On December 24, 1865, a secret racist terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan was created in the United States.

Its members intimidated and killed both black citizens of the United States and community activists defending their rights.

Despite the attempts of official Washington to ban the Ku Klux Klan, organizations associated with it are still operating in the United States.

Slavery and the fight against it

"Slavery in relation to the peoples of Africa was part of the colonial system that developed in the world even before the emergence of the United States," American political scientist Dmitry Drobnitsky said in an interview with RT.

The introduction of dark-skinned slaves to the territory of the British colonies in North America began in the first half of the 17th century.

The share of slaves in the population of some of them reached almost 40%.

In the modern northern states of the United States, slaves were more often used as servants or workers, while in the south they were forced to work on plantations.

To get the slaves to obey, according to experts, they were severely beaten and subjected to other sophisticated bullying.

Slaves were often raped by the owners or sold into brothels.

After the formation of the United States in parts of the northern states, slavery was considered economically unprofitable and was abolished.

However, in the south of the country at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, the mass cultivation of cotton began, in which it turned out to be profitable to use the labor of slaves.

Therefore, slavery persisted in the southern states.

Against this background, competition arose between southern planters and industrialists from the north for the western territories annexed to the United States.

In the middle of the 19th century, a conflict arose between representatives of the North and South over the prospects for legalizing slavery in Kansas and Nebraska.

Andrei Koshkin, head of the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, noted that the conflict between the northern and southern states was not limited to attitudes toward slavery.

The elites of the North and the South viewed tax policy, foreign trade, and many other political and economic issues differently.

  • African Americans in agricultural work

  • © Wikimedia Commons

In 1860, the leader of the popular North and pro-slavery Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, won the US presidential election.

The leadership of the southern states declared that the Republican programs were unacceptable for them and in 1861 decided to secede from the United States with the subsequent formation of a new state - the Confederate States of America.

Southerner leaders argued that slavery was supposedly normal for blacks and that Africans could not be equated with whites.

Lincoln attempted to open negotiations to restore US unity by inviting his opponents in the South to postpone discussion of controversial issues, including slavery.

However, this did not suit the southerners, and in April 1861 they switched to armed struggle against the northerners.

At the beginning of the war, the supporters of the Confederation managed to win a number of serious military victories, but this was not enough to gain a strategic advantage.

The metallurgical and arms industry of the United States was concentrated on the territory of the northern states.

Their population was about 22 million people.

At the same time, only 9 million people lived in the south, including about 4 million black slaves.

If the northerners were able to draft 2.7 million people into the army, then the southerners - only 1.1 million. The representatives of the South wanted to seize the US capital Washington, but they did not have enough strength to do so.

In 1863, the northerners were able to cut the southerners' forces into pieces and seize the strategic initiative.

  • Battle of Antiitem.

    Iron Brigade offensive

  • © Wikimedia Commons

In early 1865, the army of the North captured North and South Carolina - the main strongholds of the Confederate supporters - and forced the Southerners to surrender.

Even the assassination of US President Abraham Lincoln by the conspirators did not change the general course of events.

The unity of the United States was restored, and on December 18, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution entered into force throughout the country, abolishing slavery in the United States.

"The civil war has become the bloodiest in US history," said Vladimir Vasiliev, chief researcher at the Institute of the USA and Canada of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in an interview with RT.

According to historians, the losses of the North amounted to about 360 thousand people, and the South - 258 thousand.

Ku Klux Klan and racism

According to experts, the northerners, having occupied the southern states, at first rigidly imposed their political will on the population.

This caused strong discontent among local residents.

On December 24, 1865, in the city of Pulaski, Tennessee, former members of the Confederation, at the initiative of Judge Thomas Jones, created a secret racist organization, the Ku Klux Klan.

The origin of its name is controversial, but the most popular is the version about the imitation of the sound made by the bolt of a rifle when reloading.

The formal purpose of creating the Ku Klux Klan was to protect white southerners from attacks by gangs consisting of former slaves.

However, as the forces grew, the Ku Klux Klan proceeded to massively persecute any African American, as well as those whites who defended the civil rights of blacks.

In 1867, the Ku Klux Klan developed the Prescribe, a program designed to keep blacks and whites from equality.

"The meaning of the organization's activities was to show: despite the defeat of the southerners, the representatives of the white race dominate and remain the masters of life," Vasiliev emphasized.

The Ku Klux Klan quickly became extremely popular in the South of the United States.

The number of its members reached, according to various estimates, from 500 thousand to 2 million people.

Hierarchical organizational management structures have emerged in 11 states.

Its members wore special uniforms and masks designed to hide the identity of the Ku Klux Klan members and intimidate potential victims.

  • Murder by members of the Ku Klux Clan of George Ashburn, a Republican in Georgia.

    He became the first victim of a clan in this state

  • © Wikimedia Commons

“The Ku Klux Klan emerged in the United States as a manifestation of social revanchism,” stressed Vladimir Vasiliev.

According to some reports, members of the Ku Klux Klan have killed over 100 thousand people in just a few years, Andrei Koshkin said.

In 1871, the US authorities officially banned the organization's activities.

However, as experts note, the ideas of social revanchism have not gone anywhere.

According to Koshkin, the attempts of official Washington to "tighten the screws" in the South could lead to a new increase in centrifugal tendencies and a renewed war, so the federal authorities stopped rigidly imposing their will on the southerners.

Instead of waging a terrorist struggle in the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan, they were allowed to formally enact segregation legislation at the state level, minimizing the number of “intersections” of whites and blacks in public life.

Thus, the sphere of trade and services, health care, education was divided.

“African Americans and whites were equal only on paper, in real life blacks could not eat at the same table with whites, drink water from the same tap, ride in the same vehicle, study in the same school, and so on,” said Koshkin.

  • Initiation into members of the Ku Klux Klan

  • Gettyimages.ru

  • © Stefano Bianchetti

According to him, at the beginning of the 20th century, the official revival of the Ku Klux Klan began in the United States.

This was due both to the romanticization of the previous activities of the racist organization in the eyes of whites and the appearance of a "knightly halo" in it, and to the growing social role of blacks against the background of the First World War - whites were primarily drafted into the army, and African Americans occupied the vacated jobs.

In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was legalized.

Now, members of this organization, in addition to African Americans, have persecuted Jews, Chinese, communists and trade unionists.

However, as Andrei Koshkin notes, during the years of the Great Depression, against the background of other problems that existed in American society, the activities of the Ku Klux Klan were minimized.

Then in 1944 the organization was disbanded, but after a few years it was recreated again.

“In the 1960s, the activities of the Ku Klux Klan began to increase again.

This is how racists reacted to the black civil rights movement and the repeal of segregation laws.

In the United States, there were explosions, shootings, but formally, by the 1980s, regulatory restrictions on the rights of African Americans had been lifted everywhere, ”Koshkin said.

  • Members of the Ku Klux Klan in front of the famous symbol of the "burning cross"

  • © Wikimedia Commons

However, according to him, racial problems were not fully resolved.

The traditions of racism have permeated American society so deeply that it took not even a century and a half to eradicate them.

Today, racial issues are closely linked to socio-economic issues.

Most blacks earn less than whites and lack access to quality education and health care.

This, in turn, is causing explosions of discontent among African Americans.

According to Konstantin Blokhin, a researcher at the Center for Security Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the problem of racism in the United States has not disappeared until now and, taking into account the migration and socio-economic policy of official Washington, it may further worsen in the future.

“The Ku Klux Klan in the form of a network of separate organizations still exists today.

In the 21st century, this fact is perplexing and at the same time is an eloquent confirmation of the presence of unresolved racial problems in American society, "Blokhin summed up.