Attitudes towards black Americans and the Ku Klux Klan

What the specification asks for

“Attitudes towards black Americans. The Ku Klux Klan.” — examined through continuity and change. Incandio is aligned to specification 4HI1; it is not published by, endorsed by or affiliated with Pearson.

1 · Understand it

The position of black Americans in the 1920s

In the South, where the great majority still lived at the start of the decade, segregation was legally enforced under state law, the vote had been removed by poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation, and lynching continued: dozens of black Americans were murdered by mobs in most years of the decade, with prosecutions almost unknown. Most black Southerners worked as sharecroppers or tenants in an agricultural economy that had been depressed since 1921.

The Great Migration is the change. Something in the order of a million black Americans moved north during and after the war, drawn by wartime industrial jobs and pushed by conditions and violence in the South. It transformed cities including Chicago, Detroit and New York, and it produced both the Harlem Renaissance and violent white resistance — the Chicago riot of 1919 was among the worst of a wave of racial violence that year.

In the North, segregation was not legal but was enforced by practice: restrictive covenants on property, employers' hiring rules, unions that excluded black members, and the neighbourhood boundaries that concentrated new arrivals into small and overcrowded districts.

The revived Klan

The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was not the Reconstruction organisation. It was refounded in 1915, took its imagery partly from the film The Birth of a Nation, and was run in the early 1920s by professional recruiters who took a commission on membership fees. Its targets were broader than the original's: black Americans, but also Catholics, Jews, immigrants, bootleggers and people it judged sexually immoral.

Its scale is the fact candidates most often get wrong. Membership reached several million at its peak in the mid-1920s, and it was strongest not only in the South but in Indiana, Ohio, Oregon and Colorado. It elected governors and senators, controlled state legislatures, and marched forty thousand strong through Washington in 1925. It presented itself as respectable, Protestant and patriotic, and much of its membership joined it as a fraternal organisation rather than a terrorist one.

Its collapse was correspondingly sudden. In 1925 D. C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana and one of the most powerful men in the state, was convicted of second-degree murder in a case involving the abduction and rape of a young woman who subsequently died. The respectability the organisation depended on evaporated, and membership fell away within a few years.

What the rise and fall demonstrate

The pattern is the argument. A movement that grew because it was respectable and collapsed when a scandal removed the respectability was not held together primarily by ideology or by terror, and the speed of the fall is evidence about the shallowness of the commitment.

That reading has to be handled carefully, because it can slide into minimising. The Klan of the 1920s intimidated, boycotted, beat and in places killed, and its political influence produced real legislation and real appointments. What the collapse shows is not that it was harmless but that a great deal of its membership was conditional on its social standing.

For the interpretation question, the useful move is to notice which sources treat the Klan as an aberration and which treat it as an expression of mainstream opinion. Its concentration in Indiana rather than Mississippi, and its collapse over a sexual scandal rather than over a lynching, are the two facts that make the second reading hard to avoid.

2 · Learn it — the notes

The dates that earn marks

1915

The Klan is refounded; The Birth of a Nation is released. Why this date: The revived organisation is a twentieth-century mass movement with a commercial recruitment structure, not a survival of Reconstruction.

1919

Racial violence in Chicago and other cities during and after the Great Migration. Why this date: It shows that migration north exchanged legal segregation for a different and violent set of constraints rather than escaping them.

1925

A Klan march in Washington; the conviction of D. C. Stephenson. Why this date: The peak of respectability and the scandal that destroyed it fall in the same year, which is what makes the collapse so instructive.

The figures, and how far to trust them

• Several million — Klan membership at its peak in the mid-1920s. (The organisation's own figures were inflated for recruitment; historians' estimates range widely and all are in the millions.)
• About a million — Black Americans who moved north during and after the First World War. (Estimates depend on the period counted; the migration continued and accelerated in later decades.)
• Dozens each year — Recorded lynchings of black Americans during the 1920s. (Contemporary tallies were compiled by campaigning organisations and are likely to under-record rather than over-record.)

The people to place

• Marcus Garvey — Led the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest black mass movement of the period.
• D. C. Stephenson — Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan; his 1925 murder conviction precipitated the organisation's collapse.
• W. E. B. Du Bois — Editor and campaigner; a leading critic of both segregation and Garvey's separatism.

How historians disagree

Attributed interpretations, never voiced — the AO4 seam.

• The 'mainstream reaction' reading: The Klan's strength in Indiana, Oregon and Ohio and its respectable self-presentation show that it expressed widely held Protestant nativist opinion rather than a Southern fringe. Contested by The reading that stresses the commercial recruitment structure and the speed of the collapse, and argues that a movement destroyed by one scandal was a social club with a costume rather than a political force..

What students say — and what is actually the case

Not this: The 1920s Klan was a Southern organisation.

This: It was strongest in Indiana and had large memberships in Ohio, Oregon and Colorado. Treating it as Southern misses what makes it significant about the decade as a whole.

Not this: Moving north freed black Americans from segregation.

This: Northern segregation was enforced by restrictive covenants, hiring practices and union exclusion rather than by statute, and the migration produced serious violence in cities including Chicago in 1919.

Two things students merge

Blurred: De jure and de facto segregation.

The distinction: Southern segregation was written into state law; Northern segregation operated through property covenants, employment and neighbourhood practice. Both were effective and only one could be challenged in a court.

Blurred: The Reconstruction Klan and the 1920s Klan.

The distinction: The first was a Southern terrorist organisation of the 1860s and 1870s; the second was a national mass membership movement refounded in 1915 with a commercial structure and a broader list of enemies.

What a Grade 9 answer holds here

A Grade 9 answer notices what destroyed the Klan and what did not. Years of intimidation, violence and political intrusion cost it nothing; one conviction for a crime its own members regarded as shameful cost it almost everything — which tells you that its several million members were held by respectability rather than by belief, and that its collapse is not evidence of American opinion turning against what it stood for.

3 · How it is examined

This strand is genuinely set through: Paper 2 Section A (a) (6 marks — “Describe TWO features of EITHER … OR ….”); Paper 2 Section A (b) (8 marks — “How far does Source A support the evidence of Source B about …? Explain your answer.”); Paper 2 Section A (c) (16 marks — “Extract C suggests that …. How far do you agree with this interpretation? Use Extract C, Sources A and B and your own knowledge to explain your answer.”).

What earns marks: The Klan's geography and the manner of its collapse, used together. Indiana rather than Mississippi, and a sexual scandal rather than a lynching, make an argument about what the organisation actually was.

4 · Prove it — the questions

Answered inside Incandio, where a marker checks what a correct answer must contain and tells you which half was missing. The marking stays in the app; the questions are here.

1. Describe two features of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. [6 marks · Paper 2 Section A (a)]
2. How far does Source A support the evidence of Source B about the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s? [8 marks · Paper 2 Section A (b)]
3. How far does Source A support the evidence of Source B about the position of black Americans in the 1920s? [8 marks · Paper 2 Section A (b)]
4. Extract C suggests that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s expressed mainstream American opinion. How far do you agree with this interpretation? [16 marks · Paper 2 Section A (c)]
5. Extract C suggests that the position of black Americans improved in the 1920s. How far do you agree with this interpretation? [16 marks · Paper 2 Section A (c)]

Carry on through the option

• Previous lesson: The Palmer Raids, the Red Scare and Sacco and Vanzetti
• Next lesson: Morals, the Monkey Trial and Prohibition
• Also in this key topic: Attitudes and policies towards immigration
• Key topic 2 · Increased social tensions in the 1920s · The USA, 1918–41 · the option's timeline · Incandio History
• The other key topics of The USA: The Roaring Twenties · The USA in Depression, 1929–33 · Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1933–41 · The Opposition to the New Deal