NPR REVIEW ARTICLE ON THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KKK
Klansville USA is a documentary from PBS- American Experience series that is the history of the KKK. It proposes that the KKK "tapped into the fears of low income Whites" and that it all took place in North Carolina in the 1960's. Eventually there were over 10,000 known members in the southern states of the USA.
I found this documentary interesting, but frankly, I'm not so sure the KKK was about Whites of Low Income in the South so I'm challenging the premis. To say this, I spent a couple hours reading articles on web sites affiliated with Neo-Nazism and White Pride and so on from the last few years.
I certainly do not support terrorist tactics such as burning crosses on people's lawns or discriminating on the basis of skin color or anything else when it comes to a person's value as a human being, place in society, and so on. But the KKK was not just opposed to Black people (then called Negroes) but also Catholics, Jews, anyone not White Angle Saxon Protestant, and WASPS, as just about everyone knows, were the elite in the United States even before it was the United States. I do not associate the KKK with just low income whites in the south, but I must say that there has been plenty of opposition to women having equal rights including education and work on the basis that this means that men will be displaced in the workplace. The era of feminism I refer to began in the 1970's. And I truly wish sexism were as huge an issue as racism, especially when I meet sexist men "of color."
This video showed films that included female participation but didn't edge into the role of women in the KKK or their stand on feminist issues.
In reading so very many DNA oriented sites, I think we are reaching a knowledge that it's difficult to find anyone who isn't "mixed" in some way, even if that means going back to the 12th century.
Instead of skin color, I think people are looking at the VALUES OF A PARTICULAR RACE or ETHNIC or RELIGIOUS group in which a person is self identified. Is it wrong for a person to realize that their values are not those of another race, ethnic, or religious group and admit it? I don't think so.
Additionally, I got to know a lot about the State of North Carolina through genealogy research for a particular family with deep roots in that state, including pre American Revolutionary members. I had been told verbally that the family may have had Jewish roots in the old world. There was no genealogical evidence of this in the states that I could find, yet the children in the family had been razzed by their neighbors who called them out as "Jews." Interestingly, I traced several branches of this family and found only one who owned a single slave. I was told verbally that the family had been opposed to slavery way back.
So the genealogy lesson here is, we cannot make assumptions about any particular family from North Carolina, even if the state was full of people who hated Blacks, Catholics, and Jews in the 1960's.
