Ku Klux Klan Comparrison Paper

Ku Klux Klan

I chose to do my comparison paper on the ku Klux klan. I find this topic particularly interesting because of the amount of history that it carries behind it. The Ku Klux Klan is a group that was very heavily involved before the reconstruction era but then reappeared a few months after the movie "birth of a nation" was released in 1930. The Ku Klux Klan is responsible for much of the history that is attributed to racism and race riots. Mainly in the south but not strictly limited to that area.

In our textbook "The African-American Odyssey" they talk about how the KKK stood for white supremacy and they deemed themselves as "100% Americans". They said that they represented the white anglo-saxon prodestant America. They were heavily for the prohibition of alcohol; they fought the theories of evolution, and claimed to uphold the "sanctity". The Klan opposed pretty much everyone who was not born "native Caucasian or white". They attracted a lot of business men, farmers, professional people, shopkeepers and the like. By 1925 the Klan had an estimated five million members and 40,000 of which marched in Washington, D.C that same year. The Klan was also a money making machine. They made millions of dollars off of membership fees, initiation fees, and Klan paraphernalia.

The Movie birth of a nation which originally brought the Klan back and to its height in the early 1930's was glorifying the KKK and bringing light to what the they were doing and their beliefs. D.W Griffith was the maker of the movie. The demonstrations and the heated debates over this highly controversial movie not only brought more fame to the movie itself but also shed some light on the NAACP which is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP protested this movie when the new sound version came out in 1930 and the cover was of a guy in a Klan outfit riding a horse. It outraged many people but to this day still hold notoriety for what was portrayed in the movie.

The klan was known for their acts of violence on others and on entire families. They would burn crosses, lynch people, burn down catholic churches, and murder people. All because they believes that anyone who was not "pure white" and "100% American" was trash and that they were threats. The Klan members did take a run at government in the south and some in the mid west and often scared the other men who were running by saying that if they didn't support or join the klan that they would not be elected. The klan had a very tight grip on a lot of people because not only were people afraid of them but they were tricked into believing that what the Klan members were doing was right and what was best for their families and the country as a whole.

The above historical events that I talked about came from our text book. And it gave accounts of the KKK and how the author perceived the events that happened. When I say perceive obviously she was not making up her own accounts of the stories, because there are documents, video, audio and written record of what happened in the days that the Klan was wide spread and growing through America. But when you think about written record it brings up a different aspect that some people don't think about. When people write things down and they are carried through history that way things can tend to get skewed or the way that the person writes it is from their point of view. It can be a firsthand account of what happened at a certain event but if you read a written record from a Klan member and then you read a written record of the same event but written by a civil rights activist, the accounts are going to differ in a lot of ways. And that is what I was thinking about while I was doing the research for this paper. I am looking at what my textbook is telling me and then I am looking at an academic article written not necessarily in the same time period but focusing on the KKK and the events surrounding it. I decided that I would focus on the comparison of how the history is documented and how the authors differ in their thinking.

The article that I chose to compare to my text book is an academic article that