Ku Klux Klan- A Secret History

The foundation of Athens
Athena became the patron goddess of the city of Athens after a competition with Poseidon.
Yet Poseidon remained a numinous presence on the Acropolis in the form of his surrogate, Erechtheus.
At the dissolution festival at the end of the year in the Athenian calendar, the Skira, the priests of Athena and the priest of Poseidon would process under canopies to Eleusis.
They agreed that each would give the Athenians one gift and the Athenians would choose whichever gift they preferred. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a spring sprang up;
the water was salty and not very useful, whereas Athena offered them an olive tree.
The
Athenians
(or their king, Cecrops)
accepted the olive tree and along with it Athena as their patron, for the olive tree brought wood, oil and food.
After the fight, infuriated at his loss, Poseidon sent a monstrous flood to the Attic Plain, to punish the Athenians for not choosing him.
The depression made by Poseidon's trident and filled with salt water was surrounded by the northern hall of the Erechtheum, remaining open to the air.
"In cult, Poseidon was identified with Erechtheus,"
Walter Burkert noted.
"the myth turns this into a temporal-causal sequence: in his anger at losing, Poseidon led his son Eumolpus against Athens and killed Erectheus."
The contest of Athena and Poseidon was the subject of the reliefs on the western pediment of the Parthenon, the first sight that greeted the arriving visitor.
This myth is construed by Robert Graves and others as reflecting
a
clash
between the inhabitants during Mycenaean times and newer immigrants.
It is interesting to note that Athens at its height was a significant sea power,
at one point defeating the Persian fleet at Salamis Island in a sea battle.
Ku Klux Klan
(Redirected from KuKluxKlan)
KKK
(disambiguation).
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Ku Klux Klan Klan-in-gainesville.jpg
Ku Klux Klan rally, 1923.
In Existence
1st Klan 1865–1870s
2nd Klan 1915–1944
3rd Klan1 since 1946
Members
1st Klan 550,000
2nd Klan between 3 and 6 million
(peaked in 1920-1925 period)
Properties
Origin United States of America
Political ideology White supremacy
White nationalism
Political position Extreme right
Religion Protestant Christian
1The 3rd Klan is decentralized, with approx. 179 chapters.
Ku Klux Klan,
often abbreviated KKK and informally known as The Klan,
is the name of three distinct past and present right-wing organizations in the United States,
which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy and nationalism.
The current manifestation is splintered into several chapters and is widely considered a hate group.
The first KKK flourished in the South in the 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s.
The second KKK flourished nationwide in the early and mid 1920s, and adopted the costumes and paraphernalia of the first Klan.
The third Klan emerged after World War II.
Their iconic white costumes consisted of robes, masks, and conical hats.
The first and third KKK had a well-established record of using terrorism, but historians debate how central that tactic was to the second
KKK.

First KKK
The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee by veterans of the Confederate Army.
Although it never had an organizational structure above the local level, similar groups across the South adopted the name and methods.
Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement after the war. As a secret vigilante group,
the
Klan reacted against Radical Republican control of Reconstruction by attempting to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder,
against
black and white Republicans.
In 1870 and 1871 the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes.
Prosecution of Klan crimes and enforcement of the Force Acts suppressed Klan activity.
In 1874 and later, however, newly organized and openly active paramilitary organizations, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, started a fresh round of violence aimed at suppressing
Republican voting
and
running
Republicans out of office.
These contributed to white conservative Democrats' regaining political power in all the Southern states by 1877.

Second KKK
In 1915, the second Klan was founded.
It grew rapidly nationwide after 1921 in response to a period of postwar social tensions, where industrialization in the North had attracted numerous waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and the Great Migration of Southern blacks and whites.
The second KKK preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and antisemitism.
Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses, and carried out other violent activities.
The violent episodes were generally in the South
The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure.
At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men.
Internal divisions,
criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership,
which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.

Third KKK

The "Ku Klux Klan" name was used by many independent local groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.
During this period, they often forged alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama;
or with
governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama.
Several members of KKK groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
Today, researchers estimate that there may be approximately 150 Klan chapters with 5,000–8,000 members nationwide.
Today, a large majority of sources consider the Klan to be a "subversive or terrorist organization".
In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the Klan to be a terrorist organization.
A similar effort was made in 2004 when a professor at the University of Louisville began a campaign to have the Klan declared a terrorist organization so it could be banned from campus.
In April 1997, FBI agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and to blow up a natural gas processing plant.