Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s

University of California Press

Gender and sexuality were compelling symbols in the two largest waves of the Ku Klux Klan, those of the 1860s and the 1920s. Although the post-Civil War Klan's agenda of racial terrorism differed considerably from the racist, nativist politics of the Klan in the early twentieth century, at times both groups used a similar rhetoric of gender and sexuality. Each Klan summoned white men to protect threatened white womanhood and white female purity. Both dissolved a myriad of social, economic, and racial issues into powerful symbols of womanhood and sexual virtue.

Political symbols like those of the KKK are complex. A single symbol can compress a multitude of meanings. Some layers of meaning are clear, others ambiguous. One meaning may contradict another, either intentionally or inadvertently. As a form of communication, political symbols exist in the relation between sender and receiver. The audience's own assumptions and attitudes shape its reception of symbolic messages, so different receivers understand the same symbol differently. Some audiences receive the message intended by the sender, others do not. The representation of political symbols is also unstable over time. Symbols convey meanings that are embedded within a historical context; they may convey very different meanings at different periods. To understand political symbols, it is important to examine these three aspects: the underlying as well as the explicit message, the received as well as the intended message, and the historical contexts in which symbols are created and in which they are received.

These aspects of symbolic communication help us understand the apparent historical continuity in political symbolism between the first and second Klans. The message conveyed by symbols of white womanhood to the all-male Reconstruction-era Klan came through quite differently to a second Klan organized during the campaign for women's suffrage. The first Klan used symbols of imperiled womanhood to represent assault on Southern white men's racial privileges and regional autonomy. The second Klan, too, tried at first to use white womanhood to symbolize threatened religious, national, and racial supremacy. But newly won female enfranchisement and women's political experience complicated this strategy.

From the rallying cry of Southern white female vulnerability in the postbellum first KKK to the ambivalent call for women's rights in the second one, symbols of gender and sexuality blurred conflicts over race, religion, nationality, and region. Masculinity and femininity were not simply abstractions of individual persons; rather, they summarized and masked a complex system of privilege and subordination of which gender relations were only one aspect. Understanding the contradictory role of women in the second Klan movement requires an examination of both gender politics and symbolism in the Reconstruction-era Klan and the conditions under which women were invited to join the Klan in the 1920s.

The First Ku Klux Klan

From the beginning, the rituals and organized terrorism of the first KKK were based on symbols of violent white masculinity and vulnerable white femininity. When the KKK was organized in Tennessee immediately after the Civil War, it summoned defeated sons of the Confederacy to defend the principles of white supremacy against interference by Northerners and retaliation by freed black slaves. As it grew from a prankish club of dejected soldiers to a loosely knit and highly secret vigilante terrorist network in the defeated Southern states, the Klan continued to merge ideas of sexual menace with those of racial and political danger.1

During the late 1860s the Klan spread its reign of terror throughout Southern and border states. Gangs of Klansmen threatened, flogged, and murdered countless black and white women and men. But the Klan's violence was not arbitrary. It applied terror to bolster the crum-

bling foundations of Southern supremacy against political inroads by blacks, Republicans, and Northern whites. Schoolteachers, revenue collectors, election officials, and Republican officeholders—those most involved with dismantling parts of the racial state—as well as all black persons, were the most common targets of Klan terror.2 The KKK was particularly expert in the use of sexual violence and brutality. Klan mobs humiliated white Southern Republicans ("scalawags") by sexually abusing them. Klansmen routinely raped and sexually tortured women, especially black women, during "kluxing" raids on their households. Widely reported acts of lynching, torture, and sexual mutilation intimidated Klan opponents and terrorized its enemies.3

The secrecy and juvenile rituals of the early KKK borrowed heavily from the long tradition of male fraternal societies. Men bound themselves to one another through allegiances of race, gender, and a shared desire to preserve the racial state of the South in the face of military defeat. Even the Klan's name, derived from the Greek kuklos (circle), reinforced its quest for white male commonality across divisions of social class and local status.4 Although the Klan's politics would become fervently anti-Catholic over time, the first Klan created a culture whose costumes and secret ritual mimicked the symbolism and ritual of the male-based hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church. It barred white women (and all nonwhites) from membership, just as the Southern polity did. If the abuse and exclusion of blacks reinforced an ethos of racial power, strength, and invulnerability among the fraternity of white Klansmen so, too, the exclusion of white women served to celebrate and solidify the masculinity of racial politics.5

Although women did not participate openly in the actions of the first KKK, the idea of "white womanhood" was a crucial rallying point for postbellum Klan violence. Klansmen insisted that white women benefited from the Southern racial state, even as strict gender hierarchies within white society ensured that women would not be consulted on this matter. In an appearance in 1871 before the U.S. Senate, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard, argued that the Klan was needed because Southern whites faced great insecurity. He pointed dramatically at a situation in which "ladies were ravished by some of these negroes, who were tried and put in the penitentiary, but were turned out in a few days afterward."6

This theme of imperiled Southern white womanhood echoed throughout writings by the first KKK and its apologists. White

women, especially widows living alone on isolated plantations, were highly visible symbols through which the Klan could rouse public fears that blacks' retaliation against their former white masters would be exacted upon white daughters, wives, and mothers. Without the Klan, white men were powerless to assist white women who faced frightful sexual violations by newly freed black men:

We note the smile of helpless masculinity give but feebly assuring answer to its mate's frown of distressful inquiry, as the sullen roll of the drum and the beastly roar of the savage rasp the chords of racial instinct. As we watch the noble countenance of modest, innocent Southern maidenhood...