What the history of the Ku Klux Klan can teach us about the Capitol riot – By Anna North (VOX) / January 14 2021
“It’s not going to stop with this,” a historian who studies the Klan explains.
The mob that gathered in Washington, DC, last Wednesday, culminating in the storming of the US Capitol and the deaths of at least five people, was initially dismissed by some as a bunch of “deadbeat dads, YouPorn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans.”
It might be tempting to think of the Capitol rioters as fringe elements, rejects and losers already on the margins of society. But that was far from the case. In attendance that day, it now appears, were several off-duty police officers. There was the CEO of a Chicago-area tech company, the son of a Brooklyn judge, and more than a dozen state lawmakers. And, of course, the mob was encouraged ahead of the riot by members of Congress and President Trump himself.
It all goes back to a larger truth about white supremacist movements in America: They haven’t been composed, as some claim, of poor white people disenfranchised by society. Instead, they’ve often included supposed pillars of the community — professionals, businesspeople, and especially law enforcement officials.
Indeed, all these were represented in one of the best-known white supremacist groups in American history, the Ku Klux Klan. Linda Gordon, a history professor at New York University and the author of The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, has studied the makeup of the group, especially during the 1920s when its activities became much more overt and open. And, she told Vox, the Klan, which at one point required the payment of significant entry fees, was “not an organization of poor people.”
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