Localized introduction
The latest events call our attention to the bell of racism that has been ringing for decades and denies all American dreams, but history testifies before the present on that, when white nationalism reached its climax and the pride of white supremacy rose until thousands passed through racist marches in full view of everyone, some participated and some Just watch, but the one who turns a blind eye is the most sinful, in the article recounting the rise and collapse of a group behind one of the most racist events and periods in the history of white America.
The text of the report
A century ago, millions of Americans gathered together to defend Christian white America and traditional values and norms, and most citizens turned a blind eye to a group called Coclux. On August 8, 1925, more than fifty thousand members of the Coclux group wandered through the streets of Washington, DC, and some walked in rows of 20 people side by side, while others formed the English letter "K" or the Christian cross. Few of them rode horses, many carrying the American flag - men and women - and banners decorated with the names of the state or local organization to which they belong, and their convoy lasted for more than three hours on Pennsylvania Street with the lineup of spectators.
The organization's national leaders were glowing in colorful satin clothing, the top layer wore white clothes, and their symbols were adorned with a circular red patch containing the cross with a drop of blood in the middle, and almost all the pilgrims wore pointed headdresses but their faces were clearly visible. This is partly because officials only permit review if participants agree to walk without hiding faces, but the mask was not really necessary, and most members of the group did not find a reason to hide their faces, in any case millions of them are in the United States.
Most Americans today cite the Kuhlux as an organization that culminated in the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, and in its members as a lower-class white southern man who hid their identities while waving the Confederate flag in pro-apartheid groups, and burned crosses on the lawns of their enemies, And they abused their innocent victims.
Others may have been familiar with the group from the sixties and seventies where a terrorist and white organization and from the south in particular consisted of men who tortured and killed people under cover of darkness, in an attempt to undermine the political and economic freedoms granted to formerly enslaved people during the era of reconstruction. But Coclux was at the height of its popularity during the 1920s in the United States of America, when it was spread nationwide, and its members were from the middle class, and many of its very prominent public activities were directed towards celebrations, exhibitions, and social gatherings.
In some respects it was this group the least harmful of all of them, encapsulating its harmful ideology as the traditional values of small cities, and the Cauclux community that was in the 1920s encouraged white Americans born in America to believe that intolerance, intimidation, harassment, and unregulated violence fully aligned with national respect, if They were not central. Before that, the group had stopped nearly half a century ago when William J. Simons decided to revive the organization in the fall of 1915. The Atlanta-based Simmons worked for a fraternal community called Woodmen of the World, and he actually belonged to many clubs and churches. But for years he dreamed of setting up a fraternal organization himself one day, and with the DW Griffiths sermon for the "The Birth of a Nation - Birth of a Nation", the inspiration and timing seemed just right.
Burning the cross and the birth of the congregation
On the eve of Thanksgiving, after a tour on a chartered bus with about 15 other men, to the formation of the Grand Granite outside the city known as Mount Stone, Simmons set fire to a wooden cross and announced the new birth of the Knights of the Cocklocks. With Simosen announcing in the Atlanta papers "The Secret, Social, National, and Great Brotherhood" and "A High-Level Organization for Men of Intelligence and Personality" the group remained in flop for several years, and had only attracted a few thousand members in the spring of 1920, until Simons appointed Mary Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clark are propaganda and promoters of the group, so Tyler and Clark divided the whole country into something like sales areas, sent more than 1,000 attorneys in the field to recruit members, and the group's membership fee of $ 10 was partly used as a commission for lawyers. Tyler and Clark's strategies were largely successful, and the group's national membership swelled to more than 100,000 in a matter of months.
In 1921, the newspaper Exposive uncovered more than 100 violent acts sponsored by the group and prompted an investigation by Congress, but the subsequent propaganda for this increased the group only with strength, gaining more than a million new members in early 1922. Internal and power struggles led to Simmons was removed from his leadership position later that year, and was replaced by a Texas dentist called Hiram Evans. Despite internal fighting and external opposition, the group continued to grow, and by 1925 it had between two and 5 million members and the sympathy or support of millions.
Cocklux ideology
The group drew its historical inspiration from the southern past that dates back to the era of reconstruction, but the masses of white Americans flocked to the organization from all parts of the United States, and the group's offices were found in cities, towns and rural areas alike, and the organization did not exist in the former Confederate states such as Arkansas and Georgia Not only Alabama and Texas, but Indiana, Oregon, Kansas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington and Ohio, as well.
The exemplary members were not wealthy, powerful, or impoverished, but rather middle-class white Americans and their families: small business owners, sellers, priests, professors, clerks, farmers, doctors, and lawyers. Ideologically, the group blended xenophobia, religious prejudice, and white race superiority with the values of conservative thought. In the midst of the global recession that occurred in the aftermath of World War I, fear and anxiety were widespread among white Protestants born in America that the country they knew and were accustomed to dominating was declining. They were concerned about the influx of immigrants from East who adhered to communism and other alleged political beliefs, as well as the increasing influence of Catholics and Jews in American life, and the emigration of African Americans from the South.
The intellectual propaganda of religious modernity, the expansion of political and sexual freedoms for women, the perspective of debauchery, crime and sin, were all on the rise, only confirming the feeling that the world was spinning out of their control. The group called for the restoration of the "true American", and provided members with a platform to demonize blacks, Catholics, Jews, Mexicans, Asians and any other non-white ethnic immigrants, while also condemning communism, most other forms of leftist politics, and "malicious" cultural influences such as alcohol, birth control, and teaching evolution theory In government schools.
By presenting itself at times as a Christian value reformist organization, and another as a way to consolidate the economic and political power of white Anglo-Protestant Protestants, the group flourished with a promise that active white nationalism and traditional values would hinder the extension of modernity and ensure that the forces that planned to undermine the power of Americans born in the United States would remain in the grip. Unsurprisingly, such a hostile worldview produced a great deal of violence, beginning in the late 2000s and during the 1920s, members of the group carried out hundreds of beating and whipping cases, and dozens of murders. They threatened Mexican wine and leather promoters, put tar and feathers on doctors who performed abortions, politicians with gun power, executed blacks, and appeared in nightly attacks to terrorize prostitutes, harassed Jews, and battered young women who were found riding in cars with men.
But the violence was not attractive to most of the group’s members, and in fact most of them denied their support for these activities, and many did not consider themselves to be racist enthusiasts at all. The group’s popularity was not the product of its support for raw hatred directed toward non-whites and all that it claimed was immoral, but rather because it allowed the expression of white supremacy and moral preservation in culturally acceptable and even outward ways. Like many organizations that presented themselves as fraternal, the Ku Klux gave its members the feeling that they belonged to something special, complete with its secret rituals, such as handshakes and witch titles, such as the imperial magician, the supreme giant, symbolic words, and uniforms.
Charitable activities "white"
The group supported rallies and picnics, baseball teams and competitions for the most beautiful child, and members of the group had music bands performing public concerts and bands played at state galleries. In addition to spacious women's units, and even a number of activities for children, they carry names such as Junior Coclux, Tri-K Club, and Junior Coclux.
Members of the congregation appeared in churches every Sunday morning to donate money, run charitable campaigns, held Christmas parties for orphans, and raised money to build only Protestant hospitals. They made efforts to combat alleged Catholic influence in public schools by donating American flags and Bibles, and created community rituals for weddings, baptisms, and funerals. They presented candidates for hundreds of positions in states and local offices, and the Americans elected countless congregation mayors to cities, school board members, city councilors, police directors, and state legislators.
Among the members of the group in prominent and particularly powerful positions were conservatives such as Edward Jackson from Indiana and Clifford Walker from Georgia, as well as US Senators Earl Mayfield from Texas and Rice Mines from Colorado.
But for every member of the group who joined in pursuit of the opportunity to bullying, threatening and beating blacks, immigrants, and practitioners of vice, there were dozens who were attracted by these types of societal and civic participation ways to establish trade and political relations, with white white middle class, and had access to them An opportunity to publicly pride themselves on being white, Protestant and American-born Americans.
There is no indication that the ideology of intolerance or racist violence was inseparable from societal harmony, charitable work, pride, or political activism. On the contrary, it was all one piece, and even the members who came to the organization mostly because friends and neighbors encouraged them to do so saw the call for white supremacy and fully understood how the appearance of the group's members in her outfit spread fear in the hearts of large numbers of their American brothers.
The collapse of the white racist symbol
One of the factors that helped topple the group was the growing recognition that this fear was legitimate, and Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge opposed the Ku Klux community, and with the passage of years an increasing number of public officials and prominent citizens who joined the group turned up when their numbers increased in the early 1920s, and they turned against The organization, when it turned out to be not a useful fraternal society, was a conspiracy that overlooked the Sadists and the fanatics. Ultimately, the Washington DC parade in the summer of 1925 was a high symbolic point for the Kuhlux group in the 1920s.
By the end of the decade, their numbers practically dwindled to very small numbers, but it would be a mistake to think that a violent reaction against the group’s violence was the main reason for its collapse. Of course, the United States was fortunate in having the presidents of the 1920s see Kuklux as a general threat, but it did not break down due to fundamental liberalization For white Americans and country leaders. Rather, it has retreated mostly because of its self-destruction, the intensity and persistence of its opponents, and the changing social, economic and political contexts that have deprived the group of much of the energy that life has given it.
The group's leaders saw the state and local branches as dictators stealing money from the organization’s tanks, and the stream of members leaving the group turned a product of frustration into a flood by the end of 1925 after David Stevenson, the leading group member in Indiana, was convicted of killing a young woman who had also brutally raped her. This scandal was devastating to members of the group who appreciated the group's alleged commitment to moral integrity, but many Protestant priests, civil rights organizations for blacks, newspaper editors, and Jewish and Catholic groups who had voiced their voice and had the courage to oppose the group from the start did not.
Perhaps most important in overthrowing the Kuhlux group is that America’s degenerate vision of foreign ideologies, dangerous immigrants, and moral rotation never came into existence. After the First World War, the recession receded and the American economy increased again in the mid-twenties of the last century. The labor disputes that the group warned about as a result of communist incitement faded, and black immigration continued without causing widespread disturbances and social revolution, and the restrictions imposed on the immigration passed In 1924 it limited arrivals from Eastern Europe, and the era of overriding norms moved forward whether or not the curators liked it.
And among all this, American-born white Protestants kept the lion's share of power in the United States, and they did not need a group to keep it. Even in the absence of the group, the nation remained a place where prejudice against racial and religious minorities was pervasive, and where black Americans in particular suffered from legal discrimination and deadly violence.
However, there was something worrisome about the United States in which the appeal of bigotry became widespread and commonplace, and where suppliers were able to feel completely comfortable expressing this through these outrageous activities, in a country printed by the Kuhlux group it hardly mattered what If every white American had felt the organisation's appeal, perhaps a large proportion of them did not want to contact in any way with the group at all, but if they were not interested in watching the parade pass in front of them they would often have turned their eyes away.
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This report is translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect the location of Maidan.