How Scots founded Ku Klux Klan ‘to serenade pretty girls’
THEY were the sinister hooded figures synonymous with race hatred in the US. But a new BBC documentary claims the founders of the Ku Klux Klan originally only intended to serenade girls.
The group was formed in the 1860s by six former Confederate officers of Scottish and Irish descent after they returned from the Civil War.
The fraternal society they set up in Pulaski, Tennessee, later became the most feared racist hate organisation in America.
Speaking on Scotland and the Klan, Pulaski historian Bob Wamble tells Scots presenter Neil Oliver: ‘They were all Confederate soldiers who had just come home and just didn’t have anything better to do than to form an organisation, just for amusement.
‘They played their musical instruments, sang songs and went out and serenaded the girls. They were out hunting all the pretty girls in Pulaski. In its very first stages, that’s all it was.’
Oliver said he had often celebrated the disproportionate impact Scots have had on the history of other countries. But in the hourlong documentary he investigates a darker legacy and the links between racism today in the American Deep South and Scots immigrants.
Throughout the 18th century, hundreds of thousands of Scots emigrated to America. Many who resented being cleared from their land embraced the opportunity the arrival of cotton gave to become slave masters and, for a few, wealthy plantation owners.
When their world was threatened, the Southern States opted for secession and war rather than, as they saw it, being dictated to by the Federal government. In Pulaski, a small opera house built in 1867 sheds light on the transformation of the group set up by the former Confederate officers from the theatrical to the sinister.
Elaine Frantz Parsons, Associate Professor of History at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, tells Oliver that what began with make-believe in the theatre was transformed to violence via minstrel shows.
She says: ‘I think part of what happened was they realised this play they were doing could be brought to bear on this problem they were having with black claims to rights. If you were in the 19th century and you’re going to the theatre, a lot of the time you were going to a minstrel show.
‘A minstrel show wasn’t all about making fun of black people but that was an important part of it.
‘Part of what the Klan wanted to do was to force black people into situations where they looked ludicrous or ridiculous – and what better way to do that than to pretend like you’re a monster and attack them and then tell everybody how scared they were by this monster.’
As the Ku Klux Klan spread from Pulaski, replica societies were formed, inflicting violence and intimidation on black people.
Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, tells the programme: ‘I think that white Southerners do think of themselves as Celts. It is absolutely a core idea for a lot of these white supremacist groups, including the original Klan, which of course was thinking of Scottish clans with a “c” when they called themselves the Ku Klux Klan with a “k”.’
Scotland and the Klan, BBC Two Scotland, Tuesday, October 4, 9pm.