I see from our friends over at legal history blog that Jared Goldstein of Roger Williams Law has posted "The Klan's Constitution." I had the pleasure of reading an earlier version of this and I want to call attention to it. Jared talks about the constitutional ideas and interpretation of the Klan in each of its incarnations, the late 1860s/1870s, the 1910s/1920s, and the modern civil rights movement. What is so important about this is Jared's reconstruction of the Klan's ideas and their constitutional thought. He shows that while we often interpret them as law-breakers, they saw themselves as people who upheld the law and in some eras their view of the Constitution was the dominant one.
I'm hoping to have a lot more to say about this in North Carolina in the 1860s and 1870s shortly -- and also to point out (in regard to an article from the Yale Law Journal in 1903) that the ideas of Jim Crow segregation and deprivation of African American voting rights were widespread. While we now think of the Klan as a joke, they were much closer to the mainstream in previous generations (and in some instances were the mainstream).
Comments