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KKK and Racism in the 1930s
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- 1Ku Klux KlanThe KKK were founded in 1865. They were white Christian extremists who passionately hated black people. Most of its members were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and they thought that anyone who was not part of their cult were inferior to them.
- 2Ku Klux Klan 2The Ku Klux Klan were infamous for holding night time meetings and marching in white clothing with masks over their heads, beating up black people, throwing tar and feathers, hanging, raping, murdering and lynching – mob killings. In the state of Georgia in 1924-25, 135 people were lynched.
- 3Ku Klux Klan 3In the 1920s, they reached their peak with over 4 million members nationwide. However, the Great Depression caused internal divisions and crime within the group and caused the numbers to deplete to 30,000 in the 1940s.
- 4Ku Klux Klan 4In chapter 15 of To Kill a Mockingbird, smaller scale Ku Klux Klan-like behaviour appears outside the Maycomb Jail, longing for Tom Robinson's death. This is ironic because earlier in the chapter, Atticus tells Jem that the KKK has gone and that their kind of people do not exist in Maycomb anymore.
- 5BackgroundBlack people were paid less than their white counterparts and had to work much harder than everyone else, often given the more 'dirty work‘ that nobody wanted to do. The lynching (hanging) of black people was common in 1930s America because The Ku Klux Klan still had a lot of power, despite a decline in their numbers.
- 6Background 2Black people wanted to change the way they were being treated but it was really difficult for them to do this because of the Jim Crow Laws – these were a number of laws in America enforced between 1876 and 1965 made it legal to segregate and discriminate against African-Americans.