How Did The Ku Klux Klan Influence The Government

Continual Immurement

The third decade of the twentieth century quickly evolved into a roaring lion of new ideas, customs, and inventions. Automobiles became a common form of transportation, leading to more paved roads and pathways. Billboards with colorful advertisements ran alongside crowded highways. Flappers, a fashion trend popular with young women, wore shorter clothes and practiced a breakaway from older, traditional values. Jazz music became popular in Speakeasies, bars that sold alcohol illegally during the Prohibition era. Large baseball stadiums were built. The popularization of radio opened up more public radio stations, broadcasting music for the whole nation to tune in to. More and more people moved into big cities, and the
This wasn’t permanent, however. In 1915, a “second Klan” was formed, and continued terrorizing the nation, much like KKK members sixty years prior. This Klan had slightly different motives, nonetheless. African Americans were still hated and abused by the group, in addition to the Jewish and Catholic population. To influence in the government itself, Klan members would reach out to as many people as possible to vote KKK members into government positions. The term “Invisible Empire” was used to describe how powerful the KKK was in state governments, sometimes having enough in power to control governments in major cities (such as Portland, Oregon). The Klan had sizable power in some areas, as mentioned by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Shape of Fear, “The leader of the local Klan [in Akron, Ohio] was president of the Board of Education and had just been tremendously busied in driving a Jew out of the public schools. The Mayor, the secretary of the Y.M.C.A., prominent men in many walks of life, were either open Klansmen or secret sympathizers. I was too astonished to talk. Throughout parts of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana I found a similar state of affairs.” The Klan essentially believed that any person that is not white (primarily of English origin) and Protestant doesn’t belong in the United States. Hiram Wesley Evans, an Imperial
Laws were created to protect these newly freed men, but that didn’t stop southern governments from striking back. Plessy V. Ferguson, a landmark constitutional law marking the sincere beginning of the Jim Crow Era, and putting the idea of “separate but equal” into play. Separate but equal lead to increased segregation, in specific, uniform patterns. Most of these segregations wouldn’t be lifted until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Schools in the south weren’t segregated previously, but the separate but equal added colored branches into school districts. Black Americans weren’t allowed to marry whites, sit next to whites on the bus, or even buy beer or wine in the same room as whites. Restaurants often had signs stating “No Dogs, Negroes, Mexicans.” They couldn’t work in the same room as whites or come through the same door. African Americans were forced to use separate train cars, and it was even illegal to share a car with a white man. Some black Americans attempted to combat this, such as the Baker family who moved to an all-white neighborhood. Pictures from the time period display young white boys young and threatening the innocent family. Separate but equal, despite “equal” being in the title, many separations were not equal. Colored schools had less funding, sometimes up to three times less than their white counterparts,