Artifacts like this are key for reminding us of a history of racism that is all too easy to forget.
Ku Klux Klan robe, c. 1928 (The Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:06] We’re in the Motley Study Center, part of the Amistad Center for Art & Culture, housed in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, looking at one of the most troubling objects that I’ve ever worked with.
[0:19] This is a robe from the Ku Klux Klan that dates to about 1928. I think in the North we have this reassuring myth that the Klan is of the South, but this is from Connecticut. This is from New England.
Dr. William Frank Mitchell: [0:32] One of the things we like to remind people is that there was slavery here in Connecticut. The Klan was active here as well, and was a significant presence into the 20th century.
Dr. Zucker: [0:42] Most of the videos that Smarthistory focuses on are looking at subjects that are things of beauty, paintings and sculptures that are technically excellent, that are intellectually profound. This is an object that is very different, but it is a part of our material culture. It is a part of our history. It’s a history of terror that should not be forgotten.
Dr. Mitchell: [1:03] This came into the collection pretty recently. There was a intense conversation about why we would have it, what it would mean to bring into this collection that is primarily a resource for celebrating Black history and achievements of African Americans.
[1:16] But this is a collection that represents the highlights and the struggles of African Americans and others to push for freedom and equity across the centuries. So we have an obligation to celebrate those stories that are important, but also to confront and to challenge.
Dr. Zucker: [1:34] Maybe it makes sense to spend a moment giving a quick history of the Ku Klux Klan.
Dr. Mitchell: [1:39] I certainly think of the Klan in its earliest moments as being local and tied to the history of enslaved Blacks needing to be controlled and managed as a constantly resisting and struggling population of workers. In the years after emancipation, we see the Klan emerge as a force but still a local force, still doing the work to control people and not thinking about themselves as this vast national conspiracy.
Dr. Zucker: [2:02] This transformation into a national fraternal order is helped along by Hollywood.
Dr. Mitchell: [2:06] In the late 19th century, the images that we have of Klan activity present us with carnival characteristics. People with big puppet heads or animal heads and furs. And that does change as we get into the 20th century. An important impetus for that is “Birth of a Nation,” the film and the costuming and people’s realization that that could be appropriated and put to use in daily life.
Dr. Zucker: [2:29] And so, in the wake of D.W. Griffith’s film, which is often credited as being the first feature-length film in American history — a film by the way that was shown in the White House, a film that enjoyed broad popular acclaim — is often credited with reviving the Klan and heroicizing it, has the effect of creating this national organization of terror.
[2:50] It is at about this time that the Klan becomes a centralized organization with centralized control.
Dr. Mitchell: [2:56] Griffith’s film helps to galvanize the NAACP as people are out there protesting this film and working hard to keep it from being shown in places. It also perpetuates the myth of rape as the cause of lynching. Lots of activism around that as well. For Black activists and people who are committed to the civil rights struggle, it is a watershed moment.
[3:17] While we don’t think of it as also giving birth to the Klan costume, it’s also doing that work.
Dr. Zucker: [3:22] It’s important to remember that the Klan was not only intent on enforcing African Americans as it had so much in the 19th century, but was reacting against the influx of immigrants, especially of Catholics, of Jews, of Eastern and especially Southern Europeans.
[3:36] The focus remains clearly on enforcement against African Americans. It is a movement that arose against the autonomy that was claimed by former enslaved peoples.
Dr. Mitchell: [3:47] The Klan, at its root, is definitely a white supremacist project. Whether it’s controlling and dominating people of African descent in the South who were either enslaved workers or free workers and trying to make sure that they either stayed put or worked in a certain way or remained poor or lost property, or whether it’s looking at new immigrants who the Klan did not see as white showing up to challenge their domination, it’s still a white supremacist project.
Dr. Zucker: [4:13] This robe was meant to transform its wearer into a member, into a symbol, into a non-individualized member of a larger group. I can tell from the stitching, from the cloth that this was a mass-produced object, meant to be inexpensive, and as a result, to reach the widest possible audience.
Dr. Mitchell: [4:31] It’s the cheapest model. It’s a basic cotton without a lot of ornamentation. We have seen images of the catalog where you could purchase this piece. It’s really smartly designed.
Dr. Zucker: [4:41] One of the things it was intended to achieve was to create a sense of a larger-than-life figure. One of the ways that that was created was with the addition of the cape to accentuate the breadth of the shoulders of the wearer. It gives permission for the person who’s wearing it to act outside of societal boundaries, that they no longer need to follow rules, that they can act violently without fear of retribution.
Dr. Mitchell: [5:03] We haven’t had this piece in the collection for very long. We’ve had it on exhibition. It’s been a prompt for other institutions around the region that have had complicated material that they haven’t shown to bring those things out and have conversations about what it means to have racist material from early 19th century, what it means to have Klan robes, and that’s been a really great thing to just learn from each other about what these things mean to Connecticut history.
[5:28] It’s also allowed us to talk about things that we feel we need to talk about here in Hartford and Connecticut, and push us as an institution, and given what’s happened in America in the past two to three years, it’s been important to think about confronting these bigger questions.
[5:43] So when David Duke gets to stand on a stage at an HBCU in Louisiana as a candidate, given his history with the Klan, it’s important that we have a Klan robe in our collection.
[5:52] We’re able to remind people that the things you may think you remember about the Klan, these are the things that we know about the Klan.
[5:58] As people are marching in Charlottesville and talking about blood and soil with tiki torches, it’s important to have these artifacts that we can go to and remind people of that history, because it’s just too easy to forget.
[6:10] [music]
