A legacy of hatred: The repugnant history of the Ku Klux Klan

As a new documentary for PBS explores the poisonous ideology of the KKK, we must never drop our guard, writes James Rampton

Members of the Ku Klux Klan stand outside a courthouse lawn in Jasper, Texas (AFP/Getty)

It’s an image that cannot fail to shock. Sporting his organisation’s trademark conical white hood, a member of the Ku Klux with an insouciant cigarette dangling from his mouth is holding up a Black baby doll for the camera. It has a noose around its neck.

This picture sums up the terrifying racist power that the Ku Klux Klan still projects, 158 years after its foundation. The Klan has been driven for all that time by a pernicious white supremacist philosophy.

Its dark history stretches from Klansmen routinely lynching Black people who had the temerity to try to vote in the 1868 post-Civil War elections, through the era of racial division in the Deep South during the 1960s, when young white children would parade at demos carrying banners proclaiming “Segregation Forever” and Black victims would have the letters “KKK” carved into their stomachs, to the spittle-flecked young men giving Nazi salutes while screaming “White power” and murdering civil rights activists at demos today.