Is August KKK Revival Month?

As we approach August, it’s a good time to recall some of the Klan’s most momentous events that occurred in August.  

The federal government used troops to crush a KKK rebellion in the 1870s. The Klan re-emerged after several books and a movie romanticized the terror group (Thomas Dixon’s best selling trilogy, The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907); and a popular movie in 1915, The Birth of a Nation).

The Klan enjoyed a major revival in the 1920s, capped by a march of 35,000 robed Klansmen in Washington D.C. on August 8, 1925 (captured in this Washington Post article, above).

The Midwest—not the South— was the focus of the KKK’s second life. In Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, Cynthia Carr chronicles a lynching of two black teenagers in her hometown of Marion, Indiana on August 7, 1930 (photo here). 

Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith were accused of rape, murder, and robbery; but they never had a trial, as provided in the Sixth Amendment.

Carr writes: “When I first learned that my grandfather had been a Klansmen I didn’t want to know more and I didn’t talk about it. The news was not just shameful it was frightening. It suggested that someone I loved wasn’t who I thought he was, that maybe I’d never really known him."