Ku Klux Klan Quotes

“They burnt crosses every night all around us, and a man who'll burn what he prays to, he’ll burn anything.”
― Shelby Foote, Jordan County

“Dear poor white people, I have bad news for you: super rich white people are not your friends. They became super rich by exploiting people like you. That’s not what friends do.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy? Share This Book

“No matter how much Steve and I preached about staying legal, most of these men never believed us, and some would grin or wink as we spoke.

They thought the CKKKK was like the Klan group their grandfathers belonged to back in the 1920's or 30's, when members could get by with just about anything.

That ignorance about the CKKKK extended to the masses of people as well.

I received hundreds of phone calls from people wanting me to go out and assault this or that person, for wrongs perceived by the callers.

One 65 year old White man called, and after informing me his wife of 67 had left him and moved in with a younger man, demanded that I get some men together and, as the caller put it, "Go Klux 'em," meaning to commit some violent act upon them.

A Black girl from Angier called once, saying her boyfriend was dating a White girl, and asked me, "Whut you gone do bout it?"

Another elderly White lady called and said that her Black maid was stealing her jewelry, as if that was a classic crime for which the CKKKK should render traditional and just "Klan punishment."

It's really incredible. ”
― Frazier Glenn Miller, A White Man Speaks Out

“It is already apparent that the word 'Fascist' will be one of the hardest-worked words in the Presidential campaign. Henry Wallace called some people Fascists the other day in a speech and next day up jumped Harrison Spangler, the Republican, to remark that if there were any Fascists in this country you would find them in the New Deal's palace guard. It is getting so a Fascist is a man who votes the other way. Persons who vote your way, of course, continue to be 'right-minded people.'

We are sorry to see this misuse of the word 'Fascist.' If we recall matters, a Fascist is a member of the Fascist party or a believer in Fascist ideals. These are: a nation founded on bloodlines, political expansion by surprise and war, murder or detention of unbelievers, transcendence of state over individual, obedience to one leader, contempt for parliamentary forms, plus some miscellaneous gymnastics for the young and a general feeling of elation. It seems to us that there are many New Deal Democrats who do not subscribe to such a program, also many aspiring Republicans. Other millions of Americans are nonsubscribers. It's too bad to emasculate the word 'Fascist' by using it on persons whose only offense is that they vote the wrong ticket. The word should be saved for use in cases where it applies, as it does to members of our Ku Klux Klan, for instance, whose beliefs and practices are identical with Fascism.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there is a certain quality in Fascism which is quite close to a certain quality in nationalism. Fascism is openly against people-in-general, in favor of people-in-particular. Nationalism, although in theory not dedicated to such an idea, actually works against people-in-general because of its preoccupation with people-in-particular. It reminds one of Fascism, also, in its determination to stabilize its own position by whatever haphazard means present themselves--by treaties, policies, balances, agreements, pacts, and the jockeying for position which is summed up in the term 'diplomacy.' This doesn't make an America Firster a Fascist. It simply makes him, in our opinion, a man who hasn't grown into his pants yet. The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet. Once you see it, you never forget it.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“It was the large number of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight. And it was against this nocturnal organization that the newspapers of the North cried out most loudly, never realizing the tragic necessity that brought it into being. The North wanted every member of the Ku Klux hunted down and hanged, because they had dared take the punishment of crime into their own hands at a time when the ordinary processes of law and order had been overthrown by the invaders.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.

This characterization is necessarily general. It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism. America had a master race in the antebellum South. Reestablishing it with a resurgent Klan and a totally disenfranchised lower class would realize the dream of too many extremists on the right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“I may be a famous writer but when white people clinch to their wallet and stare at me with scorn I need to ask my skin why.”
― Daniel Marques

“Brandolini's law, developed in the context of twenty-first social media, is equally applicable to 1920s Klan-speak: 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it.”
― Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition

“Considering these precursors, a debate has arisen about which country spawned the earliest fascist movement. France is a frequent candidate. Russia has been proposed. Hardly anyone puts Germany first. It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans in 1867 by the Radical Reconstructionists, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in the eyes of the Klan’s founders, no longer defended their community’s legitimate interests. By adopting a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified in the cause of their group’s destiny,88 the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. It should not be surprising, after all, that the most precocious democracies—the United States and France—should have generated precocious backlashes against democracy.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“You don't fight America…You get America’s Democratic and Republican parties to fight each other... and destroy each other. Worst case scenario…the enemy can slip thru the back door while they are fight like third graders.
~~High Commander Mustafa”
― James Morris Robinson, Accelerant...The Sixth Extinction

“If it takes just one election to reverse hundreds of years of social progress, then that society never progressed in the first place.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Hatred taught. Detestation learned. A beautiful cherub, like kindling, set to burn.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“One owl turns her head above the Cuckoo's Nest.”
― Petra Hermans

“Ebenezer Scrooge was written by Charles Dickens and not because of Salman Rushdie.”
― Petra Hermans, Voor een betere wereld

“Even cruel acts such as those that were committed by the Ku Klux Klan, rapists, and the Nazis fall under the umbrella of ‘the pursuit of happiness’.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“There are millions who have never joined, but who think and feel and, when called on, will fight with us," Evans wrote. "This is our real strength, and no one who ignores it can hope to understand America today.”
― Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

“While Jim kept pitching God, Race and Nation, Velma showed me snapshots of her grandchildren. She talked about her crafts shop, the macramé she'd made for Christmas, and an upcoming cross-burning she hoped to attend. Before going, Velma had to pass an exam that would qualify her for full citizenship in the Realm. "It's like a driver's test where they try and foul you up," she said. "I need to know the whole book of knowledge. Like if someone asks, 'Why do we hate Jews?' I didn't know before, but I found out. It was Jews that put Christ on the cross."

If she passed the exam--and avoided Klan infractions, such as committing a felony or sleeping with a black man--Velma would don a satin hood and robe for the cross-burning, which marked her full "naturalization" into the Klan.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“[Shelby] Foote also displayed an intricate sympathy for the early KKK, which ex-Confederates formed immediately after the [Civil] War to combat what they regarded as the cruel excesses of Reconstruction. "The Klan takes some careful talking about, it's easy to misinterpret what I'm fixing to say," Foote cautioned. "But in some ways the Klan was very akin to the Free French Resistance to Nazi occupation. To expect people who fought as valiantly as these people did to roll over and play dead because there was an occupying army is kind of crazy."

Foote also admired Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan's first Imperial Wizard, a slave trader before the War, and a rebel commander who allegedly permitted the slaughter of surrendering black troops at a battle called Fort Pillow. Foote regarded Forrest as one of the "two authentic geniuses" of the War (Lincoln being the other). A daring cavalry commander, Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general in the course of the War, and his lightning tactics later inspired Rommel's use of blitzkrieg in World War II.

In Foote's view, Forrest was also "a fine man. My black friends abhor him. They want to take his statue down, dig up his and his wife's bones, and throw them to the wind. But it is not known generally that he dissolved the Klan when it turned ugly."

Disbanded around 1870 (owing not only to Forrest, but also to a government crackdown), the Klan revived in 1915 following the success of the movie Birth of a Nation and quickly became a potent force nationwide. "The Klan that people remember today is the Klan of the 1920s," Foote said. "Anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-black. Forrest's Klan was anti-black but not opposed to all black people. It was trying to keep illiterate blacks from occupying positions like sheriff and judge.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“The [Vicksburg, Mississippi] courthouse survived with only one hit, and now housed Vicksburg’s city museum. It was the most eccentric—and politically incorrect—collection I’d yet visited in the South. In the “Confederate Room,” alongside a piece of original hardtack and a copy of the Vicksburg Citizen printed on wallpaper because newsprint ran out, I found a pair of Confederate trousers “made by a plantation mammy” and a photograph of a Southern matron with “her slaves who refused to accept freedom.” An exhibit on Jefferson Davis, who delivered his first public speech on the courthouse grounds, stated: “There was a very special relationship between Jefferson Davis and his slaves. He was not only their master but also their friend.” Another display pointed out: “Ironically, Gen. U.S. Grant was a slave owner while Gen. Robert E. Lee freed his slaves.”

This last was a hoary bit of Southern propaganda. Grant’s in-laws were Missourians who owned slaves before the War; Grant acquired one from them and set him free a year later. As for Lee, the slaves in question were those his wife inherited in October 1857, with the stipulation that Lee, as executor, emancipate them within five years. Lee missed the deadline and didn’t free the slaves until December 29, 1863.

In another room, I found a Ku Klux Klan hood with eye holes and a red tassel. “The Klan’s purpose was to rid the South of the carpetbag-scalawag-black governments, which were often corrupt,” the accompanying text said. “Atrocities were sometimes attributed to the Klan by unscrupulous individuals.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War