[GCFL-discuss] Burning Houses

[gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net]

Hi Quama,

Just for the record, I had somehow assumed you were male, and I see by
your own reference to home ownership that you are not. Serves me right.
Some folks used to use the third person pronoun "she" talking about some
of my comments, and that doesn't fit either.

I can't really give you a single reference for info in the Klan. Its
something I picked up here and there over 30 or 40 years. I guess one
good out-of-print source is Three Lives For Mississippi by William
Bradford Huie. He is a southern-born journalist, who also wrote an
excellent book on the execution of Private Eddie Slovik during World War
II. There is a good short story called "Going to Meet the Man" by either
Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, I am pretty sure it was Baldwin. There
are some good references on the American Memory section of the Library of
Congress web site (www.loc.gov). Of course some details I have picked up
listening to radio interviews and documentaries. Anything on the Emmit
Till case would have some relevance, as would material on the Willie
McGee case a few years earlier. And any thoroughly factual books on
Reconstruction would be helpful. (By thoroughly factual, I mean not
indulging in stereotypes: all southerners were not disloyal to the United
States, all southern Republicans were not mean, nasty, crooks, neither
were all southern confederate veterans, etc. etc. etc. All freed slaves
were not ignorant lazy fools, nor were they all well-educated selfless
heroes. Thoroughly factual treatments of the subject give the good, the
bad and the ugly, all around, just like it was). Come to think of it,
Eric Foner wrote a good book on Reconstruction, I would recommend either
the full length or abridged versions.

I can't think of any book to recommend on the 1920s. The revival of the
KKK began in Stone Mountain, Georgia in 1915, which may help to search
on-line library catalogs for good sources. I picked up a lot on that
period from texts accompanying Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
collections pictures of Klan rallies and events. I also read something in
the National Catholic Reporter about the KKK deciding it was all right to
admit Catholics as members -- noted by a practicing Catholic who was
insulted by this decision.

Siarlys