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stuff out.”

—THE N EW Y ORK T IMES M AGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003

2

How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-

Estate Agents?

As institutions go, the Ku Klux Klan has had a markedly up-and-down history. It

was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War by six former

Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee. The six young men, four of whom

were budding lawyers, saw themselves as merely a circle of like-minded

friends—thus the name they chose, “kuklux,” a slight mangling of kuklos, the

Greek word for “circle.” They added “klan” because they were all of Scotch-Irish

descent. In the beginning, their activities were said to be harmless midnight

pranks—riding horses through the countryside while draped in white sheets and

pillowcase hoods. But soon the Klan evolved into a multi-state terrorist

organization designed to frighten and kill emancipated slaves. Among its

regional leaders were five former Confederate generals; its staunchest supporters

were the plantation owners for whom Reconstruction posed an economic and

political nightmare. In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant spelled out for the House

of Representatives the true aims of the Ku Klux Klan: “By force and terror, to

prevent all political action not in accord with the views of the members, to

deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right of a free ballot,

to suppress the schools in which colored children were taught, and to reduce the

colored people to a condition closely allied to that of slavery.”

The early Klan did its work through pamphleteering, lynching, shooting,

burning, castrating, pistol-whipping, and a thousand forms of intimidation. They

targeted former slaves and any whites who supported the blacks’ rights to vote,

acquire land, or gain an education. Within barely a decade, however, the Klan

had been extinguished, largely by legal and military interventions out of

Washington, D.C.

But if the Klan itself was defeated, its aims had largely been achieved through

the establishment of Jim Crow laws. Congress, which during Reconstruction had

been quick to enact measures of legal, social, and economic freedom for blacks,

just as quickly began to roll them back. The federal government agreed to

withdraw its occupation troops from the South, allowing the restoration of white

rule. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to full-

scale racial segregation.

The Ku Klux Klan lay largely dormant until 1915, when D. W. Griffith’s film The

Birth of a Nation—originally titled The Clansman—helped spark its rebirth.

Griffith presented the Klan as crusaders for white civilization itself, and as one of

the noblest forces in American history. The film quoted a line from A History of

the American People, written by a renowned historian: “At last there had sprung

into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect

the Southern country.” The book’s author was U.S. president Woodrow Wilson,

onetime scholar and president of Princeton University.

By the 1920s, a revived Klan claimed eight million members, including President

Warren G. Harding, who reportedly took his Klan oath in the Green Room of the

White House. This time around, the Klan was not confined to the South but

ranged throughout the country; this time, it concerned itself not only with blacks

but also with Catholics, Jews, communists, unionists, immigrants, agitators, and

other disrupters of the status quo. In 1933, with Hitler ascendant in Germany,

Will Rogers was the first to draw a line between the new Klan and the new threat

in Europe: “Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini,” he wrote. “Looks

to me like it’s the Ku Klux that he is copying.”

The onset of World War II and a number of internal scandals once again laid the

Klan low. Public sentiment turned against the Klan as the unity of a country at

war trumped its message of separatism.

But within a few years, there were already signs of a massive revival. As wartime

anxiety gave way to postwar uncertainty, Klan membership flourished. Barely

two months after V-J Day, the Klan in Atlanta burned a 300-foot cross on the face

of Stone Mountain, site of a storied rock carving of Robert E. Lee. The

extravagant cross burning, one Klansman later said, was intended “just to let the

niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is back on the market.”

Atlanta had by now become Klan headquarters. The Klan held great sway with

key Georgia politicians, and its Georgia chapters included many policemen and

sheriff’s deputies. Yes, the Klan was a secret society, reveling in passwords and

cloak-and-dagger ploys, but its real power lay in the very public fear that it

fostered—exemplified by the open secret that the Ku Klux Klan and the law-

enforcement establishment were brothers in arms.

Atlanta—the Imperial City of the KKK’s Invisible Empire, in Klan jargon—was

also home to Stetson Kennedy, a thirty-year-old man with the bloodlines of a

Klansman but a temperament that ran opposite. He came from a prominent

southern family whose ancestors included two signers of the Declaration of

Independence, an officer in the Confederate Army, and John B. Stetson, founder

of the famed hat company and the man for whom Stetson University was named.

Stetson Kennedy grew up in a fourteen-room house in Jacksonville, Florida, the

youngest of five children. His uncle Brady was a Klansman. But he got his first

real exposure to the Klan when the family’s maid, Flo, who had pretty much

raised Stetson, was tied to a tree, beaten, and raped by a gang of Klansmen. Her

offense: talking back to a white trolley driver who had shortchanged her.

Because Kennedy couldn’t fight in World War II—he had had a bad back since

childhood—he felt compelled to defend his country at home. Its worst enemy, he

believed, was bigotry. Kennedy became a self-described “dissident at large,”

writing anti-bigotry articles and books. He became close friends with Woody

Guthrie, Richard Wright, and a host of other progressives; Jean-Paul Sartre

published his work in France.

Writing did not come easily to Kennedy, or happily. He was at root a country

boy who would rather have been off fishing the swamps. But he was afflicted by

a foolhardy devotion to his cause. Kennedy would go on to become the only

gentile member of the Anti-Defamation League’s postwar effort to smite bigotry.

(He coined the phrase “Frown Power,” a centerpiece of the ADL’s peer-pressure

campaign, which encouraged people to pointedly frown when they heard

bigoted speech.) He became the only white correspondent for the Pittsburgh

Courier, the country’s largest black newspaper. (He wrote a column about the

race struggle in the South under the pseudonym Daddy Mention—a black folk

hero who, as myth told it, could outrun the blast of a sheriff’s shotgun.)

What drove Kennedy was a hatred of small-mindedness, ignorance,

obstructionism, and intimidation—which, in his view, were displayed by no

organization more proudly than by the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy saw the Klan as

the terrorist arm of the white establishment itself. This struck him as an

intractable problem, for a variety of reasons. The Klan was in cahoots with

political, business, and law-enforcement leaders. The public was frightened and

felt power-less to act against the Klan. And the few anti-hate groups that existed

at the time had little leverage or even information about the Klan. As Kennedy

later wrote, he was particularly chagrined by one key fact about the Klan:

“Almost all of the things written on the subject were editorials, not exposés. The

writers were against the Klan, all right, but they had precious few inside facts

about it.”

So Kennedy decided—as any foolhardy, fearless, slightly daft anti-bigot would—

to go undercover and join the Ku Klux Klan.

In Atlanta, he started hanging around a pool hall “whose habitués,” as he later

wrote, “had the frustrated, cruel look of the Klan about them.” A man named

Slim, a taxi driver, sat beside him at the bar one afternoon. “What this country

needs is a good Kluxing,” Slim said. “That’s the only way to keep the niggers,

kikes, Catholic dagos, and Reds in their place!”

Kennedy introduced himself as John S. Perkins, the alias he had adopted for his

mission. He told Slim, truthfully, that his uncle Brady Perkins back in Florida

had once been a Great Titan with the Klan. “But they’re dead now, aren’t they?”

he asked Slim.

That prompted Slim to whip out a Klan calling card: “Here Yesterday, Today,

Forever! The Ku Klux Klan Is Riding! God Give Us Men!” Slim told “Perkins”

that he was in luck, for there was a membership drive under way. The $10

initiation fee—the Klan’s sales pitch was “Do You Hate Niggers? Do You Hate

Jews? Do You Have Ten Dollars?”—had been reduced to $8. Then there was

another $10 in annual dues, and $15 for a hooded robe.

Kennedy balked at the various fees, pretending to play hard to get, but agreed to

join. Not long after, he took the Klan oath in a nighttime mass initiation atop

Stone Mountain. Kennedy began attending weekly Klan meetings, hurrying

home afterward to write notes in a cryptic shorthand he invented. He learned the

identities of the Klan’s local and regional leaders and deciphered the Klan’s

hierarchy, rituals, and language. It was Klan custom to affix a Kl to many words;

thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern. Many of the

customs struck Kennedy as almost laughably childish. The secret Klan

handshake, for instance, was a left-handed, limp-wristed fish wiggle. When a

traveling Klansman wanted to locate brethren in a strange town, he would ask

for a “Mr. Ayak”—“Ayak” being code for “Are You a Klansman?” He would

hope to hear, “Yes, and I also know a Mr. Akai”—code for “A Klansman Am I.”

Before long, Kennedy was invited to join the Klavaliers, the Klan’s secret police

and “flog squad.” For this privilege, his wrist was slit with a jackknife so that he

could take a blood oath:

“Klansman, do you solemnly swear by God and the Devil never to betray secrets

entrusted to you as a Klavalier of the Klan?”

“I swear,” Kennedy responded.

“Do you swear to provide yourself with a good gun and plenty of ammunition,

so as to be ready when the nigger starts trouble to give him plenty?”

“I do.”

“Do you further swear to do all in your power to increase the white birth rate?”

“I do.”

Kennedy was promptly instructed to pay $10 for his initiation into the Klavaliers,

as well as $1 a month to cover Klavalier expenses. He also had to buy a second

hooded robe, to be dyed black.

As a Klavalier, Kennedy worried that he would someday be expected to inflict

violence. But he soon discovered a central fact of life in the Klan—and of

terrorism in general: most of the threatened violence never goes beyond the

threat stage.

Consider lynching, the Klan’s hallmark sign of violence. Here, compiled by the

Tuskegee Institute, are the decade-by-decade statistics on the lynching of blacks

in the United States:

YEARS

LYNCHINGS OF BLACKS

1890–1899

1,111

1900–1909

791

1910–1919

569

1920–1929

281

1930–1939

119

1940–1949

31

1950–1959

6

1960–1969

3

Bear in mind that these figures represent not only lynchings attributed to the Ku

Klux Klan but the total number of reported lynchings. The statistics reveal at

least three noteworthy facts. The first is the obvious decrease in lynchings over

time. The second is the absence of a correlation between lynchings and Klan

membership: there were actually more lynchings of blacks between 1900 and

1909, when the Klan was dormant, than during the 1920s, when the Klan had

millions of members—which suggests that the Ku Klux Klan carried out far

fewer lynchings than is generally thought.

Third, relative to the size of the black population, lynchings were exceedingly

rare. To be sure, one lynching is one too many. But by the turn of the century,

lynchings were hardly the everyday occurrence that they are often remembered

as. Compare the 281 victims of lynchings in the 1920s to the number of black

infants who died as a result of malnutrition, pneumonia, diarrhea, and the like.

As of 1920, about 13 out of every 100 black children died in infancy, or roughly

20,000 children each year—compared to 28 people who were lynched in a year.

As late as 1940, about 10,000 black infants died each year.

What larger truths do these lynching figures suggest? What does it mean that

lynchings were relatively rare and that they fell precipitously over time, even in

the face of a boom in Klan membership?

The most compelling explanation is that all those early lynchings worked. White

racists—whether or not they belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—had through their

actions and their rhetoric developed a strong incentive scheme that was terribly

clear and terribly frightening. If a black person violated the accepted code of

behavior, whether by talking back to a trolley driver or daring to try to vote, he

knew he might well be punished, perhaps by death.

So by the mid-1940s, when Stetson Kennedy joined up, the Klan didn’t really

need to use as much violence. Many blacks, having long been told to behave like

second-class citizens—or else—simply obliged. One or two lynchings went a

long way toward inducing docility among even a large group of people, for

people respond strongly to strong incentives. And there are few incentives more

powerful than the fear of random violence—which, in essence, is why terrorism

is so effective.

But if the Ku Klux Klan of the 1940s wasn’t uniformly violent, what was it? The

Klan that Stetson Kennedy found was in fact a sorry fraternity of men, most of

them poorly educated and with poor prospects, who needed a place to vent—

and an excuse for occasionally staying out all night. That their fraternity engaged

in quasi-religious chanting and oath taking and hosanna hailing, all of it top