Ku Klux Klan: An American Story – A Documentary by David Korn-Brzoza

ARTE – TUESDAY JULY 4 AT 8:50 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

Historical documentaries by David Korn-Brzoza rarely leave anyone indifferent. Whether he looks at the French secret services, denunciation under the Occupation, money from the Resistance, the Vichy police, the Hitler Youth, colonization and decolonization, the director does a rigorous job, on the substance as in form. A finding confirmed by this two-part documentary devoted to the bloody and sulphurous history of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

For more than a century and a half, what has become, in fact, the oldest terrorist group on North American territory has caused hatred to reign. His birth, however, looks like a bad (and sinister) gag: at the end of the Civil War, in 1865, a handful of young southern veterans, most of Scottish descent, some having studied Greek and Latin, refuse defeat and especially the abolition of slavery. In the small town of Pulaski (Tennessee), they decide over a drink to found a secret society for the simple purpose of terrorizing the black population.

Its name, Ku Klux Klan, presumably refers to the Greek kuklos (” circle “). The sinister adventure begins, with hooded men, lynchings, threats and crimes of all kinds. Racist, but also anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, the “Klan” (as the Americans say) will reach its peak in the 1920s with nearly 4 million members, and an enormous influence on American social, political and cultural life. ‘era.

Troubled personalities

Several times dissolved, weakened, ruined, emptied of its troops, the KKK, which today only has a few thousand members, continues to call for hatred with explicit slogans (« Segregation forever ! »). The interest of this documentary is that it meticulously describes the different stages of its long existence, investigates the often troubled personalities of its successive leaders, and more generally deciphers the power it continues to exercise over local political life. .

The election of Donald Trump in 2016, with the support of white supremacists, rekindled the flame of unapologetic racism. And relaunched the lynchings openly claimed. Thus the murder, in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer, deliberately mowed down by the ram-car of a 22-year-old neo-Nazi.

To retrace the successive lives of the Klan, David Korn-Brzoza has gathered a large number of filmed and photographic archives, sometimes directly from the militants of the terrorist organization. He also interviewed various witnesses, such as Chris Buckley, a repentant Klansman, civil rights activists, and Bill Baxley, attorney general for the state of Alabama in the 1970s.