The Klan returned to Atlanta fueled by postwar white supremacy anxieties

Evidence

Although the Ku Klux Klan had a long history in Atlanta, the order had been dormant for years. Its postwar rebirth came, appropriately enough, at the hands of an Atlanta obstetrician, Dr. Samuel Green. In late 1945 Green, an unassuming man with wire-rimmed glasses and a toothbrush mustache, anointed himself the Grand Dragon of the Association of Georgia Klans and led his new recruits to Stone Mountain on Atlanta’s outskirts. Using a mixture of fuel oil and sand, the men carved out an enormous cross, stretching three hundred feet across the mountainside. Once lit, it was visible some sixty miles away. According to one of the hooded men who constructed it, the blazing crucifix was meant “to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is back on the market.” — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 122

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s central story of how desegregation pressure forces segregationist ideology to reinvent itself; this postwar rebirth is the opening move of that transformation. — connects to: Klan growth depended on a confluence of postwar anxieties, not primeval hatred alone — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1744

Broader Connections

• Klan growth depended on a confluence of postwar anxieties, not primeval hatred alone #expands (0.88) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1744