“Ladies must not initiate conversations with males (with the exception of male teachers).” “Ladies must cook (preferably not buy) something for the gentlemen in their class. “Ladies must address all men respectfully by title, with a lowered head and curtsy.” NPR RAD researcher Ayda Pourasad helped find historical texts for this article.“Ladies to dress in a feminine manner (in school dress code) to please the men.” She called the decision to keep the donor's identity secret a "failure of moral leadership - but sadly, fairly typical." "I think it's a public service that the public needs to know that stuff," Schmidt told me. The society refused to reveal the name, presumably to protect the donor. This past June, Schmidt, from U.Va., urged a local historical society to release the identity of the donor who in 1993 gifted the society an old set of Klan robes. The people who you went to church with, who pet your dogs. "They have deep roots in this town, and it's painful to think about that. "They are the great-grandparents and grandparents and parents of so many Charlottsevillians," Mason said. "In some ways," Rothman wrote, "it was this superficially innocuous Klan that was the most insidious of them all." He noted in The Atlantic last year that the Klan's members were disproportionately middle class and that it made many of its gatherings social. "We do know that, for instance, the Sheriff of Albemarle County was a member of the Klan," Mason said "Because when he died, robed Klansmen placed a wreath on his grave."īy 1925, the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan had an overall national membership of between 2 million and 5 million members, according to Joshua Rothman, a history professor at the University of Alabama. If you are 100 per cent American, we want you. In a bulletin published on July 19, 1921, it warned that "all undesirables must leave town" and extended this invitation: "If you are a man, we respect you. Lindsay, in 1901 as being of the "opinion that the education of the negro rather unfits him for the practical duties to which is called to his sphere."Īnd the newspaper was used as a tool to recruit more Klan members. Though it isn't clear whether the editor of the newspaper was a part of the Klan, the newspaper describes its own founder, James H.
Mason is a member of Charlottesville's Blue Ribbon Commission On Race, Memorials And Public Spaces, which released an extensive report in December 2016 to the city council, analyzing in great detail the city's legacies of slavery, Jim Crow and white supremacy. "Was the editor one of those prominent officials? Who were they?"
"It's all surmise and speculation," said Mason.
CHIVALRY CODE FOR GYMNASTICS PROFESSIONAL
A spokesman for the school said in an email: "The University of Virginia has acknowledged that controversy has been part of its history, and we continue to strive to learn from it and to improve our current environment through open and constructive dialogue."Īnd which of the city's "leading business and professional men" were secret Klan members? It's a question that has remained unanswered in the nearly 100 years since then, according to John E. I reached out to the university about whether it acknowledged the donation and, if so, what that the money was used for. To this day, the university has yet to explicitly acknowledge the KKK's donation, according to Jalane Schmidt, a religious studies professor at U.Va. then responded with a "hearty thanks," the school's student paper reported at the time. The Klansmen attached a note with the donation, the newspaper reported: "Filled with the deepest devotion to the university as an institution which inculcates virtue and fosters pure American patriotism." The president of U.Va. In that first year, the chapter made a $1,000 donation to the university. Take, for example, the Charlottesville KKK's relationship with the University of Virginia when the local Klan began in 1921. But it also glosses over a history of racism in the city stretching back more than a century. It's well-intended and meant to spurn the racism and violence that occurred last weekend. Scrolling through tweets and posts of folks processing the "Unite The Right" rally and the violence afterward, a common refrain emerged: "This is not us." It was the first of many articles from The Daily Progress about the Charlottesville KKK and its activities.Īfter events like what happened this past weekend in Charlottesville, I always find it instructive to look back at history and how people and ideologies were framed then - and how people see or don't see them today.
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