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The Klu Klux Klan and the racial segregation that was so dramatically challenged during the mid-twentieth century freedom movement was produced not during slavery but rather in an attempt to manage free black people who would have been far more successful in pushing forward democracy for all.

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The sad fact is, the leadership of all religious, political and revolutionary systems have been deceivers for thousands of years... Many have been led to "believe" these institutions were noble. Unfortunately, "belief," as opposed to rational thought, has always been the tyrants' best deception... The much revered Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan, is an example. He was a high ranking, initiated Mason. His closest friend and mentor was Albert Pike, master of the entire Scottish Rite and author of the Masonic bible called "Morals and Dogma." The motives of rank and file klansmen were White survival, but the big picture is different. The White race had to be kept alive in America until it could be used to conquer the world and destroy the racial basis of our sacred European homeland on behalf of our Zionist masters. The methods of secrecy used by the Klan are straight from Masonry, as is the name. Look at the Star of David over the eagle on the Great Seal of the United States seen on the back of a dollar bill. The words "E Pluribus Unum" (one out of many) equals genocide by race-mixing. The seal was designed by the Masonic founding fathers over 200 years ago. So, the Ku Klux Klan was formed, not to repatriate Negroes to Africa and create a White nation, but to keep the White race alive another 150 years in America. Now that the Zionists rule the world, they have sentenced the White race to death. White survival groups are not tolerated... National Socialism, or so-called Nazis, is another example. There can be no doubt that members, both earlier in Germany and now around the world, are sincere and good-hearted folk. In this case, perhaps even the leaders of Nazi Germany were of good heart. Nonetheless, wealthy, Jewish international bankers behind the scenes financed the early Nazi movement. They knew that tiny Germany had no chance against the entire Zionist controlled world. And the end effect of the Nazi effort was the creation of Israel and the consolidation of Jewish power worldwide. Of course 50 million dead White people did not hurt their feelings either.

In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy. It aimed to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.

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Every country-side wished to have its own Ku Klux, founded in secrecy and mystery like the mother ‘Den’ at Pulaski, until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an ‘Invisible Empire of the South,’ bound together in loose organization to protect the southern country from some of the ugliness hazards of a time of revolution.

The negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races, and the Northern people must occasionally be reminded of the danger which they incur in admitting him too freely to the privileges of society and government. ...The Birth of a Nation, ... is said to furnish a remarkable insight into the methods of the Ku-Klux-Klan, that noble but much maligned band of Southerners who saved half of our country from destruction at the close of the Civil War. The Conservative has not yet witnessed the picture in question, but he has seen both in literary and dramatic form The Clansman, that stirring, though crude and melodramatic story by Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., on which The Birth of a Nation is based, and has likewise made a close historical study of the Klu-Klux-Klan, finding as a result of his research nothing but Honour, Chivalry, and Patriotism in the activities of the Invisible Empire. The Klan merely did for the people what the law refused to do, removing the ballot from unfit hands and restoring to the victims of political vindictiveness their natural rights. The alleged lawbreaking of the Klan was committed only by irresponsible miscreants who, after the dissolution of the Order by its Grand Wizard, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, used its weird masks and terrifying costumes to veil their unorganised villainies. Race prejudice is a gift of Nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.

Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland. Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low. Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South. To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan. You look at the most racist — you look at the s, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan. The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats.

Ahora bien, no todos los blancos de la antigua Confederación se mostraban totalmente pasivos. En diciembre de 1865, un grupo de antiguos oficiales del ejército confederado formaron un grupo que llamaron Kyklos -palabra griega que significa círculo-, y puesto que muchos de ellos eran de ascendencia escocesa o irlandesa, se consideraban un clan, que escribían erróneamente klan por aliteración. El grupo pronto se pasó a llamarse Ku Klux Klan, y el antiguo general de caballería confederado Nathan Bedford Forrest, se convirtió en su primer gran maestre".

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Racism is not inevitable. One only has to take the case of the United States of America, the history of this country, the Civil War, the abolition of slavery... The case of the United States is very significant for the history of racism and racial segregation. Martin Luther King fought and many other Black people still do...The Kuklux Klan existed and still exists, but over the years, it is losing ground although some Black Americans continue to be victims of racism. The struggle continues. We have known Black American ambassadors...For me, all this symbolizes in some way the decline of racism, a little more than just a glimmer of hope. Who knows how long it will take for South Africa to resemble New York where today, Whites and Blacks rub shoulders, mixing indifferently?.

Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes. The white men were aroused by a mere instinct of self-preservation — until at last there sprung into existence a great Kuklux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

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It was an amazing and apparently spontaneous transformation in the attitudes and behavior of youth; the generation of the 1950s had been so famous for its "apathy" that some college newspapers banned the overused word from their editorials. Now it was enlisting en masse in a high-minded and high-spirited campaign to integrate the society by living and fighting together, going to jail together, and sometimes (this must never be forgotten) dying together. But the civil rights movement did not achieve its lofty ideals. Hotels and buses were desegregated, but blacks perceived slowly that they were not much better off than before. What good is it to be allowed to sit in the front of the bus when you haven't got the fare? Inevitably, the movement fell apart along racial lines. The blacks began to see that they were still, subtly, being treated as inferiors by the white students. They were in the same position that Frederick Douglass found himself in a century earlier with the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The well-meaning Garrison was using Douglass as an "exhibition piece," Douglass perceived, and when the great black leader demanded a more important role in the abolition movement, Garrison said he thought that the most black people were able to do at the moment was to serve as exhibits of the fact that they could be taught to read, write and speak about their experiences as slaves. Douglass understood then that he was still in a master-slave relationship with the white man and resolved to break his intellectual chains as well as his physical ones. Young blacks in the 1960s played out the same story. Where they had been integrationist and nonviolent, they became separatist and militant. It was the era of Black Power. Discovering that they were not going to win any important gains by carrying picket signs and coaching people for literacy tests, they declared their independence from white society in every way. In diet, dress, religion, clothing and behavior, they set out to become black, black and beautiful, black and proud. This struck a deep chord in the soul of black Americans, whose great need is to believe in their worth and dignity, their selfhood, after generations of having been beaten, sold, murdered, exploited and demeaned. They have been told in the most direct, brutal ways that they are worthless, and there are deep psychic wounds in the minds of all black Americans. A few hard-won gains in status have not healed them, and healing them is the most important priority for blacks. Independence movements, from community-united black fronts to the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa-each has an essential role to play in the cure. Of course, one may criticize some of their tactics. I have, myself; but it should not be missed that the people who hate and fear the militant black movements the most, and who would mobilize all the resources of the law against them, do not come with clean hands; they are people who have profited through the years from black subjugation. Many of them have supported in the past, by inaction or action, a group that was far worse than the most militant black ones, the Ku Klux Klan.

yes, Black Lives Matter was important. It was part of a whole wave of movements — We Charge Genocide in Chicago, Assata’s Daughters, the rebellion in Ferguson, which was separate from Black Lives Matter. I mean, it was really a kind of insurgent movement saying an end to state violence as we know it. But it was also an insurgent movement against white supremacy, though it didn’t always take the form of the Klan or the Nazis. It took the form of the police. It took the form of state policies and right-wing state legislatures passing laws that made protest a crime, you know? I mean, we saw this. When we think about the problem of white supremacy, it is the perennial problem, from before the founding of the nation. And, you know, when we think about, for example, the anti-Klan movement, the modern anti-Klan movement in the 1970s and '80s emerges where? It emerges in prisons, where prisoners are saying, “We've got wardens and guards who are Klansmen, and we need to fight them.” And it expands across the country. And I think we have to keep remembering that over and over again, because some of the same people who end up being elected to office are the — in some ways, the political offspring of the Klan and the Nazis and white supremacist organizations of the '70s, ’80s and ’90s. And then, you know, you know, because you've covered this so well, how many cases of racial violence, whether it’s against Sikhs, against Black people, against undocumented immigrants, that we’ve seen every year. Every year, you know? And we keep coming back to this question of, “Oh, well, we’ve got to deal with assault weapons.” That is important, but it doesn’t solve the problem of continuing and sanctioned white supremacist violence.

By an amendment to the Constitution the Negro was given the right of franchise, and, theoretically at least, his ballot became his invaluable emblem of citizenship. In a government "of the people, for the people, and by the people," the Negro's vote became an important factor in all matters of state and national politics. But this did not last long. The southern white man would not consider that the Negro had any right which a white man was bound to respect, and the idea of a republican form of government in the southern states grew into general contempt. It was maintained that "This is a white man's government," and regardless of numbers the white man should rule. "No Negro domination" became the new legend on the sanguinary banner of the sunny South, and under it rode the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless mobs, which for any cause chose to murder one man or a dozen as suited their purpose best. It was a long, gory campaign; the blood chills and the heart almost loses faith in Christianity when one thinks of Yazoo, Hamburg, Edgefield, Copiah, and the countless massacres of defenseless Negroes, whose only crime was the attempt to exercise their right to vote.

Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles.

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