If I can do that as a rock and roll piano player, certainly you all can sit at your dinner table and have conversations with your family about anything. Klansmen like music. Black supremacists like music.
I said, hey man, you and I need to talk. Not Klansman to black man, but man to man. American to American. Your Confederate history is as much a part of my history as my black history is a part of yours.
12% of its population, African-Americans, and those precepts enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. I would attend Klan rallies and different things. As I said, this is about 27 years ago.
I just want the answer to my question so I can process it and try to understand. So I would attend Klan rallies and different things. As I said, this was about 27 years ago, about a hundred pounds ago.
in Houston 1970. Those are the five Pacifica stations. That station in Houston is the only one in the country who transmitter was blown up. Uh, in the first few months of operation the Ku Klux Klan strapped dynamite to the base of the transmitter and blew it to smithereens. And when they got back on their feet, they blew it up again. Now the silver lining was it's not as if they had money for advertising or anything, so it certainly blew it into
He shouldn't be going around try to set somebody on fire. Let's blame the Klansmen for trying to hit somebody with their Confederate flag poles. That's wrong too. Let's blame the Klan leader for pulling out a gun and firing it.
Now, you notice-- you notice he's holding his fiancee, right? He's holding the Klans lady. So here we go to see the car.
If I can do that as a rock and roll piano player, certainly you all can sit at your dinner table and have conversations with your family about anything. He was a Klansman back in the 1940s.
years, didn't want to terrorize others. What you want, Frederick Douglass. I want freedom everybody e don't want terrorize others. We're not gonna create a black version of the Ku Klux Klan just because they're terrorizing us. See, that's that's That's the best of not just black people, the best of not just America. It's the best of the human spirit. That's right, which we stopped back in slavery. I mean, we've seen that sits slavery with the soul and spirit. A black folks, you
Now, you saw the Imperial Wizard in his street clothes. Here he is in his traditional Klan uniform, all right? What did I do?
If I can do that as a rock and roll piano player, certainly you all can sit at your dinner table and have conversations with your family about anything. President Harry Truman had joined the Klan for a very short time before he became president.
If I can do that as a rock and roll piano player, certainly you all can sit at your dinner table and have conversations with your family about anything. He had to leave the Klan to sit on the Supreme Court.
She didn't know if we were gonna sell tickets that night. Number four was Ku Klux Klan .
It prevents us from enjoying life. They are members of the Ku Klux Klan , KKK members.
and all its associated terrors, you know? Yeah? the heroics of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation, right.
It goes much deeper. He's going to marry that Klans lady in a couple weeks from that picture. I've been working with him for a year.
They don't want the publicity. But you can film myself and the Klans lady and the preacher. I said OK. So here we are.
That's beautiful. That's splendid. There you have the Imperial Wizard Klansman, the bride, the Klans lady, and the surrogate father. Again, this does not happen overnight.
This is one of the many incidents that happened in Charlottesville at the unite the Right rally. These guys coming down the steps are Ku Klux Klan members. You don't know that, because you don't see them in their robes and hoods.
It goes to even deeper than that. I'm the only black guy at a Klan wedding, right? But it goes deeper than that.
Now, CNN had interviewed him a while back. He said he was going to be buried in his Klan robe. So I asked him if CNN could come to the wedding.
If I can do that as a rock and roll piano player, certainly you all can sit at your dinner table and have conversations with your family about anything. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was in the Ku Klux Klan when he got the appointment to the Supreme Court.
There is a group of Endecja they called them. And that was something like the Ku Klux Klan . In 1939, I remember I was standing by the store with my great-grandpa, next to my mother, grocery store.
This was the church of which he was a priest. Some kind of imagined link to the Ku Klux Klan . Maybe it's because of the burning crosses, Phil suggested, deadpan, gazing across a few yards of gravel to the massive concrete foundation
ends meet he was a car mechanic and he started blaming his problems on somebody he puts out a blaming his problems on African Americans and like his father before him he joined the Ku Klux Klan and he rose through the ranks and became the exalted Cyclops a leader of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and like a classic white supremacist in 1968 when Martin Luther King jr. was
his father before him he joined the Ku Klux Klan and he rose through the ranks and became the exalted Cyclops a leader of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and like a classic white supremacist in 1968 when Martin Luther King jr. was assassinated he had a party for his KKK friends at his garage at his mechanics workshop but his life changed in 1971
to assist African Americans to vote. They were brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi. John Johnson, the founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazine, and Martin Luther King Jr. may have done more to enable a whole generation of African Americans to look from whence they came.
But he then lurched into villain status when as Chief of Police of San Francisco, he ordered the cops to confiscate all copies of this issue of the San Francisco Bay Times. Clarence Brandenburg, the Ku Klux Klan leader whose case established the right to advocate bad ideas, like racial hatred for example. His case still limits the ability of the government to restrict terrorist speech. James Madison,
Notice the head attire. That's the Imperial Wizard who fired the gun and his Klans lady fiancee. What did we do while we were in there?
you know I've been trying to get people from my community to join us and no one's opening the door no one's talking to me because I'm working with a Klansmen and he said same thing happened to me I keep knocking on the door of white folk and no one will talk to me because I'm working alongside you and then an out water said you know my
Let's blame the Klansmen for trying to hit somebody with their Confederate flag poles. That's wrong too. Let's blame the Klan leader for pulling out a gun and firing it. That should not have happened.
And we didn't know what kind of response we were going to get in Selma the next day. It could be anything from some kind of a vicious attack from the Ku Klux Klan to arrests to who knew? It was very, very uncertain.
These three young men were detained by the sheriff, arrested, taken to jail, and later that evening taken out of jail, turned over to that Klan where they were beaten, shot, and killed. These three young men didn't die in the Middle East or Eastern Europe.
I said, really? He's like, yeah, they don't like our kind there. Now remember, there was a Klan march in my town when I was in third grade. Like a declaration that we don't like black people.
and all kinds of stuff. And along with his fiancee, who is a Klanswoman. I sat there and I listened to him give me a lesson in American history, from a Confederate perspective
His career also reminds us that you don't need to be a Klansman or, say, Donald Trump, to participate in white supremacy.
And the white red neck population, including the Klansmen had said anybody who marches tonight will be dead by morning.
scheduled for a Times article I was writing uh with an author named Mark klansky anybody ever read anything by Mark klansky author of The Great Book
Her father is too ill to come all way up to Maryland to escort his daughter down the aisle, to give her away. She asked me if I would walk down the aisle rather than ask one of their trusted Klan members, one of the guys coming down the stairs with the Confederate flag poles.
If I can do that as a rock and roll piano player, certainly you all can sit at your dinner table and have conversations with your family about anything. President Warren G. Harding was sworn into the Ku Klux Klan in the Green Room of the White House.
It was the time of lynchings, of the Ku Klux Klan .
What we used to think of when we thought of the far right extremist movement-- we think of skinheads and Klan and militia.
Justice Hugo Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, delivered the court's opinion.
The Supreme Court then guts those programs, and then we have the birth of the Klan .
Which its claim to fame is the moonshine capital of the world. When I was in third grade, there was a Klan march in Rocky Mount. This was about 1983.
And that if they are somehow called a racist, that we mean they're got there Klan robes in the closet and they brought
can't be worn ironically by White people are Nazi uniforms, Ku Klux Klan robes, and self tanner.
But it goes deeper than that. Her father. She's from Tennessee, The Klans lady. Her father is too ill to come all way up to Maryland to escort his daughter down the aisle, to give her away.
But for some reason-- and he was also from Indiana, which is like the headquarters of the Klan .
Good afternoon. Thank you all very much for having me. Really appreciate it. And this lecture is more about communication than it is about the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. But what I do is I use those groups as extremes compared to a black person.