Ghosts of the KKK still haunt American politics

This is the first history of the Ku Klux Klan from ‘its origins in post-Civil War Tennessee to the present day’ and it makes for a lively read. Kristofer Allerfeldt, a history professor at the University of Exeter, combines lucid political analysis with eye-popping details of violence. One victim of a lynching was made to climb a tree with a noose round his neck but stubbornly clung onto a branch. Rather than waste a bullet and spare him a slow death by strangulation, a Klan member climbed up after him and sawed off his fingers one by one until he dropped.

The Klan started as a fraternity of six young, former Confederate soldiers soon after the Civil War ended. Following the example of other fraternities, it adopted rituals, oaths, costumes and arcane titles such as ‘Grand Turk’ and ‘Grand Cyclops’, but it also had a more sinister association, as two of the men were appointed ‘Night Hawks’, a reference back to the patrols which had searched for runaway slaves in the antebellum South.

Between 1867 and 1869, the Klan became an insurgent army across the South and ‘quickly gained a reputation for being ubiquitous, omnipresent, omnipotent and ultra-violent’. The Reconstruction Acts had resulted in black legislators, magistrates, militias and Union Leagues. The Klansmen responded with acts of terror intended to suppress the black vote; but they also attacked white men who collaborated with the federal authorities, deeming them to be race traitors or ‘scalawags’.

In 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made the Klan an illegal organisation; but of 3,000 men indicted a mere 65 were given short prison sentences. Thereafter, the Klan sought to burnish its myth as a chivalrous band of brothers that had resisted northern tyranny.

Inspired by D.W.