Civil War

The revived Ku Klux Klan was merely the most obvious and sinister symptom of general and widespread discrimination. The new Ku Klux Klan opposed many more groups than the blacks opposed by the first Ku Klux Klan. The first Ku Klux Klan group only discriminated against blacks and they weren’t known as the most discriminating group unlike the revived Ku Klux Klan. The revived group of the Ku Klux Klan not only discriminated African Americans, but Immigrants, Catholics, and Jews as well. Even though the revival of the KKK was short-lived, they caused a lot of damage. The Klan put their beliefs into the practice of terrorizing those people they disliked.

The KKK group operated throughout the South during the Reconstruction era. The Ku Klux Klan’s long history of violence grew out of the resentment and hatred many white southerners felt in the aftermath of the Civil War. Blacks, having won the struggle for freedom from slavery, were now faced with a new struggle against widespread racism and the terrorism of the Klan. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized African Americans by putting fear into their lives. The Ku Klux Klan enjoyed terrorizing their homes, beatings, whippings, as well as lynching male members of the family and making the surviving members get them down. Many poor farmers and laborers thought that their wages would increase if they drove the Black people out of their state. Black people were a lot cheaper to employ as they were forced to work for lower wages than white people due to their skin color. They used to parade through the streets where black people lived carrying blazing torches and crosses.

The massive immigration of Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe led to fears among protestants about the new people, and especially about job and social competition. Since the immigrants were competition to the members of the Ku Klux Klan they also terrorized them to scare them away. The message was very clear, the new Klan was going to mean