Content area
Full Text
Today's white supremacists view Klaners as clowns in sheets.
In me years following the Civil War blacks held considerable political power in southern states. The Ku Klux Klan was bom in an effort to terrorize the newly enfranchised black voter. Adopting the uniform of a white cloak and hood and the symbol of the burning cross, members of the KKK pillaged black neighborhoods and murdered black leaders. The cloak and hood, which served to hide me identity of me Klansmen, also frightened black southerners with a ghostly image of deadly terror. Violence against blacks was so widespread that President Ulysses S. Grant was...