For over 25 years I have asked my students in U.S. history courses the same questions about Jim Crow:

“Where does Jim Crow ‘live’?”

“When did it begin?”

“How does it work?”

Their answers almost always focus on Southern states. I have taught in California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota, places with well-documented histories of racial segregation and discrimination. A wealth of scholarship shows Jim Crow was everywhere. Still, students cling to a belief that the history of white supremacy is a Southern history.

To push back against these simplified notions of racial discrimination in the U.S., I’ve made it my job to write and teach about Jim Crow in unexpected places—including California. The state embraces its reputation as a site for progressive thinking, the birthplace of the hippies and the Black Panthers, and a “free” state from its 1850 inception. Yet the state also developed innovative methods for containing and restricting people of color in public and private spaces—methods that continue to stoke racism in California and throughout the U.S. today.

One of the most successful people who fought back against those methods was Loren Miller, a lawyer who worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Los Angeles. Using Miller’s mid-20th-century career as a lens to examine Jim Crow in California offers a sense of the breadth of this discrimination—and of the importance of acknowledging and understanding it.

Miller was born in Pender, Nebraska, in 1903 and earned his law degree from Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, in 1928. By the time he moved to California in 1929, the NAACP had been the leading civil rights organization in the nation for two decades, fighting to end discrimination, segregation, and lynching. The organization established a branch in Los Angeles in 1914.

In housing, neighborhoods, and schools, California had always excelled at creating white-only institutions. Its history of segregation began in the 1850s, when the state adopted so-called Black codes. These laws and practices kept African Americans out of a variety of places, from streetcars, theaters, and restaurants to political parties and witness stands, where they could not testify against white people until 1863. The state was especially proficient at creating white-only neighborhoods as it applied restrictive covenants and lending practices with aplomb.

Miller’s legal career took off quickly, fueled by the sheer volume of discrimination to fight in California. Between 1938 and 1948, when the Great Migration pulled thousands of African Americans to California, Miller appeared as the attorney in approximately 75 lawsuits involving discriminatory real estate practices. In December 1945, he won the Sugar Hill case, a decisive victory at the California Supreme Court that deemed restrictive covenants a violation of Black homeowners’ 14th Amendment rights. The case received extensive media attention, in part because one of the plaintiffs was the Academy Award-winning actress Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind. In 1954, along with Thurgood Marshall, Miller argued Shelley v. Kraemer, a landmark Supreme Court case in which the justices declared that the enforcement of racial restrictive covenants was unconstitutional.

Miller became the NAACP’s foremost expert on restrictive covenants’ legal intricacies and harmful effects in the U.S. In lectures to civic and human rights organizations around the country, he argued that the answer to most of the problems confronting Black Americans was “to find a solution to the complex housing problems that plague the urban Negro,” as he told a National Urban League audience in Pittsburgh in 1954. Housing discrimination led to other anti-Black practices and segregation, Miller noted—which kept Black people from achieving equality in education, the workplace, and beyond.

Miller never missed an opportunity to emphasize how dismal the situation was in his home state. “[M]ore Negro children attend all-Negro schools in Los Angeles than attend such schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Jackson, Mississippi, combined,” he told an audience at the Lake Arrowhead Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, in a 1963 talk titled “The Problems of The Negro in Southern California.”

And Miller knew, firsthand, that California’s Jim Crow, despite its legalistic and genteel packaging, could be as violent as that of the South—and as hard to combat. In 1946, his law firm had taken on one of the state’s most devastating instances of racial violence.

In December 1945, refrigeration engineer O’Day Short, who was Black, moved with his wife Helen and their two small children to a previously all-white part of Fontana, in California’s San Bernardino County, to take a job at a Kaiser Steel mill. Days after the Short family moved into their home, a menacing posse warned them to leave the neighborhood. The Shorts stayed put. On December 16, their house burned to the ground. Helen and the children died from “shock from extensive burns” shortly after arriving at the hospital; O’Day died several weeks later.

The threats, arson, and murders of the Shorts were almost certainly the work of Ku Klux Klan vigilantes. The so-called Second Klan had been active in the area in the 1920s and months after the fire at the Shorts’ house, the group staged a major recruitment drive in San Bernardino County.

Miller and his law partner Ivan J. Johnson worked diligently on the Short case, but it never went to trial. The San Bernardino County Coroner quickly ruled that the deaths were caused by a fire of “unknown origin,” refusing to admit the threats against the Shorts as evidence.

Rumors circulated among white neighbors and local law enforcement that the Shorts had started the fire when they lit their stove; the Black press, including the California Eagle (which Miller later purchased), devoted considerable coverage to debunking that claim. An interracial coalition of civil rights workers, labor unions, and religious leaders pushed for justice, turning the murders into a rallying cry to stop residential segregation and the revitalized Ku Klux Klan. In 1946, California Attorney General Robert W. Kenny promised an independent investigation into the murders, but the grand jury adjourned without issuing a report.

Miller and Johnson had a stellar record fighting Jim Crow in the Golden State. But in the Short case, there were no victories. As the Black newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel put it back in 1946, “All the Shorts are dead…Only Jim Crow is alive.”

When I teach my students about Miller and the Shorts, they begin to see that white supremacy had—and has—a long reach. The violence that Black Americans face today is rooted in their own backyards, and not just in the South. Understanding the pervasiveness of white supremacy and its “strange career” in unexpected places is crucial if we are to understand its resurgence today.

The post Look to California to Understand Jim Crow appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Ku Klux Klan, dead for some 40 years, was back.

Their mission? To defend white, Protestant, native-born America from “illegal foreigners” and religious minorities. Faced with unprecedented ethnic and cultural change, at least 3 million Americans—South and North—responded by joining a violent, secretive movement, vowing to keep America from becoming “Catholicized, mongrelized, and circumcised.”

Today we misremember the Klan as faceless demons forever haunting American history. This lets us distance ourselves from the movement, but beneath those robes were ordinary Americans. And the Klan was not a constant presence: It was deliberately revived in 1915, when some in the white, Protestant majority became convinced that they were losing control of the nation to new immigrants and new values. The movement’s sudden resurgence offers a useful lesson today, warning about the dangers of backlash in the face of diversity.

Between 1915 and 1925, the “second Klan” conquered America in a way the post-Civil War organization, crushed by the government in the 1870s, never had. It won millions of members, 500,000 of them women. It took Texas by storm, and so dominated Georgia that the Klan held initiation ceremonies in the state capital building, but also metastasized across the north, from Asbury Park, New Jersey, to Portland, Oregon.

The citizens who flocked to the Klan were not wrong that America really was changing fast. By 1915, what was once an overwhelmingly Protestant nation had absorbed some 15 million Catholics and 3 million Jews. African-Americans, who had mostly been isolated in the South, were beginning to move north. Overall, America had a higher proportion of foreign-born residents than it does today.

The new culture of flappers and dancehalls seemed equally threatening. As young people enjoyed more sexual freedom, fundamentalists declared themselves “Puritan” defenders of old-fashioned morality “in this corrupt, jazz-mad age.”

This sense of alienation primed many to follow “Colonel” William J. Simmons, when he lit that cross on Stone Mountain. Simmons was a failed preacher—denied a pulpit for “moral impairment”—and actually never attained the rank of colonel in the military, but he was a brilliant organizer. In 1915, he took advantage of the immense popularity of the film The Birth of a Nation, which valorized Confederates and demonized freed slaves, re-launching the Klan as a blend of Old South nostalgia and Anglo-Saxon imagery. He added touches, like the Scottish burning cross (a symbol the 19th century Klan never used), creating an iconography so powerful it still generates goose-bumps today.

In the late 1910s and early ’20s, the KKK exploded in places like northern Indiana and California’s Central Valley, where diverse cities met the more homogenous countryside. Warning of an alien tide pushing in from the coasts, Klansman ranted about Catholic plots, Jewish conspiracies, or African Americans taking white men’s jobs. It particularly appealed to a slice of middle-class America that was equally hostile to urban professionals and working-class laborers. Klansmen argued that they were the forgotten real Americans, pressed from all sides by foreign forces.

The group was an odd hybrid—part terrorist organization, part social club. The Klan meted out horrific violence, flogging divorced couples in front of their children and castrating black men linked to white women, all the while insisting that their victims were being “punished in a spirit of kindness,” to protect them from sinful behavior.

But it also created a complex bureaucracy, complete with secret code-words and high-tech radio programs. New members even submitted their measurements to the headquarters in Atlanta to be fitted for tailored robes. Though the movement claimed to defend an older America, it was as modern as a Model T.

Pillars of American life backed the Klan. As one Oklahoma mayor put it, the KKK “made our best citizens their best friends.” Preachers gave approving sermons. Politicians endorsed the movement, turning the 1924 Democratic convention into a showdown between Klan supporters and northeastern liberals. Even policemen joined. When an Inglewood, California, cop shot several Klansmen during a fight, he found a constable and a deputy sheriff under the bloody robes.

When other Americans pushed back, like Kansas editor William Allen White, who called Klansmen “moral idiots” in white robes, the movement’s propagandists feigned victimhood, claiming that they were being persecuted by the media. Klan members were the true victims of “intolerance,” they declared. Anyone who said otherwise was “a malicious, slandering, lying fool.”

The Klan peaked in the mid-1920s, and crumbled after that. Even among bigots, the movement looked violent and corrupt. When the Louisiana Klan tortured two men to death for pulling off a Klansman’s hood, tying them down and running them over with a tractor, it made national news. The press kept up the pressure, reporting on the crimes committed by the “hooded hoodlums” who ran the movement. Membership began to collapse.

At the same time, America was incorporating recent immigrants. The KKK was always dwarfed by the tens of millions whose gradual acceptance helped make immigration to America among the most successful in world history. Public schools, popular entertainment, a booming business culture, and government programs helped fold outsiders into American life.

Today we can see, with a century’s perspective, the lesson of 1915. A prosperous, technologically advanced nation was not too modern to resurrect the worst elements of its past. A faction of the majority, feeling threatened by change, convinced itself it was an embattled minority, and embraced an apocalyptic fear that their stable civilization was far less adaptive than it proved to be.

As a curator, unlocking the metal cases that contain the Smithsonian’s collection of hundred-year-old Klan robes feels a little like a scientist handling those smallpox samples quarantined in isolated facilities. The off-white linen robes are at once an ominous reminder of something truly devastating in our past, and a pile of fabric, safely contained.

We can’t afford to forget those robes, snug in their storage units. In the 21st century, we tell ourselves that changing demographics will mean a steady acceptance of racial and cultural diversity, but the “second Klan” challenges this confidence. It’s hard to accept, but it was often easier to be a Jew in 19th-century America than in the early 20th century. African Americans enjoyed more rights in the years after the Civil War than after World War One. In the roaring twenties, and the pluralistic 2010s, progress is never guaranteed.

Still, what the Klan warned against has become America’s greatest strength: our ability to incorporate and synthesize. After all, the minorities the KKK ranted against joined mainstream American life whenever they could. Jewish, African-American, and Catholic boys, who were born as “Colonel” Simmons was lighting that cross, fought for their country in disproportionate numbers in World War II.

Ku Klux Klan propagandists fretted about the “mongrelizing of the citizenship of the United States,” but one hundred years later, it has only made us stronger.

The post The KKK’s Failed Comeback appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.