In December 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee, six men who were previously officers in the Civil War decided to start a club, mainly for amusement. They chose to take on the name “kuklos,” which is the Greek word for circle. For fun, they galloped around town making a spectacle of themselves. They claimed not to have had a drink of water since the battle of Shiloh and also to live in hell. This frightened the Negroes. What began purely as a harmless, undisruptive group ended up being a violent hate assembly.

The Klan was rapidly spreading around the country. All over the South, people formed their own “Klans” with only a loose allegiance to the “mother-Klan in Pulaski.” These six founders however gave them no restraints or discipline because they did not even me

Ryland Randolph was the official spokesman of the Alabama sector of the KKK as well as the editor of the Independent Monitor and Exalted Cyclops of the Tuscaloosa Klan. He wrote that the night riders had come from “the galling despotism that broods like a nightmare over these southern states.” Disruption of their usual lives and the presence of troops as well as “a persistent prostitution of all government, all resources, and all powers, to degrade the white man by the establishment of Negro supremacy” was what this “despotism” entailed. Randolph, as well as his fellow Klansmen, felt that not only were black people now free to do what they wanted, but were actually held up higher than the common white man. The poor white dirt farmers felt that these black men were going to try to take their jobs and interfere in their everyday, normal lives. (16-17)

In Alabama, however, the Klan was huge. It was not really prominent in the Black Belt counties where it was primarily blacks who did not vote, but in the middle of the state. From Tuscaloosa to Birmingham to Anniston to Montgomery and every where in between was the circle they usually stayed within. These boundaries hold in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his first speech as well as where the bus boycott originated. This was also where the governor’s mansion was located where George Wallace and John Patterson didn’t exactly sell the idea of desegregation. The battleground for the freedom rides, beatings, bus burnings, and bombings was also in this band. Alvin Horn had a Talladega home and in Tuscaloosa was Robert Shelton in addition to the University of Alabama.

We are promoters of White Christian civilization. We believe that the concepts of private property, free enterprise, representative government, parental rights, freedom of speech, right to trial by jury, right to address the government for a redress of grievances, etc. are essential ingredients for a civilized and moral society. These are concepts born out of the genius of white men and women. We give credit to all men and women who helped instill these cherished ideas into the hearts of our founding ancestors. These cherished and essential ingredients to a civilized and moral society are born out of the white race. These concepts are a direct product of the White race. It is white culture. When we give honor to these ideals we give honor to our ancestors and our White Christian culture.

Today, instead of viewing themselves as a fraternal organization as before with Simmons, they regard themselves as a political party. They want to reform the nation to what it was when our founding fathers made it. They plan on doing this by winning complete political power and sitting on every political seat. This will be done in a small “window of opportunity.” I think this will be very difficult to achieve considering they have only 5,500 members and within that group, they have many different groups who have broken off from the original Ku Klux Klan.

Bobby Shelton viewed this as a great opportunity. This was the chance to gain the active role and the increasing membership that had been gone for so long. Georgia and Alabama Klansmen everywhere set aside their work to fight this problem of desegregation. They went to bus stations in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Gadsden and the Universities of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia with guns and pamphlets. The judges rightfully charged them with conspiring the bus riots and they were arrested. When the “freedom rides” in Alabama erupted into violence thanks to the Klan, Shelton and Horn were threatened not to cause anymore trouble. Frank Johnson from Montgomery announced, “If there are any more such incidents as this again, I am going to put some Klansmen, some city officials, some city policemen and some Negro preachers in the Federal penitentiary.”

President Ulysses S. Grant began to get frustrated with the Ku Klux Kla

Some topics in this essay:
Congressman Upshaw, Civil War, Imperial Wizard, White Christian, Birth Nation, Grand Goblin, Jefferson County, Tuscaloosa Klan, Klux Klan, Klansman Jacksonville, ku klux, ku klux klan, black people, klux klan, grand dragon, civil war, white people, robert shelton, people black, alvin horn, civil rights, klux klan ku, klan ku klux, civil rights movement, freedom speech trial,