In this day and age, individuals are exposed to a limitless amount of social issues in the United States. White supremacy is “the belief that people with pale skin are better than people with darker skin” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online). It has become a dispute between whites and minorities for over one hundred years. Just recently, there has been talk across the nation as white supremacy has made it back into the spotlight of the evening news. In order to understand the impact white supremacy has caused on this nation, it is imperative to research deeper into this pressing topic. White Supremacy is a social issue because it has formed hate groups, caused deaths, and has left a negative image on America. White supremacy has helped spark the …show more content…
It was apparent to the Ku Klux Klan that the perfect way to create political dominance throughout the South was to intimidate and murder those who opposed white supremacy. An example of their influence is the Jim Crow Laws that “enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s” (Urofsky 1). Soon after the Klan’s reign of terrorism, congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act in eighteen seventy-one which allowed the President of the United States to “use military force to suppress the KKK” (History.com Staff 2) because of how fast their influence and violence was spreading across the country. The Klan had returned to the shadows but would later rise in power again during the Civil Rights Movement, which will be discussed later in the essay. Nowadays, the Ku Klux Klan still survives in small chapters but holds no real political power. There are estimated “between 5,000 and 8,000 Klan members, split among dozens of different - and often warring - organizations that use the Klan name” (splcenter.org). Another famous white supremacist hate group likes to call themselves the Hammerskin Nation. They were founded in the late nineteen eighties as the Confederate Hammerskins