Let’s remember when the Klan held a huge rally in Issaquah, on this day in 1924 (July 26)
This is not good, and not a good thing to happen in a mostly harmless town’s history.
Per HistoryLink’s David Wilma:
On July 26, 1924, the Ku Klux Klan, an all-white, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic organization, promises to “put Issaquah on the map” with a rally that draws onlookers conservatively estimated at 13,000. (Issaquah is located in King County, east of Lake Washington and just south of Lake Sammamish.)
According to the Issaquah Press, those attending are “entertained” by “stirring, patriotic music” from a 32-piece band, a play by school children, and speeches “on Americanism” so that “law-abiding citizens” can “get first-hand evidence by which they may form their opinions of the Klan.” The event is announced ahead of time in the Issaquah Press and in the Seattle Star. A similar rally will take place the following night in Chehalis.
The Klan was and is a racist organization which originated in the South during Reconstruction after the Civil War as a means of terrorizing freed slaves and Union sympathizers. The original Ku Klux Klan disappeared by the 1880s, but it was resurrected in 1915. The Klan’s racism reflected a defensive attitude by Protestants in small towns against the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917) and against Irish Catholic immigrants who arrived in America during the nineteenth century and Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Jews who arrived from the 1880s to 1920.
Lovely.
Read the whole thing here:
