Why does the Ku Klux Klan burn crosses? They got the idea from a movie.
Seriously.
Looking eastward on a chilly Thanksgiving night in 1915, residents of Atlanta were met with an unfamiliar sight. Fifteen miles away the barren summit of Stone Mountain was illuminated by flames rising high into the blackness. The city, still reeling from a summer of anti-Semitic angst over the murder conviction and subsequent lynching of Jewish industrialist Leo Frank, would have been excused for thinking the giant burning cross was a work of Jewish retribution. In fact, it was the same violently anti-immigrant men who had committed the recent act of mob justice, and were now inaugurating the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan. It was the first time a burning cross had been used as a hate symbol in America. But the formerly innocuous act would soon become one of the hallmarks of the Klan—enduringly equated with intimidation, fear, and violence in the South and beyond.
On the mountaintop that night were fifteen men led by William Joseph Simmons, a failed medical student and army veteran who had been inspired by the popular new movie, The Birth of a Nation. D.W. Griffith’s silent film, based on the 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, includes scenes depicting Klan members burning crosses before lynching a black man accused of murder. Simmons and company, fresh from committing their own act of extrajudicial justice, adopted the flaming cross symbol. But the origins of the practice were a far cry from the racist rabble rousing espoused by the Klan’s second coming.
Cross burning dates back to Medieval Europe, when Scottish clansmen would set fire to hillsides as a statement of military defiance or call to action for soldiers ahead of battle. Now, the KKK got a lot of inspiration from Scottish fraternities. The rituals, the hoods, the whole “clan” thing. But cross burning wasn’t part of the show until Birth of a Nation came out. (And who says violence in cinema has no effect?)
Since then, cross burning has become nearly synonymous with the KKK—its primary purpose being that of intimidation. (Of course, you don’t need a cross to do that.) But incorporating religious iconography can add a bit of mystery to menace.
Avowedly Protestant, the Klan has always claimed they were “lighting the cross” in celebration, not burning it maliciously. And to an extent the law has agreed. The 2003 Virginia v. Black Supreme Court decision struck down a state statute which classified cross burning as prima facie intimidation. The First Amendment case acknowledged the KKK’s ability to express “messages of shared ideology,” leaving the burden of proof on the state to prove intent to intimidate.
Today, membership in the KKK is down to around 5,000 nationwide. That’s a tiny fraction of its 1920s peak of 4 million, but no less problematic as hate continues to manifests itself in slightly more subtle ways. And if recent controversy over a planned North Carolina cross burning in March, 2017 is any indicator, the practice will likely persist for as long as there is hate to fuel it.
This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.
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