EOTO Reaction: The Resurgence of the KKK in the 1960s

 With a dramatic resurgence in the 1960s the KKK grew in a drastic manor in order to combat the civil rights movement. After a turn table ruling in Brown V. Board of Education there was a major resistance in the south leading to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. 

The Klan soon found a way to mobilize there racial attacks. Tactics and Operations included violent intimidation, where Klan members burned crosses, bombed predominantly black areas, and arson. These were targeted attacks to discourage voting and civil rights participation.

With the rapid growth of media coverage the Klan used newspapers, flyers, and TV coverage to gain attention and recruit members. This was deemed appealing to many in the south with a strong hatred to the Civil Rights Movement. While the Klan provided a place where there were formal ranks, titles, committees, and meeting structures all tailored to racists in the south. 

Speaking of deep south ties the Klan was constantly provided institutional support from local law enforcement agents. Police officers, sheriffs, judges by day, Klan members by night. With an environment where the Klan was supported behind community powers like police offices and courtrooms there was extreme cases of violence that members of the Klan were able to get away with, and receive only a slap on the wrist. 

A perfect example being Mississippi Burning, in the summer of 1964, three young civil rights workers disappeared in the deep south of Mississippi. Investigating the burning of a black church the three workers were stopped by local law enforcement on a fabricated traffic violation. Detained and held in jail until nightfall the workers were released from jail, and were ambushed by members of the KKK. The workers innocently murdered, and their bodies were buried in an earthen dam. 

Another bone chilling Klan murder occurred in the summer of 1955, when a fourteen year old name Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi. Till, the teenager allegedly whistled/ flirted with a white woman working at a local grocery store- this seemed clear to the southerners that this was an obvious breach of the Jim Crown racial codes. Four days later, the woman from the stores husband and friends abducted Till from the home he was visiting. Proceeding to brutally beat, shoot in the head and finally throwing Tills body in the Tallahatchie. 

When his body was found three days later, his face was mutilated and was barley recognizable. His mother, made an action that rippled throughout the Civil Rights movement in holding an open-casket funeral in Chicago. In order to let the world see what had been done to her son. Thousands came to view his body in person and with photographs published by Jet magazine the nation was able to see for themselves what occurred in Money Mississippi.

The victims of Klan violence didn't die in vain. Their stories became powerful catalysts that pushed forward landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the scars of this era still linger in our communities today, the courage of those who fought against hatred—and those who sacrificed everything in that fight—proves that even in the face of overwhelming evil, the human spirit's demand for justice and equality cannot be extinguished.