, you know, yeah, yeah, totally, it's UM. There. There's never been a good handle on the numbers because it hasn't been a superorganized national thing. But UM they think it is down to like less than thirty thousand now. And when they do these specials and kind of go to these groups, the meetings you know in these towns are a number in the single digits. Sometimes it's not it's not like hundreds of guys getting together. Uh. And of course there are women in there now. Keep saying guys, but it's it's largely always been men because they call them klansmen. But these wives are getting involved as well so they can have something in common with their husbands. Yeah. The The good thing is is the numbers are small enough that UM basically local communities are strong enough to come out and chase clan rallies break them up UM, as was the case in Madison, Indiana on Labor Day in two thousand nineteen. That land said that they were going to have a cookout, and apparently about ten of them showed up and the entire Madison, Indiana community, or not the entire but a significant portion of them, showed up and basically chased the clan out of the public park um and broke up their rally in ten to twenty minutes. From what I read, that's that's usually par for the course. And then the clan is relegated to basically spewing hate online or like you said, leaving flyers on people's cars. So UM. Southern Poverty Law Center says that they they have been tracking their decline and they think they may have plateaued UM, which is not good because you like to just keep seeing them decline, but they they bottomed out. In other words, the problem is is there's no lack of other racist groups um that are that are equally problematic, if not more so. Yeah, there's one part in this new special where this kid they are these two guys dressed in their robes and putting up a flag in their front yard or whatever, a Confederate flag, and then one other um I guess clan flag, and this teenager in St. Louis comes across the street or whatever suburb they're in, and it's just like, hey, man, white power. I just want to I just want to see what you guys are all about. You know, I'm really interested in joining up. And and these guys talk to him for a minute, and it's just like, it's so troubling to see this dumb kid, you know, reaching out in all the wrong ways because he's been taught something, you know, And when you see that this family, he's in these people's homes and there's five six year old kids sitting around and and the wife's got a cigarette and she's taking a shot of bourbon and she got her Mountain dew in her hand and spewing hate, and these children are sitting there, and you just want to, like, you want to run in there and steal these kids. You know, you're not supposed to say that you just did, though, but I just did. It's awful. Yeah, it is pretty awful. Anytime you're talking about Hey, it's awful, and it should be. It should turn your stomach. I hope and it has learned stuff almost totally. That's how Yeah, that's how it. Yes, for sure, we already did one on hate before it, and we maybe we should do a redux on it. I don't know. I got one more quick thing that's kind of always always thought it was kind of fun at on a lighter note, at baseball games. I'm not sure the history. I should look that up, but a strikeout when you're keeping log is known as a K, and fans have bring K signs and they hang up with a picture. Is known for a lot of strikeouts. Yeah, one for each strikeout, one for each strikeout, and they hang it up in the in the stands in front of their seats, and they have always hung that third K upside down as per tradition, so it never says KKK, which I think is great. Yeah, it is great way to go baseball fans, sticking it to the way to go baseball fans. Well you got anything else? No, nothing else. If you want to know more about the KKK, go visit the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have some really good research on it, including sum were just like this is just just pathetic. Um, it's kind of reassuring in some ways. If you're bothered by this, maybe that'll help. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail, let me see here. I'm gonna call this Ezra the Podcaster. Hey guys, my name is Ezra. I'm fourteen years old. I've started a podcast on my own and it is inspired by your show. I'm doing a school project on my podcast and I would love it if you could respond with a couple of year tips for beginners. My podcast is called high School is a joke. Uh. I listen to you every day and it would mean a lot if you responded and even mentioned me in an episode. Thank you for always making me laugh to be more knowledgeable at the dinner table. You guys are really cool. I don't want to let you know that you've inspired me to start my own show. Sincerely. That's awesome, Ezra. Congratulations got the advice, Well, I'll give you the advice I found is the best of all time, and that is just talk about stuff that you find interesting. Because even if people aren't listening, um, you're still gonna enjoy doing it and that will make you keep it up. And if you keep it up, then other people start to notice and come around and next thing you know, you'll have an audience. That's great advice. Stay away from the clan. It's even better advice. Chuck everybody, whether you're a podcast or no, steer clear of the clan. Don't even talk to him. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Ezra did, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.