1915 | Human Rights, Social Justice
Human Rights, Social Justice
D. W. Griffith's full-length motion picture The Birth of a Nation heightens U.S. racial tensions.
A Georgia lynch mob seizes Leo Frank from a state prison August 16 and hangs him at Marietta (see 1913). Former Populist presidential candidate Thomas E. Watson, now 58, has run anti-Semitic articles in his Weekly Jeffersonian and takes pleasure in the lynching. His racist views will help him gain election to the U.S. Senate in 1920.
Christabel Pankhurst tells an audience at New York's Carnegie Hall October 25, "What we suffragettes aspire to be when we are enfranchised is ambassadors of freedom to women in other parts of the world, who are not so free as we are." Socialite Blanche Oelrichs Thomas leads a women's rights march on Fifth Avenue.
A new Ku Klux Klan takes root Thanksgiving night on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, where William Joseph Simmons revives the name from the KKK of the 1860s. A former preacher, traveling salesman, and promoter of fraternal organizations, Simmons obtains a legal charter from the state of Georgia, calls his KKK a "high-class, mystic, social, patriotic, benevolent association" dedicated to "white supremacy," the protection of Southern womanhood, but most of all "Americanism," and will promote his "invisible empire" of Kleagles and Grand Dragons through advertising developed by Edward Young Clark. It finds its greatest strength initially in Indiana, where it focuses its hatred against foreigners, but it will attract a membership of nearly 100,000 throughout the country within 6 years, concentrating political power to elect sympathetic U.S. senators, congressmen, and state officials as it employs terrorist tactics against Roman Catholics, Jews, and blacks, most especially in the Midwest and, later, the South (see 1925).