Lecture

Legacy of Bigotry: the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and american anti-immigrant rage

Linda Gordon (New York University)

March 30, 2020, 16h00 (CANCELLED)

Anf. IV, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra

Chair: Isabel Caldeira (CES/FLUC)


Abstract

The original KKK was an 1860s violent terrorist organization in the southern US, established after the emancipation of the slaves for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy.  In the 1920s a northern KKK amassed some 3-6 million members—including 1.5 million women!  By focusing its anger on Catholics, Jews, and all non-Protestant immigrants, it became a powerful national political force.  Its ability to arouse mass fear of these newcomers who posed no immediate threat to white Protestant domination--offers clues to understand today’s American bigotry.
 

Bio note

Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University, and lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin, where she also taught having been awarded the university's most prestigious chair professorship, the Vilas Research Chair.

Prof. Gordon is one of a pioneering generation of historians of the US examining women and gender. An active participant in the women’s-liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, she and her long-time collaborator Rosalyn Baxandall edited two books providing crucial views of that movement’s contributions: America’s Working Women (Random House/Vintage 1976 and 1995) and Dear Sisters: Dispatches from Women’s Liberation (Basic Books, 1995). Her first book, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: The History of Birth Control in America (Viking/Penguin, 1976 and 1990) remains the definitive history of birth-control politics in the US. It was completely revised and re-published as The Moral Property of Women in 2002. Gordon also served on the Departments of Justice/Health and Human Services Advisory Council on Violence Against Women for the Clinton administration (a council abolished by the Bush administration). 

She has won many prestigious awards, including Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS, Radcliffe Institute and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center fellowships, the Berkshire Prize and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her biography of photographer Dorothea Lange (Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits) published by W.W.Norton in 2009, won many prizes: the Bancroft prize for best book in US history (making Gordon one of a very few ever to win this award twice); the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography; and the National Arts Club prize for best arts writing, to name a few. She continued her work on women's movements in Feminism Unfinished (2015) and returned to her interest in photography in Inge Morath: An Illustrated Biography (2018).

Her study of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, The Second Coming of the KKK (Liveright, 2017), investigates some of the historical roots of today's white nationalism. 
 

Organisation: Doctoral Programmes Pós-Colonialismos e Cidadania Global (CES/FEUC) and Literatura de Língua Portuguesa (FLUC).