Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Hood Fitting

Ms. Ruth personally sews one robe a day. She works 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She has 1 to 3 helpers at times. The person to be fitted measures themselves, fills out the tailoring chart, and mails in the order. It takes 4 to 6 weeks for delivery. Here she puts the final touches on a red Klan hood.

Child Wears Klan Robe

A young child wears a new white Klan robe made by Ms. Ruth.

MoJo Photo Blog: Aryan Outfitters, April 9, 2008
Aryan Outfitters
Meet the Ku Klux Klan’s seamstress of hate couture.
Photos and text by Anthony Karen
Audio produced by Peter Meredith and Gary Moskowitz

Coming from five generations of Mississippi Ku Klux Klan members, 58-year-old “Ms. Ruth” sews hoods and robes for Klan members seven days a week, blessing each one when it’s done. A red satin outfit for an Exalted Cyclops, the head of a local chapter, costs about $140. She uses the earnings to help care for her 40-year-old quadriplegic daughter, “Lilbit,” who was injured in a car accident 10 years ago.

The following is a photo essay about Ms. Ruth by New York photojournalist Anthony Karen, a former Marine who has spent several years photographing members of the Ku Klux Klan. The essay includes audio of interviews with Karen and Ms. Ruth.

Eric Foner, A Massacre and a Travesty – washingtonpost.com, March 23, 2008

Unbeknownst to most Americans, our nation’s history includes home-grown terrorism as well as attacks from abroad. Scholars estimate that during Reconstruction, the turbulent period that followed the Civil War, upwards of 3,000 persons were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. That’s roughly the same number of Americans who have died at the hands of Osama bin Laden.

In the last generation, no part of the American past has undergone a more complete scholarly reinterpretation than Reconstruction. Once portrayed as a tragic era of rampant misgovernment presided over by unscrupulous carpetbaggers and ignorant former slaves, Reconstruction is today seen as a noble, if flawed, experiment in interracial democracy, an effort to provide free blacks with land, education and political rights. The tragedy is not that Reconstruction was attempted, but that it failed.

Harper’s Weekly

An engraving depicting an agent of the Freedman’s Bureau as a peacemaker between blacks and whites after the Civil War.

William Grimes, The Bloody Shirt – Stephen Budiansky – Book Review – New York Times, Jan. 30, 2008

In April 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, putting an end to four years of savage internecine conflict and settling the issue of slavery forever. “The war is over,” Grant said. “The rebels are our countrymen again.”

Not quite. As Stephen Budiansky reminds us in “The Bloody Shirt,” his impassioned account of Southern resistance to Reconstruction, the war was won, but the peace, up for grabs, would be lost, done in by Southern intransigence and Northern apathy.“In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war,” Albion Tourgée, a North Carolina state judge, said caustically in 1879. “The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.” Just how the trick was done is Mr. Budiansky’s subject, as seen through the eyes of a handful of men dedicated to creating a just, biracial society in the South. If “Profiles in Courage” had not already been taken, it would have made the perfect title for this linked set of portraits honoring five men who risked everything to fight for the principles that had cost so many lives. It is an inspiring yet profoundly dispiriting story.

All but one, the brilliant Confederate general James Longstreet, are unknown today. Prince R. Rivers, a literate former slave, was a South Carolina legislator and a judge in a largely black town, Hamburg, a target of white wrath. Adelbert Ames, a Union war hero, served as governor of Mississippi until, after a campaign of violence and fraud, he was driven from office by impeachment in 1875.

Albert T. Morgan, a Union veteran who earned particular scorn by marrying a black woman, came to Mississippi to seek his fortune and stayed to serve as a state legislator and sheriff of Yazoo County. Lewis Merrill, an Army major, was sent to the South to put down violence by the Ku Klux Klan and the white rifle clubs engaged in a spreading insurgency.

All five men would fail. They would witness, as Ames put it, “the political death of the Negro.”

Mr. Budiansky, a military historian, does not inspire confidence at the outset. In a fierce prologue he reviews the sorry record of white resistance to Reconstruction, a campaign of terror that took the lives of more than 3,000 freedmen and their white allies, and heaps scorn on those who would invoke wounded Southern honor as a defense.

Jonathan Yardley, washingtonpost.com, January 27, 2008

Review of THE BLOODY SHIRT: Terror After Appomattox, By Stephen Budiansky.Viking. 322 pp. $27.95

The decade-long period known as Reconstruction, which began shortly after the Civil War and ended with the presidential election of 1876, probably has been subjected to more misinterpretation, misunderstanding and outright factual distortion than any other time in American history. For a variety of reasons, including white Southern mythologizing and national indifference to the desperate situation of the former slaves, beginning in the late 19th century fictions about Reconstruction gained not merely wide popular acceptance but also the endorsement of many prominent historians, who gave them legitimacy and staying power.

These fictions presented the white South not as instigator, perpetuator and defender of black slavery, but as the victim of politically motivated mistreatment by “carpetbaggers” and other outsiders dispatched by Radical Republicans in Washington to wreak vengeance on the South. By contrast with the rapacious industrial North, the South was portrayed as — in the words of one historian — “a garden for the cultivation of all that was grand in oratory, true in science, sublime and beautiful in poetry and sentiment, and enlightened and profound in law and statesmanship.” Slavery metamorphosed from a “peculiar” institution into a benevolent one, and it was argued that only the South could hope to help the former slaves because “the Southern white man is the only man on earth who understands the Negro character.” If only the North had left the South to settle its own problem, the fictions contended, everything would have been fine. If Reconstruction failed, the fault lay solely with the North.

I remember all too well being force-fed this poppycock in the late 1950s at the University of North Carolina by a distinguished old professor who so ardently embraced the anti-Reconstruction argument that he might as well have been waving the bloody shirt, a time-honored phrase employed by political demagogues to accuse their opponents of association with violence. As Stephen Budiansky notes at the outset of this book, “the fiction that Northerners were given to making fetishes of bloodstained tokens of their victimhood at Southern hands” was just that — a fiction — but it gained wide currency in the white South during Reconstruction as a metaphor for what was seen as the cruelty, cowardice and hypocrisy of the Northern conquerors. Obviously, there was no such thing as a monolithic “white South,” and opinion on these matters was scarcely unanimous, but “distorted memories of Reconstruction” were more the rule than the exception, even among many white Southerners who were more open to sectional reconciliation than were the diehards.

Munson: Condoleeza Rice did not foresee that invading Iraq would strengthen the very Islamists the invasion was supposed to weaken and for years she ignored the critical importance of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even now that she has begin focusing on this issue, the Annapolis conference she organized was poorly timed and unproductive. Moreover, her statement that “like the Israelis,” she knows what it is like to be “afraid to go to your church,” was remarkably naive. All of this notwithstanding, however, it is clear that Rice understands the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that President Bush never has.

Rice, Israeli Official Share Perspectives – washingtonpost.com, November 29, 2007

Rice began by saying she did not want to draw historical parallels or be too self-reflective, but as a young girl she grew up in Birmingham, Ala., “at a time of separation and tension.”

She noted that a local church was bombed by white separatists, killing four girls, including a classmate of hers.

“Like the Israelis, I know what it is like to go to sleep at night, not knowing if you will be bombed, of being afraid to be in your own neighborhood, of being afraid to go to your church,” she said.

But, she added, as a black child in the South, being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, she also understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians.

“I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian,” she said. “I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness.”

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

The people in this picture no longer belong to the Klan. The man has died and the two women are now active in their church.

“Hardly a day passes I don’t think about it,” the Rev. John H. Cross Jr. said of the 1963 bombing at his Birmingham, Ala., church, which killed four girls. (By Renee Hannans — Atlanta Journal-constitution Via Associated Press)

Rev. John Cross Jr.; Pastor at Bombed Church, WP, November 18, 2007

The Rev. John H. Cross Jr., who was pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, when four girls at his church were killed in a bombing that became a turning point in the civil rights movement, died Nov. 15 at DeKalb Medical at Hillandale, in Lithonia, Ga. He was 82 and had had a series of strokes in recent years.

Rev. Cross was named pastor of the venerable Birmingham church in 1962 after serving at a Baptist church in Richmond. Not previously identified as a civil rights activist, he appeared to be a good match for the conservative black church, which was known for its educated congregation.

But when he stepped off the train in Birmingham and tried to hail a taxicab, Rev. Cross encountered a level of racial animosity he hadn’t seen anywhere else.”[I] don’t drive coloreds,” a white taxi driver told him, according to a 1991 article in the Boston Globe.

“I’ll tell you what,” Rev. Cross said, leaning in the window. “I’m coming here to pastor a church. Before I leave here, you’ll be hauling anybody who wants to be hauled.”

With the encouragement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Cross made his church a rallying point for the civil rights movement in one of the most volatile cities in the South. Birmingham had a strong Ku Klux Klan presence and had been shaken for years by an insidious, random violence that led to its infamous nickname, Bombingham.

The city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, was notorious for unleashing dogs and turning high-powered fire hoses on demonstrators. Many protesters were beaten in clashes with police.

On Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, Rev. Cross was at the church, preparing to deliver a sermon called “A Rock That Will Not Roll” for a youth worship service. At 10:22 a.m., an explosion shattered the morning calm, crumbling a brick wall and destroying the face of Jesus in a stained-glass window.

At first, Rev. Cross thought the church’s water heater had exploded, but he could smell the powder of explosives and hear anguished cries amid clouds of dust and smoke. As he and church members dug through rubble in the collapsed basement, he found the bodies of 11-year-old Denise McNair and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14.

ABC Radio National – Background Briefing: 3 April 2005 – Condoleezza, Condoleezza

Condoleezza Rice: I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of 4 young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair….

Condoleezza Rice: You may find this hard to believe, but I started school in 1960. I did not have a single white classmate, and I had one white teacher, until we moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1968. I remember too, my first trip to Nashville. I was 7 or so years old, and we travelled here to Fisk University to hear the Fisk Jubilee Singers. There would have been no thought of dinner in a restaurant, or lodging in a hotel. No, the American South was still quite separate and quite unequal.

Maine Memory Network: Item 23229, Full Page View

Maine Memory Network: Item 1264, Full Page View

Maine Memory Network: Item 1265, Full Page View