William Joseph Simmons

William Joseph Simmons ( born May 6, 1880 in Harpersville, Alabama, † May 18, 1945 in Atlanta ) was the American founder of the second Ku Klux Klan.

Life

Simmons fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and falsely claimed to have studied medicine at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University. He was an itinerant preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the Southern States, but he was released in 1912 due to lack of services.

Through the 1915 released movie inspired The Birth of a Nation built Simmons on a second Ku Klux Klan after this racist secret society founded in 1865, was 1871 already dissolved. First, this second Klan was white Protestants reserved. Simmons published a small book called Kloran, which formulated the basic beliefs of the clan. At Stone Mountain fifteen members burned a cross and then declared the Klan as a resurrected. Simmons himself was the first Grand Wizard of the new clans and was given the nickname "Colonel ".

To make the Klan popular, he hired Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, who campaigned for the slow -growing clan. The Klan then grew to 115,000. With this rapid growth, however, there were also disputes within the clan and Simmons withdrew. His successor in 1922 was Hiram Wesley Evans, a dentist from Alabama. This Simmons paid 145,000 U.S. dollars, so that transferred the leaders of the clan to him. Simmons later founded a new Klavern under the name Hidden hosts, Knights of the Flaming Sword, which, however, remained largely unsuccessful. Also, the second Klan was founded by him fell apart in 1944, after he did not have a tax debt can be paid. Simmons himself died on 18 May 1945.