Original subtitles

(downbeat music)

- [Narrator] On the 17th of June, 2015,

Charleston in South Carolina saw one

of the worst racially motivated killings

in recent American history.

Nine black worshipers were shot dead

during a prayer meeting at this downtown church.

The killer was identified as 21 year old white supremacist

Dylann Roof.

He confessed to committing the massacre

in the hope of igniting a race war.

All of America was shocked but in the southern state,

where race has been an issue for centuries,

the shooting also triggered a passionate argument

about the past.

Much of it focused on the Confederate battle flag.

For many, the very symbol of racism and hate

but what is it about the past that stokes the flames

of racism here?

That's the question that interests me

because it seems that the bedrock

of the southern states of America,

the old, confederate, deep south is,

deep down, more than a little Scottish.

- He lifted the blazing emblem.

The fiery cross of old Scotland's hill.

It would become the most identifiable symbols

of race hatred, of the Ku Klux Klan.

- I think that white southerners

do think of themselves as Celts.

It is absolutely a core idea for a lot

of these white supremacist groups

including the original Klan which of course

was thinking of Scottish clans with a C

when they called themselves the Ku Klux Klan with a K.

- I've spent a lot of time celebrating

the legacy of Scots who left home

and helped lay the foundations

of the United States of America.

When they arrived here, they had the chance

to create something new, something perfect.

A new world.

A (mumbling) of the signatories

of the Declaration of Independence were Scots.

The pursuit of happiness, the most famous part

of the declaration is arguably a Scottish idea

but the new world is not perfect

and I want to find out why.

If the Scots had a significant hand

in conjuring the American dream,

to what extent were they also responsible

for the nightmare?

That ugliest of stains.

The bloody, violent history of race hatred

that blights America to this day.

I'm traveling over 2,000 miles

of the southern states of America.

It's somewhere I've never been before

and I'm going to explore how early Scottish immigration

evolved and see whether it's had

an enduring impact on race relations here.

This seems like a natural place to start

as I'm told it's living evidence

of the Scots that originally settled here.

(bagpipe music)

I'm in Greenville in South Carolina

on the eve of an annual gathering

for the highland games.

I can hear the pipes.

Must be Scottish people here.

- Come on people, let's hear you!

- We're Scottish American.

- Okay, you do the Scottish parts?

- We do tonight, yes, absolutely.

- You claim Scottish descent?

- Yes.

- If you were to score yourself out of 10

as a Scot, what numbers would you give yourself?

- Today, a 10.

- I have a four year old.

If I could get him out here, he's still scared

of bagpipes, but as soon as I can get him over that

it'll be fantastic.

- He's scared of bagpipes.

That's a worrying, oh, there we go.

The next day at the games proper

I asked yet more (mumbling) Scots

what they thought of the effect

of Scottish migration to the states.

- They influenced everything.

The first governor of South Carolina

was a boy from Oxfordshire and he very quickly

wanted state laws that reflected

the way things were back in Scotland.

(cheering)

- Some historians will tell you

to look at the Confederate flag from the civil war,

very similar to St. Andrews in terms of design

and they see a connection there

because it was a lot of Scottish heritage

in those early days.

- Coming from a place where you weren't allowed

to have your own land and you felt

you were kept down by the landlords.

The first thing you do when you get here is buy slaves.

There's a kind of disjuncture there isn't there?

(downbeat music)

Greenville's not unique.

All over the south I'm finding people

who keep to describe themselves

or their ancestors as Scottish.

How and why did the Scots arrive here

and what does that tell us about the nature

of the south today?

I found one man who has written extensively

on trans-Atlantic immigration.

Barry Vann has studied the subject

in the United States and the UK.

He brought me to one of the peaks

of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia

to look down on the great Appalachian Valley

that most of the early Scottish settlers

would have passed through during the 18th century.

- They were going to the frontier, looking for cheap land.

Ran into those mountains.

They couldn't go north because that land

was already occupied and they couldn't

go over the mountains because it was too difficult

to get over them and they were probably

hostile natives over there so they came

down the valleys this way.

- It's such a massive undertaking for these people.

What's driving it?

- One was economic because they were coming

from a place where the lands that they had farmed

for generations were no longer available to them

'cause they weren't able to afford

the money rent that was required to stay on those lands

but here they could acquire lands

and become their own lords.

In lot of respects, they were trying

to recreate the imagined Scotland

that they had back there but they wanted it here

because they had more resources.

Look at those beautiful trees, water was plentiful.

Nice longer growing seasons.

This was a bountiful place.

This was the Scotland that they had imagined.

- Scotland 2.0.

- That's right.

- It's the upgrade.

- The upgrade, absolutely.

- [Host] But it wasn't just the prospect of a better future

that drew Scots to what they called the back country.

They were tempted here because of the reputation

as fighting folk.

Recruited to help defend the coastal areas

already settled by the English

from native Americans and the French.

- They wanted them to go to the back country,

to this part of the state or colony at that time

and to be a buffer zone against potential invasion.

(gentle music)

This is probably the oldest part of the cemetery right here

and these are some of the founding families,

second generation.

- Down in the valley lies the resting place

of many of those early frontiers people.

Yeah, look at that, Scott, Kirkpatrick, Bell.

They came from Scotland and from Alston

and they quickly exceeded the number

of English settlers in the south.

Next to the graveyard, we can see

what united these newcomers.

This church is built on the site

of one of the earliest Presbyterian places

of worship in the area.

Were they a happy lot, do you think,

or were they coming in with lots

of emotional and religious baggage

on account of the old country they had left behind?

- When they got here, they were interested

in acquiring land and they also knew

that they were gonna be facing potential hostiles

and so they were not necessarily coming here

with an open hand saying we wanna be friends.

They came here for the most part

interested in farming if they could

and they wanted to live in strategically important places.

That's why we call them today hillbillies

and hilltoppers because they wanted

to live up in the hills where they could see

the enemy coming.

- For those Presbyterians, who were the enemy?

Who was it they thought was gonna come

and attack them on their hills?

- Anybody who wasn't them.

It could be the English because they

had a history of conflict with the English.

They had a history of conflict with the Catholics.

They had a history of conflict

with almost anybody who was not dissenting if you will.

- Some of those settlers, confident

about who they were and just as importantly

who they weren't strode out into the untamed back country

moving further south and west with each generation.

But at the end of the 18th century,

the settlers simply way of life

was transformed by something that changed the course

of this part of America forever.

It was the arrival of cotton.

To the frontier farmers, the economics were simple.

Cotton was a cash crop that brought relatively easy money.

It also offered an easy life as long

as those picking the cotton were slaves.

As the cotton industry grew, so did slavery.

By 1810, the number of slaves in the US

rose to 1.2 million, almost double

what it was 20 years earlier.

Now, the descendants of many oppressed

and downtrodden refugee Scots took the path

of racism to become oppressors themselves

and their simple farmhouses became

increasingly grand plantation houses.

Like this one, built in 1851 just outside Charleston

by William Wallace McCleod.

He owned one of the largest plantations in South Carolina

but like many, he never forgot his roots.

He called the grand house Inverness.

The impression planters wanted to give

was one of affluence and the most striking display

of wealth at that time was measured

by the number of slave cabins

that lined the drive to the house.

Here there were 23.

I asked Heather Williams to show me around.

Not only is she an expert in slavery

in the south but she's known this place for some time.

- When I first came to this place,

for me it was a really powerful sense of the past.

The cabins, it seemed as though slavery

has just ended one day and everybody

had packed up and left and that I had been,

in a sense, transported back to that time period,

the late 1860's.

In order for a society to survive

you need the top people who think

and then you have the people who do the work.

This is what James Henry Hammond said.

He was a senator from South Carolina,

governor and so on.

You need a mud seal, he said, in the society

and we have found them in these Africans

who are so well-suited to do the work

that we don't want to do.

(downbeat music)

They were legally owned.

They could be sold, they could be traded,

they could be given away, they could be mortgaged.

People could transfer them.

There was this perpetual sense

that they would be punished if they didn't adhere

to the rules of the place.

- So would this be about as good as it gets

for enslaved people?

- Yeah, I think, I've seen cabins made of brick

which might have kept people a little bit warmer

in the winter.

I would think that there would be

at least six, seven people in here.

- William Wallace McCleod enslaved up

to a hundred people on his plantation

while he lived the life of undoubted privilege.

Being here in a place where slavery actually happened,

I have to admit I'm filled for the first time

with feelings of disbelief at the surreal nature

of the life that those elite whites chose for themselves.

How you get to the point where you can enjoy a life

that is composed of people who are your captives

who are around you in great numbers

every minute of the day, doing things against their will

for no pay, they cook your food,

they work in the fields, they fix up the house.

If it's a cold night, you would order one

of them to lie across your feet on your bed

so that you are warm.

At what point does living like that

feel in any sense normal?

And it was another Scot who provided the bomb

that made all this seem legitimate.

By the mid 1800's, almost every house

like this would have contained some

of the many romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott.

Scott's stories of gallant knights

and brave highlanders set in a golden,

mythical past were wildly popular

but according to the American writer Mark Twain

they merely fed this fantasy lifestyle.

Twain felt the planters were modeling their lives

on Scott's romantic vision of the old country,

imagining themselves as lairds of their own clan.

He wrote that the civilization of the south

in the 19th century is curiously confused

and co-mingled with the Walter Scott

middle age sham civilization.

The inflated speech and the Georgian romanticism

of an upset past that is dead and like a charity,

ought to be buried.

- I think that for many people it felt

as though it was something they were entitled to

and I think that sense of entitlement

then passed from generation to generation.

This sense that you are supposed

to have more than other people

and that some people are supposed to serve

and you are to be served.

- Twain also thought that Scott's heroic romanticism

was partly responsible for the terrible war that followed.

The northern states had wanted

to limit the expansion of slavery

just as the worldwide demand for cotton was booming.

Southern state planters like William McCleod

saw their whole lifestyle threatened

and were willing to fight for it.

In 1861, the 11 slave states with cotton based economies

left the union and a horrific four year war began.

(guns firing)

Now, 150 years later, people flock

to see the Civil War as entertainment

and living history groups meet regularly

to replay the battles again and again.

This one is at Fort Hollingsworth in Georgia

where reenactors from all

over the southern states take part.

What is it important to remember

by taking part in and watching a reenactment like this?

- It's important to make sure that the people understand

that what the history is all about.

It's important that they remember that this

is something that their ancestors fought for

and something that's actually a part of them.

This is something that they were born ingrained with

and they should remember that.

- What does define the ancestors?

- They didn't leave any of their culture behind.

They just brought it here and used that culture

and created something completely new.

Even from the way we talk.

Even down to the patterns in their clothes.

When the Scots came here they brought with them the tartans.

- Our way of life is probably closer

to those in Scotland that are now

in this part of the country.

We held on to a lot of their ways, I think we did.

I think we did.

- [Host] What was lost when the war was lost?

- The way we lived, actually.

They had plantations, a lot of folks had plantations

and a lot of wealth and a lot of that was lost in the south.

They had to go back and start life over.

- America's Civil War was immensely destructive.

Well over half a million soldiers died

and much of the south's infrastructure was ruined.

For many whites, the greatest fear

of all had just come true.

The enslaved were now free.

Not only that, but black men could also vote

just as the vengeful north took away the right to vote

for those that supported the Confederacy.

Like the Jacobites in Scotland a hundred years earlier,

the southern whites had lost everything

but now they too had a lost cause to believe in.

That lost cause found its footing here

in the neat streets of Pulaski in Tennessee.

This is where things first started to turn ugly.

I've come to meet local historian Bob Wamble

to find out what happened in the town

after the end of the Civil War.

Bob, when the war was over and the soldiers came back

what did they find here in Pulaski?

- Right here in town where we are,

they found a courthouse and that was pretty much it.

This entire side of the square was burned to the ground.

It was done by Union soldiers that were stationed here.

There were all these Confederate soldiers

that came home and had nothing.

If they had owned a business before the war

it was gone, it was burnt to the ground.

They had no government, they had no law really.

Anybody that had supported the Confederacy couldn't vote.

Any law that was here, they didn't have a part of it.

- [Host] So they were effectively aliens in their own town.

- [Bob] Yes, this was their home

but it wasn't their government.

- The destruction here was typical

of many towns in the south but this town

has a claim to fame that it would rather forget.

One group of former Confederate officers

bold and fearful of the future

now that black man had the vote,

set up a secret fraternal society.

They drew on ancient Greek

and their Scottish heritage for the name.

They called it the Ku Klux Klan.

- This is the spot where the Klan was formed.

The Ku Klux Klan was six young men,

met right here in this office

and decided that they wanted to form an organization.

This is a plaque showing this to people of Pulaski

and they were proud of the Ku Klux Klan.

The plaque is turned backwards.

About probably 20, 25 years ago ...

- [Host] Oh, it's got its face to the wall now.

- It's face is to the wall.

The man that owned this building turned it around like that.

- So what's on the other side of the plaque?

- Well it lists the names of the young men

that formed the Ku Klux Klan.

I have a copy of it right here.

- [Host] These are the key players.

- Alvin Jones, John B. Kennedy.

- Frank O. McCord, John C. Lester,

Richard R. Reed and James R. Crowe.

- They were all Confederate soldiers

that had just come home just really

didn't have anything better to do

than to form an organization just for amusement.

They played their musical instruments

and sang songs and went out and serenaded the girls.

They were out hunting all the pretty girls of Pulaski.

- [Host] Is that really all it was in its first form?

- Its very first stages, that's all it was.

- This photograph, discovered by Bob,

is thought to show Frank McCord

and the rest of the original Klan.

It was John B. Kennedy who apparently suggested

that they should call themselves a clan

as they were all of Scotch Irish descent.

Some of them were educated obviously

because the drawing on Greek, kuklos is a circle

and a clan is a family group

that shares some kind of blood or a name, a surname.

I think there's an intention there

to declare yourself as a group

that will stand shoulder to shoulder against outsiders.

Pulaski has another revelation.

Tucked behind this store front

is a small scale opera house.

A good place, it seems, to understand

how the Klan moved from make believe to reality

according to author and academic Elaine Frantz Parsons.

Amazing, look at that.

- [Elaine] For a town this size, it is impressive.

- [Host] Created in 1867, almost exactly the same time

as the Klan, this theater gives us a fascinating insight

into what might have influenced them.

- They're trying to figure out who they are

and they're really interested particularly in culture.

They don't have power anymore.

They don't have politics but maybe

they can keep culture or they can create a culture

that means something.

Particularly pretending they were in a different time

and place pretending they were in the world

of Sir Walter Scott I think was very attractive.

- Just a couple of years after the war,

they embark on this and it's all

about theatrical and make believe.

Was that in forming the Klan as well?

Was it about the costumes and pretend?

- Yeah, I think that's a really good way

to think about it actually,

that the world, the real world, wasn't something

that they necessarily wanted to spend a lot of time in.

I think that part of what happened

is that they realized that this play

that they were doing could be brought to bare

on this competition, this problem

that they were having with black claims to rights.

If you were in the 19th century

and you're going to the theater,

a lot of the time you were going to a minstrel show

and the minstrel show wasn't all

about making fun of black people

but that was an important part of the minstrel show

and so part of what the Klan wanted to do

was to force black people into situations

where they looked ludicrous or ridiculous

and what better way to do that

than pretend like you're a monster

and attack them and then tell everybody

how scared they were by this monster.

- What flicks the switch from it being make believe,

harmless, costumes, music, what flicks the switch

and turns it into something sinister?

- We know that Frank McCord was trying

to get up a mob during the time

that the Klan seemed to have nothing to do with it,

he is also interested in racial violence.

- The Klan soon moved on from theatricalities

and threats, it became more violent

and better organized.

At the nearby state museum in Nashville,

they have one of the few remaining documents

from that time.

What is in effect the Klan's constitution.

It's a tiny little sliver of a thing.

- So this is one of the few remaining copies

of what was the constitution of the Ku Klux Klan

and you'll see at the front this is the constitution

which they called the prescript.

The prescript of the star, star, star

which is what they used to stand for Ku Klux Klan.

Then you have some Shakespearean verse

and then down here we have Burns

so you can see the Scottish influence here.

- And then the Burns is about a certain ghoul,

a certain ghost is around and drinking.

We'll send him linking to your black pit

but faith he'll turn a corner jinking

and cheat you yet.

So both are about things macabre.

- Yes, but they're also high culture.

They're saying we aren't just a bunch of hayseeds.

- It makes you wonder what Robert Burns himself

would have thought had he known

that some of his verse was gonna be included

in such a document.

You know the man that rights a man's a man for all that

to then find one of his verses

publicizing the aspirations of a society

like the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan now had rules and roles.

It had become a serious organization,

an invisible army dedicated to reestablishing

the status of the southern whites

and this is what the Klan looked like.

This is an exact replica of one

of the original outfits they wore in Pulaski.

You can see how frightening that would be

if somebody appeared out of the dark

dressed like that.

- Absolutely terrifying.

It's important to note these were not uniforms.

These were costumes.

These are expressing a cultural thing.

They're not expressing that they're,

it's not an army-like uniform.

This is a very chaotic mask.

Maybe this colorful thread up here,

this red thread used to put this black eyebrow on,

that seems like it's deliberate, right,

you're meant to see how sloppily made this was.

- Imagine if you opened your front door

and that character was standing there

brandishing a weapon or whatever.

- Yeah, no, it's very terrifying.

- In Pulaski, the Klan became increasingly popular

with the white population.

News spread, especially as Frank McCord's brother

ran the local newspaper, The Pulaski Citizen.

The stories printed in the Citizen

helped publicize the Klan

and reassured the white population

that something was being done

to keep the former slaves in their place.

Many potential black voters received crude

and menacing messages like this letter

from a Ku Klux ghost ordering them which way to vote.

Other copycat Klans were soon formed

by more bored and better southerners

in nearby states only now,

the theatricalities had turned very ugly indeed.

- Groups of white men would come out

in the evening to a home, a cabin,

and find the man of the house there,

take him from his home, and then

they would either whip them to try

to tell them to change their behavior,

to punish them for something that they had apparently done,

or they would kill that person.

Kill them either by shooting them

or by hanging them.

What happened when the Klan spread

was that existing white on black violence

which was pervasive throughout the south already,

that that comes to be called Klan violence

and when it comes to be called Klan violence

it gets worse.

People have an additional impetus,

they feel like they're part of a collective project.

They're doing something for the south.

They're not just some guy attacking their black neighbor

who's competing with them for property rights.

They are now a Klans or a Ku Klux.

- By the late 1860's, a reign of terror

existed throughout much of the former Confederacy.

By the time the federal government

had brought in legislation against the Klan,

much of the groups work had already been done.

Violence had successfully kept most blacks from the polls

and the few that had taken up any civic office

had already been brutally beaten or hung.

With the black population now successfully terrorized,

white state government brought in laws

that segregated the races.

They were mockingly known as Jim Crow laws

after a black character in a minstrel show.

Now, living separate lives, the white population

of the southern states relaxed,

less fearful of those who were not them

except the fear never really went away.

This is Atlanta, now the bustling modern business hub

of the deep south.

In the early 1900's, it was also the place

where the Klan was reborn.

We might never have heard from the Klan again

but for the efforts of one man, Thomas Dixon.

He wrote this book.

It published in 1905 and in it,

he transformed the members of the Klan

from villains into heroes.

Dixon was born in North Carolina.

The son of a Scotch minister and plantation owner.

He went on to become a southern Baptist minister,

lawyer, and author.

His novel was called The Clansman and it was a big seller.

It was subtitled An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

and it imagined a future where the racial divide is reverse

and it is the white man that is in chains.

Now I'm sure if you were to take the time

to weave through this tome, you would agree

that it's pretty dreadful.

I offer you part of one chapter

in which Dixon imagines a future for America

in which the black man is in charge.

As he passed inside the doors of the house

of representatives, the rush of foul air staggered him.

The hall was packed with negroes

smoking, chewing, jabbering, pushing, perspiring.

The doctor surveyed the hall in dismay.

At first, not a white member was visible.

The galleries were packed with negroes.

The speaker presiding was a negro.

The clerk, a negro.

The doorkeepers, negroes.

The little pages all coal black negroes.

The remains of aryan civilization

were represented by 23 white men

from the Scotch Irish hill counties.

When the book was published,

it caused a literary explosion

and when it transferred to the stage as a play

it provoked riots, not just in this city

but all across America.

When the play premiered at the Grand Opera House

here in Atlanta in October of 1905,

the segregated audience went wild.

Tom Rice has studied what happened.

- The reports stressed that the house lights

were kept on, that the sell of soda bottles

was prohibited because they were worried

they were gonna get hurled around the theater.

Absolutely had tapped into this culture

of fear, these anxieties about racial integration

and race relations that were really prevalent

in Atlanta and across the south at this moment.

- [Host] Dixon took his Scottish heritage

and paraded it in his work.

Inside the front cover of his novel,

the dedication reads to the memory

of a Scotch Irish leader of the south,

my uncle, Colonel Leroy McAfee,

grand titan of the invisible empire, Ku Klux Klan

and it's not the only reference to a Scottish past.

- Clearly the title The Clansman

does make a connection with the Scottish roots here.

We can see it even in the title

of the main family here, the Cameron's.

It was settled by the Scotch folk

who came from the north of Ireland,

the great migrations which gave America 300,000 people

of covenants and martyr blood,

the largest and most important addition

to our population.

He's really thinking about the makeup

of the American south and of this area

but internal so of the Klan,

of what would create the Ku Klux Klan here.

High above his head in the darkness of the cave,

he lifted the blazing emblem.

The fiery cross of old Scotland's hill.

I quench its flames in the sweetest blood

that ever stained the sands of time.

And here we've got the fiery cross.

This is not a feature of the original Klan.

It's created here by Dixon.

It would become one of the most identifiable symbols

of race hatred, of the Ku Klux Klan

and it's still today widely identified

with the Klan and here he's saying,

this is the fiery cross of old Scotland's hills.

It's creating a history and a heritage for this here.

- The full impact of Dixon's novel

was felt much more widely when 10 years

after its publication it was released as a film

touted then and still lauded now

as an epic of its time.

The Birth of a Nation directed

by Hollywood superstar D.W. Griffith

let Dixon's work reach a much bigger audience

and it was a massive hit.

The budget was huge and the direction

was groundbreaking but the story

was as racist as Dixon's book.

Charlene Regester is a film academic

and remembers her first reaction.

- I saw Birth of a Nation when I was a graduate student.

Of course some of the scenes that we saw

were very inflammatory.

They showed us alleged rape scene.

The scene where Gus is chasing the woman

who jumps off the cliff onto the ground

and so it was very offensive then

and it's probably still equally offensive today.

It was a racially incisive story

and it was about black male predators,

black male racists, it was about miscegenation

and it was about the Ku Klux Klan

rescuing the south and white supremacy

and I think all of the variables together

is what made it so volatile.

- Did the film work as a PR exercising for the Klan?

- It certainly made them almost appear

as though they're heroic and also

at the end of the film they have one

of the white characters who unveils as a Klan member.

They're making them look like they're the saviors

of the day, they saved the south,

and certainly coincided with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

I think it glamorized the Klan

and made it a desirable organization to belong to

as a way of restoring order and I guess

of instituting white supremacy nationwide.

- [Host] Just outside Atlanta, soaring out of the landscape

is a curious monolith called Stone Mountain.

Carved on its side is a vast memorial

to the Confederate leaders of the Civil War.

- [Tour Host] Alright everybody.

Now the mountaintop would be about 350 million years old.

Only a very small portion

of the mountain's actually visible.

- But long before the carving was completed,

people came here to pay homage

to something that happened directly

as a result of Griffith's film.

It turns out that that film was a revelation

for at least one cinema goer.

It was a Methodist preacher and his name

was William Joseph Simmons and he took all

he'd seen and heard and he brought it here

to this mountaintop.

He was accompanied that day,

the eve of Thanksgiving in 1915

with 15 like minded souls and they had come

for a bizarre ceremony.

What they wanted to do first of all

was to build an altar.

Once it was built, Simmons placed three things

on that altar.

An American flag, a bible, and a sword unsheathed.

Then, he set fire to a crudely made wooden cross.

At that moment, he declared himself to be,

get this, the imperial wizard of the invisible empire

of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

The KKK was back but this time the Klan would be different.

It would be political, it would be obsessed with power,

and most significantly of all, it would be big.

Very, very big.

And with changing immigration,

the Klan now had a whole new range of targets

they thought threatened the lives of southern people.

The new Klan's focus wasn't just on black people.

Jews, Catholics, and Mexicans also

became targets of the organization.

To get an insight into this second Klan,

I've come to the small estate of author William Rawlings

just outside the town of Sandersville in Georgia.

- The Klan's mantra at this time,

its recruiting mantra can be summed up

as being 100% Americanism.

Support of the constitution, just laws,

anti-immigration.

People that joined the Klan during the early 1920's

joined not because they had some agenda

but because the message of the Klan was one

we want to do the good thing for America.

We want to perhaps keep this immigrants out,

these Chinese in California, these Mexicans

on the border states.

- [Host] But the new Klan was as oppressive as the first.

- Say you live in a town and the Klan is in the town

and you don't know who the members are

but they may be your best friends and they may not be.

You don't know if the policeman on the corner's

a member of the Klan or perhaps

your minister's a member of the Klan

and they liked it that way.

They could go to a merchant for example and say

you know, we're the Klan, we can tell people

not to trade with you and the merchant

would say gee, I better support the Klan.

You never knew how many people were members of the Klan

and once they developed the reputation

for not only intimidation but action

then frequently all they had to do

was simply say we're watching you

and that was all that was needed.

- [Host] Clan violence directly

effected William Rawling's family.

Although they had owned a slave plantation

everyone was a potential target.

- My family had an unfortunate experience with the Klan.

Uncle Charlie was a bit of a philanderer.

I guess that's the best way to say it.

Not only did he have his girlfriends,

his interest also crossed racial lines

and he sired a number of mixed race children

which was not exactly the socially acceptable thing

of the day to do.

He was allegedly, according to family history,

warned by the Klan and when he ignored them

because he was a very wealthy and powerful man,

when he ignored them they simply waylaid him

on a country road.

He had his own chauffeur.

Guy named Hal Hooks, a black man.

They put a tree across the road.

When Hal Hooks went out to move the tree

all of a sudden Klansmen emerged from the forest,

they told Hooks to stand to one side

and they castrated Uncle Charlie.

- Castrated him?

- They castrated him

and he lived the remainder of his life

without part of his anatomy.

* Well nothing is going right this morning

* Oh I guess it's the chains that bind me

* I can't shake them loose

- How big did it get, what was the high point?

- For a very brief period of time, 1924 and 1925,

they were one of the most powerful social

and political organizations in the United States.

Around five million members at its peak in 1925.

You know it's a tremendous number of people

that joined the Klan.

Perhaps the high point of the Klan

was the march in August of 1925

where an estimated as many as 150,000 robed Klansmen

marched down Pennsylvania Avenue.

It's a terribly frightening image

to see Pennsylvania Avenue with the capitol dome

in the background and an endless stream

of white robed Klansmen marching down the street.

Is this what America has become?

The Klan of the 1920's failed eventually

because people figured them out.

People began to say you know, these people

are not really what I want America to be.

These people are beating and flogging,

these people are judge, jury, and executioner

rolled into one.

This is not the American way.

We should reject the Klan.

- The Klan may have been rejected

but racial hatred and discrimination remained.

Here is one of the many places in the south

where the law itself was used to discriminate.

This is the former railway terminal building

in Macon, Georgia.

Fantastically impressive building.

Big stone frontage.

Now that's the main entrance down there

with the eagles above it and the pillars.

Off to one side though is a separate entrance

and if you look above the door look what it says.

Colored waiting room.

This is a relic, an artifact of the Jim Crow laws

which were touted as keeping the white people

and the black people of America separate but equal.

The Jim Crow laws reflected the mindset

of those that wanted the races to be separate forever.

They not only mandated the segregation

of colored transport but public schools,

public places, and the segregation of restrooms,

restaurants, and even drinking fountains.

Black and white lived separate but rarely equal lives.

It took until the 1950's for the federal court

to declare that segregation in state schools

was unconstitutional.

The black population celebrated

but the southern states were having none of it.

I'm finishing my journey in America's deep south

here in Alabama, the heart of the fight

against civil rights.

Montgomery, the state capital, became the epicenter

and these steps the backdrop to much of the rhetoric.

- Before the seed of tyranny, and I say segregation now,

segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

(cheering)

- [Host] Governor George Wallace spoke

with the mindset of those that elected him.

The Klan, too, raised its costumed head again

and when around 3,000 people attended another rally

at Stone Mountain, it was clear

that the Klan was back in force

for the third time and the tactics, again,

would be violent.

The fight for the soul of the south

came to its ugliest point in the 1960's

in the battle between the civil rights movement

and the Klansmen.

The Klans brazen violence and murders

eventually pushed President Johnson's federal government

to make a full scale assault on the Ku Klux Klan.

- Their loyalty is not to the United States of America

but instead to a hooded society of bigots

so if Klansmen hear my voice today

let it be both an appeal and a warning

to get out of the Ku Klux Klan now.

- Leading members of the Klan were prosecuted by the FBI

and once again, America's most feared hate group

appeared to be defeated.

But despite the success of the civil rights movement,

that southern mindset didn't go away.

It's still with us today.

In the last 50 years, there's been an explosion

of hate groups in America.

In 2015, it was estimated that there were 892 hate groups

in the US including anti-government militias,

neo-nazis, neo-confederates,

and 190 separate Ku Klux Klan groups.

The League of the South is one

that's often described as a hate group.

It advocates rolling back time,

creating a separate southern society

run by Anglo-Celts.

So I've got an email from Dr. Michael Hill,

leader of the League of the South

and he's suggesting meeting at the post office parking lot

in Killen at nine a.m.

I think we have our man.

Dr. Hill, hello, I'm Neal.

- Nice to meet you, sir.

- Nice to meet you too, sir.

- Good to be here.

- Is it okay if we put a microphone on you?

- Sure.

I think that's one thing about southerners.

We're known for our hospitality

but we're also very suspicious of outsiders.

Now I'm not suspicious of you folks

because I know where you come from

and I know that basically you and I

come from the same people so it's different

but people come around here from other places

and southerners are not so hospitable

until they get to know you.

- If you're a nationalist, what's your nation?

- My nation is my people.

- [Host] It's not America?

- No, America is not my nation.

- If your nation is family, what is your family?

You mean literally people who are blood.

- Yes, exactly, blood, blood kin.

That is what a nation is.

But you know as well as I do that the Scots

have always been big on fictive kinship.

You're sort of in the clan, in the family.

My family is southern people

and people who are related to us by genetics

back in the old country.

America is not a nation.

America is a multi-cultural empire.

I want nothing to do with it.

It has nothing for me.

- [Host] Is the church shooting at Charleston

an inevitable consequence of that kind of grievance?

- [Michael] I think you just had a disturbed young man.

- He doesn't come from nowhere, though.

He's from a context.

- Sure he's from a context.

The minute I saw that he had a Confederate flag,

I said oh they will take this and use it.

If the left wants to use Dylann Roof

as the archetype of everybody that thinks like I do

then we're gonna have to have fair play on the other side.

Every time a black person kills a white person

we're gonna have to just examine that

inside and out, why it happened,

the circumstances, the hatred behind it,

but it doesn't get done.

- How likely is it that you're way

of thinking will come to pass?

- I'm a realist about this.

If you look out in the world right now

you see that the other side looks like they're winning.

My side will win mainly because

it is the natural way that human beings

have always lived.

This is an anomaly period that we're living in

and I can see the end of it

and the pendulum will swing back

to a more normal type human existence.

So yeah, I think I'm on the right side

of not only history but human nature.

- It seems so pessimistic and depressing

to me to think that people, given the opportunity

to create a new world, and that was the expression

that was in use at the time.

They came out full of ideas like the pursuit

of happiness and equality and religious freedom

and all of that.

They were part of a world that became a misery

for millions, I find that just sad.

- I know, but what does it tell you.

It tells you that there can be no utopias

because man is a fallen creature

and he's always gonna behave like a fallen creature.

He's always going to fuck it up.

- I said was there someone who has

perhaps a naive hope in the brotherhood of mankind,

if he's right then I just feel

we're never gonna get anywhere.

If there was ever an indication that history's alive

then it's here, a set of events

unfolded here 200 and odd years ago

and the consequences of them, the reality

of the world which created then

are still 100% here.

He feels as if we're not going anywhere.

It's so dispiriting to hear someone

using my Scottish ancestry in support

of views that could give rise to hatred.

I'm heading back to the state capital

to get a second opinion on Michael Hill's thinking.

Mark Potok keeps tabs on hate groups

at the Southern Poverty Law Center

and he has monitored the development

of the League of the South for some time.

I've heard mention of the potential

for a race war, is that just meaningless hyperbole?

- Well look, I mean, a race war is the wet dream

of all of these groups.

They all expect a race war and many

of them fervently hope for it.

That's absolutely common in the Klan

and in neo-nazi groups and so on.

What's been surprising is to see the evolution

of a group like the League of the South.

Mike Hill wrote a few months ago

an incredible essay in which he said essentially

if black people think they wanna have a race war

let me just warn them right now,

they're not gonna win that war.

Hill has also talked to his people

not merely about how the south is an Anglo-Celtic wonderland

and all this kind of things and we need

to protect our culture but about the need

to buy AK-47's and tools to derail trains.

Will this ever really come to a race war?

No, I very much doubt it.

Are there people out there who desperately

would like to see it happen?

Absolutely.

In the aftermath of the June 2015 Charleston massacre

by Dylann Roof, there was an enormous backlash

against the Confederate battle flag

because Roof, of course, before carrying out

this mass murder, had taken many pictures

of himself displaying the Confederate battle flag

and as a result of that, the flag came under attack.

The governor of South Carolina

ordered the Confederate battle flag

off the grounds of the state capital

and then there was this incredible,

very widespread reaction.

We counted actually, in the six months

immediately following the Charleston massacre,

364 pro-Confederate battle flag rallies.

- Does that rhetoric inform people like Dylann Roof?

- I don't think Dylann Roof probably even knew

what the League of the South was

but did he connect with the kinds of ideas

that are at the center of the League of the South?

Absolutely.

- One of the greatest writers of the south,

William Faulkner, wrote something

that seems very apt.

The past isn't dead and buried.

It's not even past and that's the point.

All the people of the south are living with history,

coping with the consequences of immigration,

greed, fear, and a sequence of events

that have turned this place upside down more than once.

I come to the end of my journey

at the church where this story began.

How on Earth do the people who suffered the attacks here

cope with the horror of the racism

that has stopped the south since the settlers

first arrived here.

- Just with the thought of this interview itself,

I'm teary eyed to think that this

is what brought us together

but yet I'm grateful because it gives me

an opportunity to say to my brothers

and sisters around the world, thank you for caring.

Thank you for praying for us, remembering us,

and not forgetting about it.

- Is there anything that ought to be forgotten?

Are there any ideas that need to be put in the past

and not taken into the future?

- I think that each of us, we are sum total

of our past, our present, and our hope for the future

and so no, I wouldn't want to disregard the past.

I'd wanna learn from it.

I'd wanna grow as a result of it

and we must embrace our individuality

and celebrate it and not be negative

as a result of it.

I believe that from this can lead a path

of race relations that's positive.

A path that will lead us to a place of reconciliation,

of healing, and a place of a healthier society.

- Oh hey, come on.

(downbeat music)