Interview with Jeff Berry

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

I'm not associated with the KKK but this interview reveals a few interesting points... --CSR

Interview with The Ku Klux Klan: Jeff Berry
Imperial Wizard of The American Knights
by Mark Liberator (e-mail: www.AmericanKnights.com.

3 The KKK was formed as a social club by a group of Confederate Army veterans in Pulaski, Tenn., in 1865 or 1866. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate general, was the Klan's first leader, called the Grand Wizard. The group took its name from the Greek word kyklos, meaning circle, and the English word clan.
      Klan members, who believed in the superiority of whites, soon began to terrorize blacks to keep them from voting or exercising the other rights they had gained during Reconstruction, the period following the end of the American Civil War in 1865. The Klan threatened, beat, and murdered many blacks and their white sympathizers in the South. To hide their identity, Klan terrorists wore robes and hoods, draped sheets over their horses, and rode at night. The KKK spread rapidly throughout the Southern United States and became known as the Invisible Empire. Its attacks helped drive blacks out of Southern political life. In 1871, Congress passed the Force Bill, which gave the President the authority to use federal troops against the Klan. The KKK soon disappeared.
     In 1915, William J. Simmons, a former Methodist clergyman, organized a new Klan in Atlanta, Ga., as a patriotic, Protestant fraternal society. The Klan directed its activities against groups it considered un-American, including blacks, immigrants, Jews, and particularly Roman Catholics.
     The KKK grew rapidly and by the mid-1920's had more than 2 million members throughout the country. Some Klan members burned crosses and whipped, tortured, and murdered people whose activities angered them, but most relied on peaceful means. By electing public officials, the Klan became a powerful political force throughout the South and also in many Northern and Western states, including Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, and Oregon. However, public criticism of Klan violence and quarrels among Klan leaders weakened the organization. By the 1930's, only local Klan groups in the South remained strong. The organization died out again in 1944.
     Samuel Green, an Atlanta physician, revived the Klan in 1946. Green died in 1949, and the Klan then split into many competing groups. However, all of the groups opposed racial integration.
     Increased civil rights activities during the 1960's brought a new wave of Klan violence. Klan members were involved in many terrorist attacks, including the killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in which four black girls were killed. President Lyndon B. Johnson used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to probe the Klan. Some Klan members were sent to prison, and membership fell to about 5,000 by the early 1970's.
     Beginning in the mid-1970's, new leaders tried to give a more respectable image to competing Klan groups. Some accepted women as members and set up youth groups. The KKK especially appealed to whites who resented both special programs designed to help blacks and job competition from blacks and recent immigrants. Also in the 1970's, it largely abandoned its opposition to Roman Catholics.
     Klan membership rose to about 10,000 by 1980. The KKK still attracted people with extreme views who often used violence. In 1979, Klan members and their supporters killed five anti-Klan demonstrators in Greensboro, N.C. Klan members murdered a black youth in Mobile, Ala., in 1981. Since then, declining interest in the Klan and some prosecutions for illegal activities have reduced KKK membership to about 6,000. Most of these members live in the South.
     [Obtained from http://www.worldbook.com/fun/aajourny/html/bh057.html.]

4 See our article, In Defense of Change.

5 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Copyright 1981, p. 768) states: nigger 1: NEGRO — usu. taken to be offensive, 2: a member of any dark-skinned race — usu. taken to be offensive.


http://liberator.net/articles/KKKJeffBerry.html