ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan promoted white supremacy and antagonized racial minorities in relation to salient political and cultural themes of the era. It explores cultural politics to identify tendencies and examples, by which the Klan produced expressions for certain racial groups to contrast whiteness. In the cultural and ideological domain of Klan action, salient cultural signifiers had both positive and negative uses as they were rendered to serve certain political aims. Unlike national discourse about race, which sought to hide the nature of white supremacy, the Klan’s racial ideology opted for aggressive simplicity. For example, the Klan transformed familiar and reassuring symbols and language of Christianity and patriotism into expressions of hate, terror, and racism. Relying on both reassuring symbols and racist myths, Klan adherents and supporters of segregation were given not racial code words but explicitly racist explanations that provided a standard through which social issues and political struggles of the 1960s were understood.
