Harper Lee Quotes

The Ku Klux Klan never dies. They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.

I am a former Kleagie of the Klu Klux Klan in Raleigh County and adjoining counties of the state, having been appainted to this office [by] Mr. J. L. Baskin of Arlington, Virginia, in 1942... It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union.

It was headquartered in Michigan City, a long way off. I never saw Ku Klux Klan march.

I prefer the 1950s where people were like, "I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am." Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.

I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

I was born in the late '70s and grew up in the deep South, and I was very much still of an era where racism was a casual part of white people's public and private lives, though it had been pushed more into its own little echo chamber by then. As a five year old, I saw a fully costumed Klan circle, complete with burning cross, on a town square in rural Alabama at high noon.

The Ku Klux Klan has never been dead and is never going to die.

They [the KKK] owned the place. In spirit, everyone belonged to the Klan

Be sure you avoid the Ku Klux Klan. Don't get that albatross around your neck. Once you've made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena.

Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days.

Sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white southern women.

It's not appropriate to joke about the Ku Klux Klan.

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.

The time for running has come to an end. You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!

As a matter of social class Ku Klux Klan would have been regarded as white trash.

The Ku Klux Klan is the worst and most deadly terrorist group in American History.

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races.

The Fiery Cross

The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent ... I would preserve for free white labor a fair country ... where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.

My mom had an encounter with the KKK when she was, I think, 7 years old in North Carolina. She snuck into a cross burning. I'm so lucky she didn't get caught, because I wouldn't be here.

You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.

Any time a negro community lives under fear that its churches are going to be bombed, then they have to realize they're living in a war zone.

Actually, some of the things I experienced as a child still linger on; what the white man has done to the black people in the south!

The Negro fought and bled and died in every war the white man waged, and he still won't give you justice. You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won't give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you and raped your women, but he still won't give you equality.