Word: klan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
King probably harbored some racist beliefs before he checked into Texas' 3,200-inmate, maximum-security Beto I unit. He already had a book on the Klan, stolen from his high school library. Michelle Chapman, 18, a friend, testified that she could see him becoming increasingly racist in the 10 letters he wrote her from prison between 1995 and 1997. His missives were full of vulgarities and racial slurs denouncing blacks, Jews, Hispanics and a variety of "race traitors." White women who date blacks are "whores," he said, and they should "hang from the same tree as their black boyfriends...
King and Brewer joined a local prison chapter of a gang called the Confederate Knights of America, a small North Carolina-based Klan faction that recruited heavily from biker groups and prison inmates in the early 1990s. He began getting tattoos that would cover 65% of his body. His body art was a litany of racist images, including Nazi SS lightning bolts, Klan emblems and a black man lynched from a tree. One witness, psychiatrist Dr. Edward Gripon, suggested the tattoos may have been a way to make the 5-ft. 7-in., 165-lb. King look forbidding to threatening...
...bashing" meant killing a black man. King was by now in the process of becoming a white-supremacy polemicist. In his prison writings, he cast himself as a hero in a coming race war with racial minorities and Jews. He drafted proposed bylaws and recruiting letters for his new Klan chapter and expounded on the Aryans, whom he considered to be a "race of individuals who have found themselves existing on humanity's evolutionary plateau," who were "born with genetic capacity for great power, leadership, and knowledge...
Things have changed--but not completely. Though whites and blacks now monitor their attitudes about race, racial terrorism lives on. Killers who were never charged for their hate crimes roam free. From recent cases one might even be led to surmise that the Klan has given up white uniforms for blue ones. And then there are cases in which there is still time to make good on history. Perhaps this one. Mamie Till Mobley is ailing but alive. She has mourned her only child these 44 years. She could never get his murderers indicted on lesser charges, never got their...
However, it would be ridiculous to denounce the study of all American history because it contains the story of the Ku Klux Klan. Black History Month is a claim to black cultural and historical equality, not a "silly therapeutic excess...