How Ku Klux Klan Terrorized America And Changed American Culture

Ethan Giangrande

Ms. Rourke

English 10A

12 May, 2023

How the Ku Klux Klan terrorized America and changed American culture

From the start, the Ku Klux Klan characterized the entire African-American community as a threat to America. The primary threat was the belief that blacks would take away jobs which gave the Klan reasons to force their version of justice upon them. This allowed the Klan to become themselves as vigilantes, who protected the land of America from minorities. The Klan then disguises the recruitment of the very minorities which they hunt, soon to be the next generation of Klansmen. In the current state of American culture, the lingering impacts left from KKK creates fear of a resurgence. Given the Klan’s influence as strong

The killing of blacks from the Klan, then allows the government to turn a blind eye to the atrocities the Klan creates, this collusion between the two then show them self again, “The most significant acts of violence, and those that had the greatest, longest-lasting impact on the African-American civil rights movement concerned the abduction and murders of three young activists[…] This was supported by the fact that hundreds of crimes against African-Americans, including murders, remained uninvestigated and unsolved. It was believed that the Ku Klux Klan had ordered the trio murdered” (Yusuf 4). As the murders occur, the remaining unsolved murders leave people to find ties between the Ku Klux Klan and the government. Established with a relationship, the government and Klan display their power onto the population, but the Klan has more so when they are able to silence the government by keeping murders unsolved. Simply, orders from the Klan can manipulate the government, and it is inferred that the government is powerless and manipulated by the goals of the Klan. This is not only alarming for the African community, but also for the surrounding officials around the government and those who work for them.

Unexpectedly, the occurrence in the newspaper seems like a nightmare when a man that is a part of the African community opens the newspaper: “when he spotted an ad seeking those with interest in the KKK, a white-supremacist hate group dating back to the end of the U.S. Civil War. Thinking that the ad had to be a joke--that members of a group with such an odious record of hate crimes would advertise in an ordinary newspaper--Stallworth drafted a note, signed his real name, and dispatched it to the P.O. box address given in the ad” (Blee 2). Along with the idea left over from the ad, it then suggests a more wide expansion to the Klan’s reign. In this expansion, the Klan shows their ties to the media and how they can manipulate companies for them to gain publicity, good or bad. With the Klan’s odious records of hate crimes, being able to post an ad in a public newspaper also displays the Klan’s ruthlessness and their way of showing communities that they are present and have the power to make their way into American life. Meaning, for the African-American community, the looming threat that they face is present in any type of media they consume. For this is not an ad to recruit, it is instead a signal at which the Klan uses to induce fear on those it targets. Along with the media the Klan uses to promote their mission in the hopes of bigotry.The other half of the Klan,