27-34), Parsons shares the origins of the Ku-Klux Klan’s name and introduces its founding members. In the following excerpt from Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (pp. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and mass media of the North. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan’s mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group’s emergence have long remained shadowy. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku-Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group’s rise with startling acuity. Those who made and wore these costumes intended to define a new basis of southern white authority and to force freedpeople and their allies to acknowledge it.Įlaine Frantz Parsons is an associate professor of history at Duquesne University and the author of Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States and Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction.
Their varied costumes featured animal horns, fake facial hair, polka dots and reflective metals, blackface, and, often, women’s dress. Most “Ku-Klux” did not wear white uniforms like the Klan of the 1920s. It sought to disempower and control rural blacks not only directly through violence but also by using bizarre costume and performance to create a climate of terror that could be spread both by word of mouth and through the powerful national newspaper network.
Although there was nothing new about white violence against black southerners, the Ku-Klux Klan reworked violence in a way that would fit a modern post-slavery nation. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Ku-Klux Klan became the first broad-based domestic terrorist movement in the United States. On December 8, 2016, Elaine Frantz Parsons delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Horns, Masks, and Women's Dress: How the First Klan Used Costume to Build Domestic Terrorism.”
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