The Ku Klux Klan was created at the end of the Civil War to repress the rights and freedoms of African Americans. Even after 150 years, it is still an active, domestic terrorist organization. This group was born out of fear, back when the slaves were freed, which gave blacks the liberation to pursue life and all its glory. This freedom that African Americans enjoyed, angered and scared many whites, especially white supremacist. The Klan was born, out of fear and hate.
Does the Klu Klux Klan have a plan to expand their hateful ways and conquer America? This article written by Brooke Leigh for The Daily Beast exposes some truths about this diabolical group and explores the idea of the Klan taking over America.
However, that sense of Black liberation scared white supremacists, who formed vigilante groups to try and stifle Black people back into systemic boxes of subordination.
One of those organizations, the Ku Klux Klan was born in Tennessee. Though the homegrown terrorists did manage to slaughter thousands of Black Americans during their early existence, the Klan was unable to grow and prosper due to Reconstruction-era laws and the occasional righteous political leaders who enforced them.
But the eventual relaxation of those laws allowed a resurrection of the Klan in the early 20th century, and the organization’s spidery legs of hate were spread throughout multiple avenues of politics, religious communities, and social movements.
Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (Viking) picks up on the second—and more notorious and harrowing—coming of the Ku Klux Klan when white sheets became the costume norm and burning crosses became regular scare tactics.
Released April 4, the work of nonfiction reads like a thriller novel, as if it’s laying the groundwork for a movie script rather than providing the textbook template of historical accounts.
The book follows the true story of Grand Dragon D.C. “Steve” Stephenson and his rise as a white supremacist leader. The heart of the Klan no longer resided below the Mason-Dixon Line. Instead, it swept in massive waves across the Midwest, with Indiana as the ultimate zone of racist-religious-anti-immigrant terror.
