The preacher who used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux Klan
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/08/the-preacher-who-used-christianity-to-revive-the-ku-klux-klan/The preacher who used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux Klan
by DeNeen L. Brown | April 10 at 7:00 AM
It was approaching midnight on Oct. 16, 1915, when Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons and at least 15 other men climbed Stone Mountain in Georgia. They built an altar, set fire to a cross, took an oath of allegiance to the “Invisible Empire” and announced the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
Beneath a makeshift altar glowing in the flickering flames of the burning cross, they laid a U.S. flag, a sword and a Holy Bible.
“The angels that have anxiously watched the reformation from its beginnings,” said Simmons, who declared himself Imperial Wizard, “must have hovered about Stone Mountain and shouted hosannas to the highest heavens.”
Last Wednesday — on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — progressive faith groups held a march in Washington to combat racism and atone for the history of that prejudice.
Meeting of the KKK, probably in Portland, Ore., in the 1920s. (Oregon Historical Society)
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the silent film era film released in Feb. 1915, by director DW Griffith and based on the book "The Clansman" by Thomas Dixon. Griffith was the KY son of a confederate officer, and Dixon, a GA classmate of Pres. Woodrow Wilson who premiered the film at the WH. The scourge went national.
"The film's release is also credited as being one of the events that inspired the formation of the "second era" Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia the same year; it was used as a recruiting tool for the KKK, along with the trial and lynching of Leo Frank for the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta.[10] The Birth of a Nation was the first American motion picture to be screened inside the White House, viewed there by President Woodrow Wilson,[11] who was unaware of the film's content before viewing and later expressed disapproval of it. Griffith's innovative techniques and storytelling power have made The Birth of a Nation one of the landmarks of film history.[12][13] In 1992, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
