According to a recent report by a group of civil rights based in Alabama, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of extremist groups and anti-Government "Patriot" in the United States decreased to around 2,000 in 2013, after reaching an all-time high of nearly 2,400 in 2012. However, instead of a positive development, the SPLC points out that the lower number of hate groups could well be the result of the incorporation of the ideas of the extreme right in State law in the United States
But even if the number fluctuates by a few hundred years per year, the fact remains the Neo-Nazis, cults "Christian identity", white-supremacist militias and other anti-Semitic groups, against the nativist aliens exist in all 50 States.
When it comes to extremists in the United States, of course, the longest-lived and most easily identifiable remains the Ku Klux Klan, which has been operating in varying degrees of influence and strength for about 150 years. Hundreds of Klan actively working groups and recruitment in the United States, with more than two dozen in Texas only. The KKK as a political and cultural force fortunes waxed and waned over the decades, with members of the Klan peak in the Decade of 1920, during the time of the "second Klan". (The first Klan, in the South of war Civil War, lasted from 1865 to 1874; the second Klan from 1915 until approximately 1944; and the third from approximately the end of the war until today.)
The Klan said literally millions of members at the height of the era of the second Klan; Today, the Klan observers estimated that number to be less than 10,000. The good news is that it is a precipitous decline, to say the least, in the number of people officially associated with the Ku Klux Klan; the bad news is that many thousands of Americans who have perhaps joined the Klan in the past have aligned instead with a large number of groups extremists, militias and other organizations, making the extreme fringe right so dangerous as it has ever been.
In May 1946, LIFE magazine ran a series of remarkable images of an initiation of the Klan in Georgia, in the beginning of the era of the third Klan. Under the title "Ku Klux Klan tries a comeback", said the article which started the KKK pledged "in" a mystical contest in Georgia Stone Mountain. Photos of the language that accompanied by photographer Ed Clark, meanwhile, made it clear that, as newsworthy as it might have been the story of this particular initiation, editors of life considered the figures in their white robes and hoods to be rather laughable - if his rhetoric and arcane, pseudo mystical antics were so disturbing.
On the afternoon of May 9 at 20 a mob of adult men marched solemnly to a broad plateau of stone mountain outside Atlanta, Georgia, and fell on his knees on the ground before 100 Atlanta covered white and hooded. In the eerie light of Crescent and a cross of fire that stumbled in parallel up to a large altar stone and knelt there on the ground while the "great dragon" went through the trickery of instituting proceedings in the Ku Klux Klan. Then a new Member was selected from the mafia and ceremoniously "gentleman" in the Organization on behalf of the rest of their intolerant classmates.
This was the first public initiation in the Klan since the end of World War II. It was carefully set a time calculated. The tops of the anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, against the aliens anti-democratic Ku Klux Klan was leaving hidden at the very moment when the CIO and the A.F. of l. began simultaneous campaigns to organize the South during the war... But it is doubtful that the Klan can become so terribly strong as it was in 1919. An indication of the powerlessness of the Klan was its lack of effect on blacks, who were previously intimidated by members of toga white and frightened. More than 24,000 Blacks have already registered for the primaries next month of July in the vicinity of Atlanta only, where took place the ritual of stone mountain.
As mentioned in one of the legends in the Gallery overhead, the ceremony of the stone of the mountain was postponed several times during the previous year due to the shortage of the sheet during the war. Or at least that's what informed the life at the time.
The magazine also made a point to characterize the garb and actions of members in the Klan meetings (slides #10 to 15) as creepy and pathetic. "Childhood ritual and secrecy", the magazine noted, "they have always been the great attractions for the kind of people who make good Klansmen."
The more things change...
-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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