The Klan My Experience: Atlanta and the Klan
We should also add that in the 21rst Century in 2017 we are witnessing what could be described a fourth resurgence of the Klan due to the intensification of white supremacist activities. This is both a response to what seems to be a sympathetic White House to white supremacy overall, along with the white supremacist response to the country having just completed two terms of its first Black President, Barack Obama.
And don’t think for a moment that the Klan has its leadership exclusively among the white working class, because if you do think that way you would be wrong. Its leadership – whether directly in the Klan or of white supremacist sentiments – has always resided in America among its white elite.
And how do you define the “white elite”? They are “white” Americans with either inherited family wealth or professional leaders such as lawyers, physicians, dentists, those in the military or those in corporate and/or in government positions, etc. In other words, they are everywhere in society. And they are interested in “power”, largely to accrue profits, pure and simple.
As civil rights leader Reverend Joseph Lowery once said, “The Klan might not be wearing sheets today, but instead they are sitting in boardrooms.” These were words of wisdom, yet the Klan members and leaders, as stated, have almost always been sitting in boardrooms or legislatures, etc. since the beginning. And further, as a Mississippi friend of mine once said, “the Klan never does anything without approval from its white elite leaders” which also makes sense.
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William Venable
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To understand the Klan vis-a-vis Atlanta and the United States overall, we need to consider some of the Venable family members that have had a long residency in the Atlanta area.
It was William Venable (1852-1905) and Sam Venable (1856-1939) who purchased Stone Mountain in DeKalb County, Georgia in 1886 for $48,000 and the family maintained ownership until the State of Georgia purchased Stone Mountain in 1958. (See biographical information about William and Samuel Venable in the appendix below.)
Sam Venable
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In turn, Stone Mountain has served as the home base for Klan activity since the early 1900s, not only because of Sam Venable’s interest and involvement in the Klan but also because he allowed it to be used to create what became the“largest high relief sculpture in the world, the Confederate Memorial Carving, depict(ing) three Confederate figures of the Civil War – President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.” (Stone Mountain Park)
The entire carved surface measures three-acres, larger than a football field and Mount Rushmore. The carving of the three men towers 400 feet above the ground, measures 90 by 190 feet, and is recessed 42 feet into the mountain. The deepest point of the carving is at Lee’s elbow, which is 12 feet to the mountain’s surface. (Stone Mountain Park)
Most people think the carving was completed in the early 1900s. Not so. Surprisingly, the Confederate carving at Stone Mountain was not finished until the 1970s. Its completion, according to some, was initiated by white supremacists who clearly held disdain for the successful passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and completing this depiction honoring the Confederacy was a way to counter those victories with arrogance and disrespect.
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President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
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At Stone Mountain, as you might also expect, there was a dedication ceremony to celebrate the completed carving. Georgia officials presumed President Richard Nixon was coming to the event but he instead sent his “reviled” Vice President Spiro Agnew to give the keynote and this created a controversy in itself. In a May 9, 1970 editorial entitled “Shame and Disgrace,” the Atlanta Constitution stated:
Nathan Bedford Forrest
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Then, Atlanta and Stone Mountain come into the mix regarding Klan development.
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William J. Simmons
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The second resurgence or re-birth of the Klan was on Thanksgiving Day in 1915. William J. Simmons, also in Atlanta, organized the event on the top of Stone Mountain after being inspired by the recently released infamous and controversial film, “The Birth of a Nation”
directed by D.W. Griffith that depicted Black males as unintelligent and sexually aggressive toward white women. In the film, it was the Klan that saved the day and protected white women. (See biographical information about William J. Simmons in the appendix below.)
Historian John Hope Franklin observed that because of the popularity of the film in the South that “had it not been for “The Birth of a Nation”, the Klan might not have been reborn in 1915″. (Wikipedia)
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James Venable
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“In 1922 Hiram W. Evans, a dentist from Dallas, Texas, displaced William Simmons as the leader of the Klan and attempted to turn the organization into a powerful political machine.” (Georgia Encyclopedia)
The four girls killed in the bombing (Clockwise from top left, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and
Carol Denise McNair) |
(The bombing was)….an act of white supremacist terrorism which occurred at the African-American 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday, September 15, 1963, when four members of the Ku Klux Klan planted at least 15 sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device beneath the steps located on the east side of the church.
Knights Of the Ku Klux Klan (Incorporated)
Imperial Palace, Invisible Empire
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Atlanta, GA (1921)
Proclaim to the World
Apparently, the constitution developed for the 1921 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was adapted from Nathan Bedford Forrest’s original Klan constitution in 1868 that can also be read by clicking here.
DeKalb County and the Venable Family
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Venable House |
The Tudor Domestic Gothic building above is the Stonehenge Mansion near the corner of Oakdale and Ponce de Leon in eastern Atlanta, Georgia. It was built by the Venable family in 1914. The architect was Edward Bennett Dougherty. The mansion is now part of St. John’s Lutheran Church.
Samuel Hoyt Venable and William Venable owned the Southern Granite Company, which owned Stone Mountain, Arabia Mountain, and Pine Mountain in Georgia. The mansion was therefore built of granite from Stone Mountain, which is about twelve miles to the east. Stone Mountain granite is a gray granite… (University of Georgia)
(See the Appendix for information about other Atlanta structures built from the Stone Mountain granite.)
Some Venable family members have seemingly regarded the Klan involvement as unfortunate. In fact, Frank Eldridge said that while running for government positions he had never verbalized his family’s Klan history. He said that the presentation he was giving at the church was the first time he had spoken in public about his family’s Klan connection, as having the Klan association known, he said, would not be helpful for a politician or judge.
Eldridge, however, has had an impressive legal career.
….but really you never become a Klansman till you complete the third degree, the Knights of the Great Forrest, named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was the first Imperial Wizard, and his son was a Grand Dragon of Georgia, lived out there on Forrest Avenue, and black people have been successful in changing that name of that street after Ralph McGill there. He lived the third house, right at Glen Iris, on Forrest Avenue. I went to school with Nathan III. He finished military college at West Point. He died in 1946. I was acquainted with his father, who was the Grand Dragon of Georgia and the son of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, perhaps the bravest general, he and Stonewall Jackson. He had twenty-nine horses shot from under him, Nathan Bedford Forest. History doesn’t recall these facts.
Being “White” in the South
In the above narrative I have not written extensively about the specific activities of the Klan but rather about some of the early Klan formation. However, in my recollection of my high school in Atlanta, the Klan activities were not discussed openly even though they were occurring not far away.
Further, as someone “white” and, reflecting upon growing up in Atlanta and in the South, I realized that there were often rumors in my high school and elsewhere of outrageous “white supremacy” atrocities in and outside the city, yet much of it was not openly discussed and was rarely in the press as well. Everything was done in secret it seems.
This kind of “closed” thinking and lack of action against white supremacy is exceptionally harmful in countless ways. White supremacy tears at and rips apart the heart of society and not just in the South, but throughout the country and the world. I even heard from visiting scholar Gerald Horne this week, in his Atlanta lecture, that the surviving members of the “Little Rock Nine”, who, in 1957, integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas school, are still receiving death threats. Yes, it is white supremacy on steroids for sure.
Appendix
(1) William Venable (1852-1905)
(2) Sam Venable (1856-1939)
(3) James Venable (1901-1993)
James R. Venable, a Georgia lawyer and white supremacist who organized a major Ku Klux Klan faction in 1963 and headed it for nearly 25 years.
From 1963 to 1987, Mr. Venable was the Imperial Wizard of the National Knights of the Klan, which he organized as one of several rival Klan factions nationally.
Mr. Venable’s ancestors owned Stone Mountain near Atlanta and ran a granite quarry there. The mountain, the site of a 1915 rally that revived the nearly extinct Klan, later became a state park and memorial with a giant relief of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, and Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson carved in the mountainside.
Mr. Venable was mayor of Stone Mountain Village from 1946 to 1949 and used the mountaintop and nearby family land for annual Klan rallies.
As a lawyer in Decatur, he sometimes represented blacks. He won acquittal for a black accused of murder and won an appeal for two Black Muslims in Louisiana convicted on charges stemming from a police raid on their mosque. (NYTImes)
Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate general during the Civil War (1861-65). Despite having no formal military training, Forrest rose from the rank of private to lieutenant general, serving as a cavalry officer at numerous engagements including the Battles of Shiloh, Chickamauga, Brice’s Crossroads and Second Franklin.