The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

The Ku Klux Klan, initially organized as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee (1866), soon transformed itself into a vigilante group whose primary purpose was to

redeem the South and thereby ensure that America remained a white man’s country.

Cole Blease, the two-time governor and U.S. senator from South Carolina, proclaimed that lynching is a “divine right of the Caucasian race to dispose of the offending blackamoor without the benefit of jury.”[13]