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Ku Klux Klan

Sickened by a lynching he witnessed as a boy, Tom Landrum joined the Klan and risked his life to provide evidence on murder of Civil Rights activist Vernon Dahmer.

Text  TK excerpt from recent book, When Evil Lived in Laurel (WW Norton). Landrum's testimony led to convictions in the murder of Vernon Dahmer  Visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Dahmer    
Correll and Gosden—later to become famous as Amos ’n Andy—were originally song pluggers in Chicago.

Although marred by the grisly murders of three young activists, the Freedom Summer of 1964 brought revolutionary changes to Mississippi and the nation

On the first day of summer in 1964, three young activists piled into a blue station wagon in Meridian, Mississippi, and headed into Klan country. Across America, it was Father’s Day, a lazy holiday of picnics, barbecues, and doubleheaders.

At the apex of its power, the Ku Klux Klan staged an enormous march on Washington in 1925 

On August 8 some forty thousand white-robed members of the Ku Klux Klan marched peacefully up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in what the Washington Post called “one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.” Enthusiastic
For a sense of the continuity of the of the terrorist tradition in America, consider this actual sequence of events: The FBI smashes a dead-serious plot to overthrow the federal government and reveals that for more than a year the right-wing militias involved
I read with interest Bernard A. Weisberger’s article about the Ku Klux Klan in the April issue (“In the News”). I generally agree with everything he says after the first two paragraphs but I would offer the following additional information about one brief period of time.

In the 1920s, the Klan expanded by targeting Catholics, Jews, and foreigners as well as blacks. But eventually it collided with fundamental American values.

 

Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post-Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study

President Roosevelt had failed to “pack” a hostile Supreme Court, and now the first New Dealer he named to that high bench stood accused of being a lifetime member of the infamous Ku Klux Klan

It was 1924 and the Klan was riding high. The author’s father, a congressman, wouldn’t join, and this Is how It felt to be an outcast in one’s own home town that summer.

When I think of the nineteen twenties, I think of the heat of summers in southern Indiana where I spent my vacations from Harvard. They were mostly happy summers, but there was one that was not—the summer of 1924, which came at the end of my freshman year.

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