I was 19, I believe, when I first encountered the Ku Klux Klan.
I had grown up in Mississippi, had read about the klan in books, and knew it still existed somewhere. But it wasn’t until I moved away from home to Lafayette, Louisiana, for a newspaper job, that I first met a hooded klansman. He wasn’t particularly frightening in person, but he knew something that the klan – and more modern extremists – understand well: it’s the image that counts.
His name was Darrell Flynn, and he had a show on the local public-access television station. The studio was only a few blocks from the newspaper office, so one day I went to see him live. There he sat, garbed in a flowing, purple silk robe and hood. His show was a how-to sort; he would sit facing the camera with silent robed lieutenants on his left and right, and demonstrate skills such as how to clean one’s guns.
People tuned in to watch him not because they needed firearms advice, or even because they were racist. They watched for the spectacle.
That’s the theme of a new book called White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan, by Tom Rice. In it, Rice sets out how the propagandist power of the klan has always lay in its spectacle; in its regalia, and hoods, and fiery crosses.
He focuses on the KKK’s history with cinema, but addresses other media from print to radio to theatre. Rice is an academic, a professor at St Andrews University in Scotland, and it shows. The book is not a gripping page-turner, and it stays within the dusty confines of the past. But within it, for the careful reader, lies a lesson on how extremists spread their hatred under other banners today.
Perhaps the greatest success for the klan image lies in its cinematic portrayal in Birth of a Nation, the iconic 1915 film. Birth of a Nation was a Chimera, a strange creature of two parts almost never seen together: creative genius and racist nonchalance. With brilliance and innovation it told the romanticized story of the original klan, which formed in the wake of the Civil War and disbanded after only a couple of years.
Our modern imagery of the klan – the white hoods and robes, the flaming crosses –were not real. They were inventions of DW Griffith, the film-maker, who was conjuring ideas of an organization that had gone defunct two generations prior.
But his imagery was so potent – so spectacular – that it stirred a new generation of klansmen to mount up. On the film’s release in Atlanta – a century ago this year – about a dozen men climbed Stone Mountain outside the city and essentially acted out the drama of the movie. They wore the hoods and robes, lit a 16ft cross, swore various oaths and brandished a Confederate sword left over from the civil war.
Art had driven reality, but that quickly reversed. Using Birth as a recruitment tool, over the next few years the klan exploded from the handful of members on that Georgia hilltop to about five million across the nation. The klan made several unsuccessful attempts to re-create Birth of a Nation and, failing that, tried to persuade its director, Griffith, to make them another one. He refused.
Soon, the klan took to demonizing Hollywood, which it saw as a nest of Jewish and Catholic enemies.
Through an estimated 24 klan-owned print newspapers in 16 states, the klan took on films such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim, which one klan paper called a “willful, deliberate, cunning piece of propaganda that is going on daily” by “certain Jew picture-show magnates”. Unlike other critics, the KKK would send out riders to demonstrate against movies it didn’t like, and in some instances it was able to have certain films shut down, or heavily edited.
But the klan paid for this campaign. In the many years that followed, mainstream media portrayed the klan as menacing and dangerous, and then later bumbling and foolish.
These range from 1937’s Black Legion, starring a young, unknown Humphrey Bogart, to more recent examples such as O Brother Where Art Thou? and Django Unchained.
The media tactics Rice describes remain relevant, and maybe more now than in the 1920s. The most obvious modern parallel is Isis, the radical Islamist terror group that, like the klan, seems to understand that spectacle is important; the group announced its existence to the world with a series of gruesome videos. And in physical appearance seems to be a photo negative of the klan itself: black masks, black banners.
Closer to home, new forms of media – once used by the klan to capitalize on geography – are now used by extremists to overcome it. The klan used movies and plays as centers where like-minded people could gather. But today the Internet transcends and overcomes geographical shortcomings. In June, 21-year-old Dylann Roof shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. At the time South Carolina came under national scrutiny for breeding Roof’s hatred. But a look at the manifesto he left behind shows he drew his rage from elsewhere:
“I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.”
