2016-12-03 08:00:00
The Ku Klux Klan plans to demonstrate this Saturday in North Carolina (United States) to celebrate the victory of Republican Donald Trump in the American presidential election on November 9.
The extremist movement, founded more than 150 years ago on the segregation and lynching of blacks, announced this parade on its site as soon as the results of the vote were published, before finally withdrawing this mention. But a spokesperson for the group confirmed to the information verification site Snopes.com that a parade would take place this December 3 in North Carolina, without specifying the exact location and time. Friday, a local site, Thetimesnews.com, mentioned the town of Pelham, stronghold of the Loyal White Knights group, and a time: 9 a.m. (3 p.m. in Paris).
Representatives of the Republican Party in the state quickly distanced themselves from this initiative. “We are disgusted and condemn this extremist ideology and associated actions in the strongest possible terms,” said North Carolina Republican Chairman Robin Hayes. In another statement, Donald Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Hope Hicks, also reacted: “Mr. Trump and his team continue to disavow these groups and individuals and strongly condemn their message of hatred.”
On several occasions during the campaign, former KKK leader David Duke supported Donald Trump, prompting the latter to deny any connection with him. But Duke today sees in the appointment of Steve Bannon as the president-elect’s chief strategist “excellent” news for his racist ideology, white supremacism. A very controversial figure, Steve Bannon headed the news site Breitbart, which he himself described as a “platform for the alt-right”. Alt-right, or the name of this nationalist, anti-immigration movement, which today influences Donald Trump.
“People are starting to wake up”
When it was created in 1865 after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan fought against the acquisition of new rights by blacks, just freed from slavery. It was banned in 1871 after the assassination of a senator, but was reborn in 1915 to fight for an America purged of its non-Protestant elements. The movement experienced a meteoric rise in the 1920s, reaching more than 4 million members in 1924. The political world was infiltrated, the north of the country contaminated. The conviction of a local leader, DC Stephenson, for rape and murder in 1925, contributed to the decline of the KKK, of which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted only 5,000 to 8,000 members in 2016.
“The number of our members is increasing day by day, (…) we have received 1000 requests for information since the election,” says Gary Munker, a man interviewed by AFP who presents himself as a spokesperson of the KKK. “People are starting to wake up, to become aware of what is happening,” says this 36-year-old father.
An observatory of the American extreme right, the SPLC, however, affirms that the number of local KKK cells fluctuates, depending on local initiatives, the movement not being hierarchical. It first decreased at the start of the decade (from 221 local cells in 2010 to 72 in 2014) before increasing again last year to reach 190. “This growth is mainly explained by the disappearance last year “the last of two major groups – the Fraternal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Knight Rider Knights of the Ku Klux Klan – and their members migrated to other groups, most of which were newly formed,” the report explained. SPLC released in February. More than a quarter of the groups (52 precisely) are located in Texas.
Beyond questions of membership, the KKK returned to the forefront last year, in the context of the primary elections, when Donald Trump was already professing a speech hostile to Islam. After a racist shooting in a church in Charleston on June 17, 2015, the KKK organized 364 rallies in 27 states across the country to defend the Confederate flag. This relic of the Civil War, hung in certain southern states of the United States on the pediments of official buildings, was strongly criticized after the killing, with part of America seeing it as a symbol of racism… and the Ku Klux Klan .
Under the US Constitution’s First Amendment freedom of speech, these parades are not prohibited. On the other hand, they rarely attract people and no longer constitute “the primary activity” of the KKK, which according to American researcher Carla Hill, has become the distribution of leaflets. According to her, the latest available figures do not suggest any resurgence of the movement: 74 distributions of leaflets have been recorded since the beginning of 2016.
But it’s not just the “Klan.” The SPLC warns of the sharp increase in the number of groups propagating hatred in the United States, whether they persecute whites, blacks, Jews or homosexuals. Including those nostalgic for the Third Reich, galvanized by the imminent arrival of Donald Trump at the White House. On September 20, in Washington, Richard Spencer, leader of the far-right group National Policy Institute, concluded a conference with “Heil Trump” and Nazi salutes. The American president did not react to the provocation, nor did he condemn the latest attacks targeting minorities. In a report released Tuesdaythe SPLC counts 867 acts of hatred committed in the United States in the ten days following the election.
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