For decades, scholars of the second Ku Klux Klan, the White Supremacist Protestant organization that terrorized numerous people during the early 1920s, have defined the organization as hateful and murderous. But “hate” is not the chief reason why employers and their allies, those interested in maintaining a compliant workforce, joined the organization. Moreover, Klansmen were more inclined to use non-lethal violence, if they used violence at all, during the 1920s. Lynchings, after all, declined during the Klan’s heyday, and few participated in these ghastly acts. Second wave Klansmen, like Reconstruction Era Klansmen, were more inclined to use violence like whippings to punish insubordinate African Americans than to resort to killings. This paper demonstrates that Klan leaders were primarily interested in identifying ways to control the activities of the Black masses than to hurt or murder them. As the Texas-based socialist leader Stanley Clark, an attentive student of Klan activities, explained in 1924, “White supremacy doesn’t want Negroes exterminated, but Negro labor intimidated.” Clark’s analysis seems correct. After all, Klansmen in Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas sought to lure Black strikers back to work by threatening harm, and they found no reason to use violence against subordinate laborers.
Indeed, Southern business and landowners, many of whom were Klansmen or supporters of the Invisible Empire, sought to find the right balance between repression and benevolence. Too much repression, they understood, led to out migrations of African Americans—a major problem for southern landowners during World War I and the immediate aftermath. In this period, tens of thousands of African Americans, departed southern regions for urban areas in the North. Building on what sociologists call the repression paradox, this paper illustrates the different ways elite Klansmen addressed what many called “the negro labor problem.”