The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

A notorious former Methodist preacher, one William J. Simmons, retreated to Stone Mountain, Georgia, with at least fifteen other local firebrands, including the speaker of the Georgia legislature. Simmons, the son of a physician who had been a leader of the original Alabama Klan of the 1860s, presided over a squad of men shivering before a burning cross of pine boards. They placed a Bible on a jutting rock altar, along with an American flag, a canteen of water, and a sword, over which they swore allegiance to wage an armed campaign against Negroes seeking rights as full citizens of the United States. During the night of fireworks on November 15, 1915, this band of fierce and fearsome Georgians reconstituted the Ku Klux Klan as a secret organization of native-born “Protestants, white, gentile Americans.” And for generations the hooded, white horsemen would crack down brutally on Negro progress with such terror methods as firebombings, torture, abduction, castration, gang rape, and death by gunfire, drowning, and lynching.