ABSTRACT
With the election of Barack Obama as the first black president, discussion inside and beyond the United States focused on the legacy of civil rights and the possibility of a post-racial America. Discussion and images of Obama were often juxtaposed with historical references to and images of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, civil rights activists and the Ku Klux Klan. Post-racial discourses rely on both a historical narrative of unidirectional progress and the juxtaposition of examples of racism from the past with those of the achievements in the present. Such historical references and images not only obscured continuing institutional racism, racial inequality and discrimination, but were challenged by the revival or resurgence of violent organized racism, including the Klan itself. On 7 April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued the report ‘Right-Wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fuelling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment’ and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has reported a significant increase in hate groups and racism in the period since Obama’s election and in the context of Donald Trump’s campaign and election. This chapter will examine the ways in which the Klan has been used to represent the history of racism in America as something that is past, formerly acceptable and mainstream, and now understood as extremist. Moreover, it will look at how the history of the Klan has been constructed in order to serve that purpose in not only the current context, but also throughout the history of the organization itself. It look at three specific periods in Klan history in which the rise and mainstream power and influence of the Klan was ended by a crisis brought about partially by processes of political delegitimization and more specifically criminalization through federal investigations, legislation and hearings focusing on terrorism and other crimes. It will argue that this occurred at specific times when the organization’s cause and activities were seen to pose a threat to the peaceful establishment and enforcement of federal laws or a threat to national security and when racism (in its most explicit form) needed to be symbolically expunged. The periods that this chapter will examine are: (1) the first era Klan (1860s–70s) of post-Civil War reconstruction; (2) the second era Klan (1910s–20s) of the nativist period, as well as the fascist period which followed it (1930s–40s); and (3) the third era (1954–67) anti-civil rights Klan, which is the period most frequently evoked in responses to Obama’s election, and was ended through anti-Klan FBI-COINTELPRO investigations and the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee of the Committee on Un-American Activities hearings. These will be examined in the context of both the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ focus on ‘Islamist’ terrorism and ‘post-racial’ America witnessing a revival of the Klan and wider far-right.
