The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or simply the Klan, is the name of three distinct movements in the United States that have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, anti-immigration, and, especially in later iterations, Nordicism, anti-Catholicism, and antisemitism. The first Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. The second group was founded in 1915, and it flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, particularly in urban areas of the Midwest and West. The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after 1950, in the form of small, local, unconnected groups that use the KKK name. It is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. (More from Wikipedia)
“Only a Pawn in Their Game” by Bob Dylan is about the murder (Wikipedia calls it an “assassination”, and that is not really an overstatement) of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in his own driveway. The conviction of the unrepentant Klansman Byron de la Beckwith for the murder took place in Mississippi in 1994; two other trials of this man 30 years earlier resulted in hung juries. I don’t know how much visibility this murder has in other parts of the country, but it is still pretty fresh in Mississippi. One reason is that Medgar’s widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams is a civil rights activist in her own right – she was on the local news just this month.
(May 2013)
In a 2005 reminiscence by Maureen Cleave, called “The John Lennon I Knew” (published in The Daily Telegraph), she recalls a 1978 interview (as reported in Wikipedia) where Lennon said: “If I hadn’t said [that] and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas! God bless America. Thank you, Jesus.”
(September 2014)
