Community Corner

Peters Library Hosts Program About Why the Klan Wear Bizarre Costumes

Civil War 150 program series continues at Peters Township Library.

The Peters Township Public Library will host “Why Did the Klan Wear Bizarre Costumes” on Thursday, July 18 at 7 p.m. The program is the third and final portion of “Civil War 150”, a three-part national public programming initiative designed to encourage public exploration of the transformative impact and contested meanings of the American Civil War. 

The program is presented by The Library of America in partnership with The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and is supported by a grant from National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Register to attend by emailing programs@ptlibrary.org, visit the circulation desk, or call 724.941.9430.

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In the wake of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan emerged to terrorize freed people and their few white allies, and to reassert white, Democratic political, economic, and social power in the rural south. These earliest Klansmen did not wear the white hooded uniforms we picture today. Instead, they wore a range of strange costumes: Mardi Gras costumes, animal masks with horns, masks made of squirrel skin, women’s dresses, polka dots, fake beards and tongues, even blackface. This presentation describes these Klan costumes and explores where they came from and why Klansmen might have gone to such lengths to create them.

This program will be facilitated by Dr. Elaine Frantz Parsons, Civil War scholar and associate professor of history at Duquesne University. Parsons is currently compiling a book about the Ku Klux Klan entitled Constructing the Kuklux: The Ku Klux Klan and the Modernization of the Reconstruction-Era South.

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