What is the History of the U.S. White Supremacist Movement?
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August 6, 1999
· The white supremacist movement is not a new phenomenon. The Ku
Klux Klan, historically the most influential white supremacist organization
in the U.S., was founded in 1865, as a fraternal order for Civil War
veterans of the confederate states (Blee, 1991).
· The Klan reemerged in 1915, expanding its membership to between
four and five million by 1925 (Blee, 1991).
· The civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s triggered the
next wave of interest in the Klan (Ferber 1998).
· The American Nazi Party was founded in 1958 by George Lincoln
Rockwell, honoring the legacy of Adolph Hitler.
· While the American Nazi Party never gained many members, many
contemporary neo-Nazi organizations are their direct descendants (Ferber
1998).
· There are a wide variety of white supremacy organizations today,
including various Klan groups, skinheads, the neo-Nazi National Alliance,
the National Socialist White People's Party, and the Posse Comitatus.
· The white supremacist movement of the 1980s gave birth to the
militia movement, which has recently grown increasingly racist and anti-Semitic.
References
Blee, Kathleen. 1991. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the
1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ferber, Abby L. 1998. White Man Falling: Race, Gender and White Supremacy.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
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