White Supremacy in America

Paper Summary:

This paper begins by describing the strong influence white supremacist groups used to have in the United States, while questioning whether this influence still exists. In the years following the defeat of the Confederacy by the Union, resistance to Reconstruction and changes in the status of former African slaves was to emerge throughout the American South. Supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of the White Camellia were formed in part by southern leaders in the 1860s to destroy the voting power of newly freed slaves and to do damage to carpetbag misrule. According to the paper, such organizations are restructuring themselves into survivalist groups that are calling for increased cultural separatism. The author further contends that such groups do exist and do exert an influence over American political and social systems, but their actual presence and influence in American life is most probably less than one might suspect.

From the Paper:

"It was, however, the formal resistance to the policies of Reconstruction in the form of the Klan that most troubled race relations in the South during an long after Reconstruction. Martin and Roberts (1989, pp. 501 -502) quote a historian of the Klan who asserted that it "whipped, shot, hanged, robbed, raped and otherwise outraged Negroes and Republicans across the South in the name of preserving white civilization." A major goal of the Klan was to intimidate Republican voters and electoral candidates (including those Blacks who were affiliated with the Party) and to restore Democrats to office."

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