KKK Was Terrorizing America Decades Before Islamic State Appeared

When Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) returned home from a trip to the Middle East in October, he offered a reflection on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, to the Bangor Daily News:

“My characterization of ISIS is that they have 14th century ethics and 21st century weapons,” he said.

King and others who have reached into the Middle Ages for an apt Islamic State comparison may be going back further than they need to. The 19th and 20th centuries work just as well.

For David Pilgrim, the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, the actions of ISIS and other extremist groups are familiar — no better, no worse than the historic stateside violence against African-Americans.

“There’s nothing you’re going to see today that’s not going to have already occurred in the U.S.,” he said. “If you think of these groups that behead now — first of all, beheading is barbaric but it’s no more or less barbaric than some of the lynchings that occurred in the U.S.”

The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic terror organization from its beginning, said Pilgrim, who finds it offensive when, after 9/11, some Americans would bemoan that terrorism had finally breached U.S. borders.

“That is ignoring and trivializing — if not just summarily dismissing — all the people, especially the peoples of color in this country, who were lynched in this country; who had their homes bombed in this country; who were victims of race riots,” he said.

Victims of lynching were often burned, castrated, shot, stabbed and, in some cases, beheaded. Bodies were then hung or dragged through towns for display.

“It’s not just that you’re killing this person, for one reason or another. It’s that you’re warning all the rest,” Potok said. “It was message crime. It was supposed to send a message to black people in Alabama, and elsewhere, that if you do things like set black cop killers free, we will kill you.”

While current terror organizations abroad are fighting to upset the existing conditions of their societies, the Klan aimed to maintain the status quo being threatened by a rapidly growing social movement.

The goal of first- and third-era Klan groups was to return to a time when “men were men, women were women, and black people knew their place,” according to Potok.

“The radical right, in general in the United States, was — until the end of the civil rights movement — essentially restorationist,” he said. “The Klan, and most other groups of those years … wanted to turn back the clock.”

Knowles testified in 1984 during a civil rights lawsuit filed against the Klan by Beulah Mae Donald, Michael Donald’s mother, that one of the purposes of the killing was to “show Klan strength in Alabama.”

Mobile’s black community got the message loud and clear.

“They come out and let us know they in full bloom … How do you think that made us feel? It was like they can do anything they wanna do,” she said. “They sent a message to us saying, ‘Y’all think that it’s gone away. [That] we’ve left — we still here.’ Cause we didn’t think they’d do something like that.”

The Huffington Post