title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The Second Klan saw threats from every direction. According to historian Brian R. Farmer, "two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers". Much of the Klan's energy went into guarding the home, and historian Kathleen Blee says that its members wanted to protect "the interests of white womanhood". Joseph Simmons published the pamphlet "ABC of the Invisible Empire" in Atlanta in 1917; in it, he identified the Klan's goals as "to shield the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood; to maintain white supremacy; to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism; and by a practical devotedness to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles and ideals of a pure Americanism". Such moral-sounding purpose underlay its appeal as a fraternal organization, recruiting members with a promise of aid for settling into the new urban societies of rapidly growing cities such as Dallas and Detroit. During the 1930s, particularly after James A. Colescott of Indiana took over as imperial wizard, opposition to Communism became another primary aim of the Klan.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: New Klan founder William J. Simmons joined 12 different fraternal organizations and recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, consciously modeling the Klan after fraternal organizations. Klan organizers called "Kleagles" signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and received KKK costumes in return. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials. When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a rally, often with burning crosses, and perhaps presented a Bible to a local Protestant preacher. He left town with the money collected. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Simmons initially met with little success in either recruiting members or in raising money, and the Klan remained a small operation in the Atlanta area until 1920. The group produced publications for national circulation from its headquarters in Atlanta: "Searchlight" (1919–1924), "Imperial Night-Hawk" (1923–1924), and "The Kourier".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The second Klan grew primarily in response to issues of declining morality typified by divorce, adultery, defiance of Prohibition, and criminal gangs in the news every day. It was also a response to the growing power of Catholics and American Jews and the accompanying proliferation of non-Protestant cultural values. The Klan had a nationwide reach by the mid-1920s, with its densest per capita membership in Indiana. It became most prominent in cities with high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, as rural Protestants flocked to jobs in Detroit and Dayton in the Midwest, and Atlanta, Dallas, Memphis, and Houston in the South. Close to half of Michigan's 80,000 Klansmen lived in Detroit.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Members of the KKK swore to uphold American values and Christian morality, and some Protestant ministers became involved at the local level. However, no Protestant denomination officially endorsed the KKK; indeed, the Klan was repeatedly denounced by the major Protestant magazines, as well as by all major secular newspapers. Historian Robert Moats Miller reports that "not a single endorsement of the Klan was found by the present writer in the Methodist press, while many of the attacks on the Klan were quite savage. ...The Southern Baptist press condoned the aims but condemned the methods of the Klan." National denominational organizations never endorsed the Klan, but they rarely condemned it by name. Many nationally and regionally prominent churchmen did condemn it by name, and none endorsed it.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The second Klan was less violent than either the first or third Klan were. However, the second Klan, especially in the Southeast, was not an entirely non-violent organization. The most violent Klan was in Dallas, Texas. In April 1921, shortly after they began gaining popularity in the area, the Klan kidnapped Alex Johnson, a Black man who had been accused of having sex with a white woman. They burned the letters "KKK" into his forehead and gave him a severe beating by a riverbed. The police chief and district attorney refused to prosecute, explicitly and publicly stating they believed that Johnson deserved this treatment. Encouraged by the approval of this whipping, the Dallas KKK whipped 68 people by the riverbed in 1922 alone. Although Johnson had been Black, most of the Dallas KKK's whipping victims were white men who were accused of offenses against their wives such as adultery, wife beating, abandoning their wives, refusing to pay child support or gambling. Far from trying to hide its vigilante activity, the Dallas KKK loved to publicize it. The Dallas KKK often invited local newspaper reporters to attend their whippings so they could write a story about it in the next day's newspaper.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The Alabama KKK was less chivalrous than the Dallas KKK was and whipped both white and Black women who were accused of fornication or adultery. Although many people in Alabama were outraged by the whippings of white women, no Klansmen were ever convicted for the violence.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In 1920, Simmons handed the day-to-day activities of the national office over to two professional publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke. The new leadership invigorated the Klan and it grew rapidly. It appealed to new members based on current social tensions, and stressed responses to fears raised by defiance of Prohibition and new sexual freedoms. It emphasized anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant and later anti-Communist positions. It presented itself as a fraternal, nativist and strenuously patriotic organization; and its leaders emphasized support for vigorous enforcement of Prohibition laws. It expanded membership dramatically to a 1924 peak of 1.5 million to 4 million, which was between 4–15% of the eligible population.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: By the 1920s, most of its members lived in the Midwest and West. Nearly one in five of the eligible Indiana population were members. It had a national base by 1925. In the South, where the great majority of whites were Democrats, the Klansmen were Democrats. In the rest of the country, the membership comprised both Republicans and Democrats, as well as independents. Klan leaders tried to infiltrate political parties; as Cummings notes, "it was non-partisan in the sense that it pressed its nativist issues to both parties". Sociologist Rory McVeigh has explained the Klan's strategy in appealing to members of both parties:


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Religion was a major selling point. Kelly J. Baker argues that Klansmen seriously embraced Protestantism as an essential component of their white supremacist, anti-Catholic, and paternalistic formulation of American democracy and national culture. Their cross was a religious symbol, and their ritual honored Bibles and local ministers. But no nationally prominent religious leader said he was a Klan member.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Economists Fryer and Levitt argue that the rapid growth of the Klan in the 1920s was partly the result of an innovative, multi-level marketing campaign. They also argue that the Klan leadership focused more intently on monetizing the organization during this period than fulfilling the political goals of the organization. Local leaders profited from expanding their membership.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Historians agree that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over Prohibition. The historian Prendergast says that the KKK's "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation". The Klan opposed bootleggers, sometimes with violence. In 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas. Membership in the Klan and in other Prohibition groups overlapped, and they sometimes coordinated activities.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: A significant characteristic of the second Klan was that it was an organization based in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in the North, West, and the South. In Michigan, for instance, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, where they made up more than half of the state's membership. Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class whites who feared the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were mostly Catholic or Jewish; and Black and white migrants from the South. As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods created social tensions. Because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the Midwest. The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In the medium-size industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts, in the 1920s, the Klan ascended to power quickly but declined as a result of opposition from the Catholic Church. There was no violence and the local newspaper ridiculed Klansmen as "night-shirt knights". Half of the members were Swedish Americans, including some first-generation immigrants. The ethnic and religious conflicts among more recent immigrants contributed to the rise of the Klan in the city. Swedish Protestants were struggling against Irish Catholics, who had been entrenched longer, for political and ideological control of the city.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In some states, historians have obtained membership rosters of some local units and matched the names against city directory and local records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big city newspapers were often hostile and ridiculed Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indiana showed that the rural stereotype was false for that state:


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Indiana's Klansmen represented a wide cross section of society: they were not disproportionately urban or rural, nor were they significantly more or less likely than other members of society to be from the working class, middle class, or professional ranks. Klansmen were Protestants, of course, but they cannot be described exclusively or even predominantly as fundamentalists. In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long. Membership in the Klan turned over rapidly as people found out that it was not the group which they had wanted. Millions joined and at its peak in the 1920s the organization claimed numbers that amounted to 15% of the nation's eligible population. The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan's decline.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The distinctive white costume permitted large-scale public activities, especially parades and cross-burning ceremonies, while keeping the membership rolls a secret. Sales of the costumes provided the main financing for the national organization, while initiation fees funded local and state organizers.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The second Klan embraced the burning Latin cross as a dramatic display of symbolism, with a tone of intimidation. No crosses had been used as a symbol by the first Klan, but it became a symbol of the Klan's quasi-Christian message. Its lighting during meetings was often accompanied by prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism. In his novel "The Clansman", Thomas Dixon Jr. borrows the idea that the first Klan had used fiery crosses from 'the call to arms' of the Scottish Clans, and film director D.W. Griffith used this image in "The Birth of a Nation"; Simmons adopted the symbol wholesale from the movie, and the symbol and action have been associated with the Klan ever since.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: By the 1920s, the KKK developed a women's auxiliary, with chapters in many areas. Its activities included participation in parades, cross lightings, lectures, rallies, and boycotts of local businesses owned by Catholics and Jews. The Women's Klan was active in promoting Prohibition, stressing liquor's negative impact on wives and children. Its efforts in public schools included distributing Bibles and petitioning for the dismissal of Catholic teachers. As a result of the Women's Klan's efforts, Texas would not hire Catholic teachers to work in its public schools. As sexual and financial scandals rocked the Klan leadership late in the 1920s, the organization's popularity among both men and women dropped off sharply.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The second Klan expanded with new chapters in cities in the Midwest and West, and reached both Republicans and Democrats, as well as men without a party affiliation. The goal of Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans to make common cause in the North.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The Klan had numerous members in every part of the United States, but was particularly strong in the South and Midwest. At its peak, claimed Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas. The Klan also moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it opposed Catholics.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In Indiana, members were American-born, white Protestants and covered a wide range of incomes and social levels. The Indiana Klan was perhaps the most prominent Ku Klux Klan in the nation. It claimed more than 30% of white male Hoosiers as members. In 1924 it supported Republican Edward Jackson in his successful campaign for governor.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Catholic and liberal Democrats—who were strongest in northeastern cities—decided to make the Klan an issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. Their delegates proposed a resolution indirectly attacking the Klan; it was defeated by one vote out of 1,100. The leading presidential candidates were William Gibbs McAdoo, a Protestant with a base in the South and West where the Klan was strong, and New York governor Al Smith, a Catholic with a base in the large cities. After weeks of stalemate and bitter argumentation, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise candidate.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In some states, such as Alabama and California, KKK chapters had worked for political reform. In 1924, Klan members were elected to the city council in Anaheim, California. The city had been controlled by an entrenched commercial-civic elite that was mostly German American. Given their tradition of moderate social drinking, the German Americans did not strongly support Prohibition laws – the mayor had been a saloon keeper. Led by the minister of the First Christian Church, the Klan represented a rising group of politically oriented non-ethnic Germans who denounced the elite as corrupt, undemocratic and self-serving. The historian Christopher Cocoltchos says the Klansmen tried to create a model, orderly community. The Klan had about 1,200 members in Orange County, California. The economic and occupational profile of the pro- and anti-Klan groups shows the two were similar and about equally prosperous. Klan members were Protestants, as were most of their opponents, but the latter also included many Catholic Germans. Individuals who joined the Klan had earlier demonstrated a much higher rate of voting and civic activism than did their opponents. Cocoltchos suggests that many of the individuals in Orange County joined the Klan out of that sense of civic activism. The Klan representatives easily won the local election in Anaheim in April 1924. They fired city employees who were known to be Catholic, and replaced them with Klan appointees. The new city council tried to enforce Prohibition. After its victory, the Klan chapter held large rallies and initiation ceremonies over the summer. The opposition organized, bribed a Klansman for the secret membership list, and exposed the Klansmen running in the state primaries; they defeated most of the candidates. Klan opponents in 1925 took back local government, and succeeded in a special election in recalling the Klansmen who had been elected in April 1924. The Klan in Anaheim quickly collapsed, its newspaper closed after losing a libel suit, and the minister who led the local Klavern moved to Kansas.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In the South, Klan members were still Democratic, as it was essentially a one-party region for whites. Klan chapters were closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government. Due to disenfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites around the start of the 20th century, the only political activity for whites took place within the Democratic Party.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In Alabama, Klan members advocated better public schools, effective Prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other political measures to benefit lower-class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a political force in the state, as leaders such as J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black tried to build political power against the Black Belt wealthy planters, who had long dominated the state. In 1926, with Klan support, Bibb Graves won the Alabama governor's office. He was a former Klan chapter head. He pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. Because the Alabama state legislature refused to redistrict until 1972, and then under court order, the Klan was unable to break the planters' and rural areas' hold on legislative power.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Scholars and biographers have recently examined Hugo Black's Klan role. Ball finds regarding the KKK that Black "sympathized with the group's economic, nativist, and anti-Catholic beliefs". Newman says Black "disliked the Catholic Church as an institution" and gave over 100 anti-Catholic speeches to KKK meetings across Alabama in his 1926 election campaign. Black was elected US senator in 1926 as a Democrat. In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court without knowing how active in the Klan he had been in the 1920s. He was confirmed by his fellow Senators before the full KKK connection was known; Justice Black said he left the Klan when he became a senator.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan, gaining national attention. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed in the early 20th century in response to attacks on Jewish Americans, including the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta, and to the Klan's campaign to prohibit private schools (which was chiefly aimed at Catholic parochial schools). Opposing groups worked to penetrate the Klan's secrecy. After one civic group in Indiana began to publish Klan membership lists, there was a rapid decline in the number of Klan members. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched public education campaigns in order to inform people about Klan activities and lobbied in Congress against Klan abuses. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership in most areas began to decline rapidly.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Specific events contributed to the Klan's decline as well. In Indiana, the scandal surrounding the 1925 murder trial of Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the KKK as upholders of law and order. By 1926 the Klan was "crippled and discredited". D. C. Stephenson was the grand dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states. In 1923 he had led the states under his control in order to break away from the national KKK organization. At his 1925 trial, he was convicted of second-degree murder for his part in the rape, and subsequent death, of Madge Oberholtzer. After Stephenson's conviction, the Klan declined dramatically in Indiana.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana's Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan's stated goals. They were uninterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement. For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power. These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership. More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan, or who pursued some of the interests of their Klan constituents, also accomplished little. Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience. When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan's behalf.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In Alabama, KKK vigilantes launched a wave of physical terror in 1927. They targeted both Black and white people for violations of racial norms and for perceived moral lapses. This led to a strong backlash, beginning in the media. Grover C. Hall Sr., editor of the "Montgomery Advertiser" from 1926, wrote a series of editorials and articles that attacked the Klan. (Today the paper says it "waged war on the resurgent [KKK]".) Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for the crusade, the 1928 Editorial Writing Pulitzer, citing "his editorials against gangsterism, floggings and racial and religious intolerance". Other newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan, referring to the organization as violent and "un-American". Sheriffs cracked down on activities. In the 1928 presidential election, the state voters overcame their initial opposition to the Catholic candidate Al Smith, and voted the Democratic Party line as usual.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Although in decline, a measure of the Klan's influence was still evident when it staged its march along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1928. By 1930, Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than 6,000. Small independent units continued to be active in the industrial city of Birmingham.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: KKK units were active through the 1930s in parts of Georgia, with a group of "night riders" in Atlanta enforcing their moral views by flogging people who violated them, whites as well as Black people. In March 1940, they were implicated in the beating murders of a young white couple taken from their car on a lovers lane, and flogged a white barber to death for drinking, both in East Point, a suburb of Atlanta. More than 20 others were "brutally flogged". As the police began to investigate, they found the records of the KKK had disappeared from their East Point office. The cases were reported by the "Chicago Tribune" and the NAACP in its "Crisis" magazine, as well as local papers.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In 1940, three lynchings of Black men by whites (no KKK affiliation is known) took place in the South: Elbert Williams was the first NAACP member known to be killed for civil rights activities: he was murdered in Brownsville, Tennessee, for working to register Black people to vote, and several other activists were run out of town; Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, for a minor social infraction; and 16-year-old Austin Callaway, a suspect in the assault of a white woman, was taken from jail in the middle of the night and killed by six white men in LaGrange, Georgia. In January 2017, the police chief and mayor of LaGrange apologized for their offices' failures to protect Callaway, at a reconciliation service marking his death.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In major Southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs and opposed unions. During the 1930s and 1940s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which advocated industrial unions and accepted African-American members, unlike earlier unions. With access to dynamite and using the skills from their jobs in mining and steel, in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham used bombings to destroy houses in order to intimidate upwardly mobile Black who moved into middle-class neighborhoods. "By mid-1949, there were so many charred house carcasses that the area [College Hills] was informally named Dynamite Hill."


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Activism by these independent KKK groups in Birmingham increased as a reaction to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Independent Klan groups violently opposed the civil rights movement. KKK members were implicated in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on a Sunday in September 1963, which killed four African-American girls and injured 22 other people. Members of the Communist Workers' Party came to North Carolina to organize textile workers and pushed back against racial discrimination there, taunting the KKK, resulting in the 1979 Greensboro massacre.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: According to Professor Jon Schamber, Rev. Philip E. J. Monson branched off from the teachings of British Israelism and began to develop Christian Identity Theology in the 1910s. During the 1920s, Monson published "Satan's Seat: The Enemy of Our Race" in which he adopted Russel Kelso Carter's theory that Jews and non-whites were descended from the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Monson connected the work of the corrupt race to the activities of the Catholic Church and the Pope. Monson's ideas were popular among some KKK members in the 1950s.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In 1939, after experiencing several years of decline due to the Great Depression, the Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the national organization to James A. Colescott, an Indiana veterinary physician, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician. They could not revive the Klan's declining membership. In 1944, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott dissolved the organization that year. Local Klan groups closed down over the following years.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: After World War II, the folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan; he provided internal data to media and law enforcement agencies. He also provided secret code words to the writers of the "Superman" radio program, resulting in episodes in which Superman took on the KKK. Kennedy stripped away the Klan's mystique and trivialized its rituals and code words, which may have contributed to the decline in Klan recruiting and membership. In the 1950s Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The historiography of the second Klan of the 1920s has changed over time. Early histories were based on mainstream sources of the time, but since the late 20th century, other histories have been written drawing from records and analysis of members of the chapters in social histories.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The KKK was a secret organization; apart from a few top leaders, most members never identified as such and wore masks in public. Investigators in the 1920s used KKK publicity, court cases, exposés by disgruntled Klansmen, newspaper reports, and speculation to write stories about what the Klan was doing. Almost all the major national newspapers and magazines were hostile to its activities. The historian Thomas R. Pegram says that published accounts exaggerated the official viewpoint of the Klan leadership, and repeated the interpretations of hostile newspapers and the Klan's enemies. There was almost no evidence in that time regarding the behavior or beliefs of individual Klansmen. According to Pegram, the resulting popular and scholarly interpretation of the Klan from the 1920s into the mid-20th century emphasized its Southern roots and the violent vigilante-style actions of the Klan in its efforts to turn back the clock of modernity. Scholars compared it to fascism in Europe. Amann states that, "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental. ...[The KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system."


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The "social history" revolution in historiography from the 1960s explored history from the bottom up. In terms of the Klan, it developed evidence based on the characteristics, beliefs, and behavior of the typical membership, and downplayed accounts by elite sources. Historians discovered membership lists and the minutes of local meetings from KKK chapters scattered around the country. They discovered that the original interpretation was largely mistaken about the membership and activities of the Klan; the membership was not anti-modern, rural or rustic and consisted of fairly well educated middle-class joiners and community activists. Half the members lived in the fast-growing industrial cities of the period: Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Denver, and Portland, Oregon, were Klan strongholds during the 1920s.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Studies find that in general, the KKK membership in these cities was from the stable, successful middle classes, with few members drawn from the elite or the working classes. Pegram, reviewing the studies, concludes, "the popular Klan of the 1920s, while diverse, was more of a civic exponent of white Protestant social values than a repressive hate group."


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Kelly J. Baker argues that religion was critical—the KKK based its hatred on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans: "Members embraced Protestant Christianity and a crusade to save America from domestic as well as foreign threats." Member were primarily Baptists, Methodists, and members of the Disciples of Christ, while men of "more elite or liberal" Protestant denominations such as Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists and Lutherans, were less likely to join.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In Indiana, traditional political historians focused on notorious leaders, especially D. C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan, whose conviction for the 1925 kidnap, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer helped destroy the Ku Klux Klan movement nationwide. In his history of 1967, Kenneth Jackson already described the Klan of the 1920s as associated with cities and urbanization, with chapters often acting as a kind of fraternal organization to aid people coming from other areas.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Social historian Leonard Moore titled his monograph "Citizen Klansmen" (1997) and contrasted the intolerant rhetoric of the group's leaders with the actions of most of the membership. The Klan was white Protestant, established Americans who were fearful of change represented by new immigrants and Black migrants to the North. They were highly suspicious of Catholics, Jews and Black people, who they believed subverted ideal, Protestant moral standards. Violence was uncommon in most chapters. In Indiana, KKK members directed more threats and economic blacklisting primarily against fellow white Protestants for transgressions of community moral standards, such as adultery, wife-beating, gambling and heavy drinking. Up to one third of Indiana's Protestant men joined the order making it, Moore argued, "a kind of interest group for average white Protestants who believed that their values should be dominant in their community and state."


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Northern Indiana's industrial cities had attracted a large Catholic population of European immigrants and their descendants. They established the University of Notre Dame, a major Catholic college near South Bend. In May 1924, when the KKK scheduled a regional meeting in the city, Notre Dame students blocked the Klansmen and stole some KKK regalia. On the next day, the Klansmen counterattacked. Finally, the college president and the football coach Knute Rockne kept the students on campus to avert further violence.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In Alabama, some young, white, urban activists joined the KKK to fight the old guard establishment. Hugo Black was a member before becoming nationally famous; he focused on anti-Catholicism. However, in rural Alabama the Klan continued to operate to enforce Jim Crow laws; its members resorted more often to violence against Black people for infringements of the social order of white supremacy.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Racial terrorism was used in smaller towns to suppress Black political activity. Elbert Williams of Brownsville, Tennessee, was lynched in 1940 for trying to organize Black residents to register and vote; also that year, Jesse Thornton of Luverne, Alabama, was lynched for failing to address a police officer as "Mister".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In 1944, the second KKK was disbanded by Imperial Wizard James A. Colescott after the IRS levied a large tax liability against the organization. In 1946, Samuel Green reestablished the KKK at a ceremony on Stone Mountain. His group primarily operated in Georgia. Green was succeeded by Samuel Roper as Imperial Wizard in 1949, and Roper was succeeded by Eldon Edwards in 1950. Based in Atlanta, Edwards worked to rebuild the organization by uniting the different factions of the KKK from other parts of the United States, but the strength of the organization was short-lived and the group fractured as it competed with other klan organizations. In 1959, Roy Davis was elected to follow Edwards as national leader. Edwards had previously appointed Davis Grand Dragon of Texas in an effort to unite their two klan organizations. Davis was already leading the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Davis held rallies Florida and other southern states during 1961 and 1962 recruiting members. Davis had been a close associate of William J. Simmons and been active in the KKK since it first reformed in 1915.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Congress launched an investigation into the KKK in the early 1964, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Davis, based in Dallas, resigned as Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights shortly after the Original Knights received a Congressional subpoena. The Original Knights became increasingly fractured in the immediate aftermath as many members were forced to testify before Congress. The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan formed in 1964 after splitting from the Original Knights. According to an FBI report published in May 1965, the KKK was divided into 14 different organizations at the time with a total membership of approximately 9,000. The FBI reported that Roy Davis's Original Knights was the largest faction and had about 1,500 members. Robert Shelton of Alabama was leading a faction of 400-600 members. Congressional investigators found that by the end of 1965 most members of Original Knights organization joined Shelton's United Klans and the Original Knights of the KKK disbanded. Shelton's United Klan continued to absorb members from the competing factions and remained the largest Klan group unto the 1970s, peaking with an estimated 30,000 members and another 250,000 non-member supporters during the late 1960s.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: After the decline of the national organization, small independent groups adopted the name "Ku Klux Klan", along with variations. They had no formal relationships with each other, and most had no connection to the second KKK, except for the fact that they copied its terminology and costumes. Beginning in the 1950s, for instance, individual Klan groups in Birmingham, Alabama, began to resist social change and Black people's efforts to improve their lives by bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods. The white men worked in mining and steel industries, with access to these materials. There were so many bombings of Black people's homes in Birmingham by Klan groups in the 1950s that the city was nicknamed "Bombingham".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: During the tenure of Bull Connor as police commissioner in Birmingham, Klan groups were closely allied with the police and operated with impunity. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham in 1961, Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police to quell the attack. When local and state authorities failed to protect the Freedom Riders and activists, the federal government began to establish intervention and protection. In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors' administrations. In Birmingham and elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil rights activists. In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation, and assassination directly against individuals. Continuing disfranchisement of Black people across the South meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all-white and demonstrably biased verdicts and sentences.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: According to a report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of 40 Black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some of the bombing victims were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who refused to bow to racist convention or were innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random violence.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: There was considerable resistance among African Americans and white allies to the Klan. In 1953, newspaper publishers W. Horace Carter (Tabor City, North Carolina), who had campaigned for three years, and Willard Cole (Whiteville, North Carolina) shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service citing "their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities". In a 1958 incident in North Carolina, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans for associating with white people, and threatened more actions. When the KKK held a nighttime rally nearby, they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbee. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: While the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had paid informants in the Klan, for instance in Birmingham in the early 1960s, its relations with local law enforcement agencies and the Klan were often ambiguous. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, appeared more concerned about Communist links to civil rights activists than about controlling Klan excesses against citizens. In 1964, the FBI's COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights groups.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: As 20th-century Supreme Court rulings extended federal enforcement of citizens' civil rights, the government revived the Enforcement Acts and the Klan Act from Reconstruction days. Federal prosecutors used these laws as the basis for investigations and indictments in the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo. They were also the basis for prosecution in 1991 in "Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In 1965, the House Un-American Activities Committee started an investigation on the Klan, putting in the public spotlight its front organizations, finances, methods and divisions.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: After federal legislation was passed prohibiting legal segregation and authorizing enforcement of protection of voting rights, KKK groups began to oppose court-ordered busing to desegregate schools, affirmative action, and the more open immigration authorized in the 1960s. In 1971, KKK members used bombs to destroy 10 school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. By 1975, there were known KKK groups on most college campuses in Louisiana as well as at Vanderbilt University, the University of Georgia, the University of Mississippi, the University of Akron, and the University of Southern California.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: On November 3, 1979, five communist protesters were killed by KKK and American Nazi Party members in Greensboro, North Carolina, in what is known as the Greensboro massacre. The Communist Workers' Party had sponsored a rally against the Klan in an effort to organize predominantly Black industrial workers in the area. Klan members drove up with arms in their car trunks, and attacked marchers.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the KKK in 1979, reported that the FBI's COINTELPRO efforts were highly successful. Rival KKK factions accused each other's leaders of being FBI informants. William Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was revealed to have been working for the FBI.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Thompson also related that KKK leaders showed great concern about a series of civil lawsuits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming damages amounting to millions of dollars. These were filed after KKK members shot into a group of African Americans. Klansmen curtailed their activities in order to conserve money for defense against the lawsuits. The KKK also used lawsuits as tools; they filed a libel suit in order to prevent the publication of a paperback edition of Thompson's book, but were unsuccessful.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In 1980, three KKK members shot four elderly Black women (Viola Ellison, Lela Evans, Opal Jackson, and Katherine Johnson) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, following a KKK initiation rally. A fifth woman, Fannie Crumsey, was injured by flying glass in the incident. Attempted murder charges were filed against the three KKK members, two of whom—Bill Church and Larry Payne—were acquitted by an all-white jury. The third defendant, Marshall Thrash, was sentenced by the same jury to nine months on lesser charges. He was released after three months. In 1982, a jury awarded the five women $535,000 in a civil trial.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: After Michael Donald was lynched in 1981 in Alabama, the FBI investigated his death. The US attorney prosecuted the case. Two local KKK members were convicted for his murder, including Henry Francis Hays who was sentenced to death. After exhausting the appeals process, Hays was executed by electric chair for Donald's death in Alabama on June 6, 1997. It was the first time since 1913 that a white man had been executed in Alabama for a crime against an African American.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: With the support of attorneys Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and state senator Michael A. Figures, Donald's mother Beulah Mae Donald sued the KKK in civil court in Alabama. Her lawsuit against the United Klans of America was tried in February 1987. The all-white jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching of Donald and ordered the Klan to pay US$7 million, but the KKK did not have sufficient funds to pay the fine. They had to sell off their national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In 1995, Don Black and Chloê Hardin, the ex-wife of the KKK grand wizard David Duke, began a small bulletin board system (BBS) called Stormfront, which has become a prominent online forum for white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, hate speech, racism, and antisemitism in the early 21st century.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Duke has an account on Stormfront which he uses to post articles from his own website. He also polls forum members for opinions and questions, in particular during his internet broadcasts. Duke has worked with Don Black on numerous projects including Operation Red Dog in 1980.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The modern KKK is not one organization; rather it is composed of small independent chapters across the United States. According to a 1999 ADL report, the KKK's estimated size then was "No more than a few thousand, organized into slightly more than 100 units". In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors extremist groups, estimated that there were "at least 29 separate, rival Klan groups currently active in the United States, and they compete with one another for members, dues, news media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan". The formation of independent chapters has made KKK groups more difficult to infiltrate, and researchers find it hard to estimate their numbers. Analysts believe that about two-thirds of KKK members are concentrated in the Southern United States, with another third situated primarily in the lower Midwest.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: For some time, the Klan's numbers have been steadily dropping. This decline has been attributed to the Klan's lack of competence in the use of the Internet, their history of violence, a proliferation of competing hate groups, and a decline in the number of young racist activists who are willing to join groups at all.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: A 2016 analysis by the SPLC found that hate groups in general were on the rise in the United States. The ADL published a report in 2016 that concluded: "Despite a persistent ability to attract media attention, organized Ku Klux Klan groups are actually continuing a long-term trend of decline. They remain a collection of mostly small, disjointed groups that continually change in name and leadership."


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In 2015, however, the number of KKK chapters nationwide grew from 72 to 190. The SPLC released a similar report stating that "there were significant increases in Klan as well as Black separatist groups".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Recent KKK membership campaigns have stimulated people's anxieties about illegal immigration, urban crime, civil unions, and same-sex marriage. In 2006, J. Keith Akins argued that "Klan literature and propaganda is rabidly homophobic and encourages violence against gays and lesbians. ...Since the late 1970s, the Klan has increasingly focused its ire on this previously ignored population." The Klan has produced Islamophobic propaganda and distributed anti-Islamic flyers.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Many KKK groups have formed strong alliances with other white supremacist groups, such as neo-Nazis. Some KKK groups have become increasingly "nazified", adopting the look and emblems of white power skinheads.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK in defense of their First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, and marches, as well as their right to field political candidates.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights, Frank Ancona, was fatally shot in Missouri in February 2017, several days after disappearing. The coroner declared his death a homicide. Ancona's wife and stepson were charged with first-degree murder in connection with the killing. The prosecutor in the case believes that the killing "happened because of a marital dispute" and was not connected to Ancona's Klan participation. Ancona's group "was not considered the largest or the most influential iteration of the Klan, but he was skilled at attracting the spotlight".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The February 14, 2019, edition of the Linden, Alabama, weekly newspaper "The Democrat-Reporter" carried an editorial titled "Klan needs to ride again" written by Goodloe Sutton—the newspaper's owner, publisher and editor—which urged the Klan to return to staging their night rides, because proposals were being made to raise taxes in the state. In an interview, Sutton suggested that Washington, D.C., could be "clean[ed] out" by way of lynchings. "We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them," Sutton said. He also specified that he was only referring to hanging "socialist-communists", and compared the Klan to the NAACP. The editorial and Sutton's subsequent comments provoked calls for his resignation from Alabama politicians and the Alabama Press Association, which later censured Sutton and suspended the newspaper's membership. In addition the University of Southern Mississippi's School of Communication removed Sutton—who is an alumnus of that school from its Mass Communication and Journalism Hall of Fame, and "strongly condemned" his remarks. Sutton was also stripped of a distinguished community journalism award he had been presented in 2009 by Auburn University's Journalism Advisory Council. Sutton expressed no regret and said that the editorial was intended to be "ironic", but that "Not many people understand irony today."


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Aside from the Ku Klux Klan in Canada, there have been various attempts to organize KKK chapters outside the United States in places in Asia, Europe and Oceania, although most of them ultimately came to naught.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In South Africa, during Apartheid, there were attempts, in the 1960s, to establish a branch at Rhodes University, with the help of Terry Venables. Some far-right activists took some of the lore such as by writing "Ku Klux Klan Africa" on the ANC Cape Town offices or wearing their dresses.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In the 1970s, Rhodesia had a Ku Klux Klan, led by Len Idensohn, attacking Ian Smith for his relative moderation.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In Mexico, the KKK endorsed and funded the Calles government during the 1920s Cristero War with the intention of destroying Catholicism there. On 1924 vigilantes claimed to have organized themselves into a Klan against "criminals", publishing a program of "social epuration".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In São Paulo, Brazil, the website of a group called Imperial Klans of Brazil was shut down in 2003, and the group's leader was arrested.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Klan was present in Cuba, under the name of Ku Klux Klan Kubano, directed against both West Indian migrant workers and Afro-Cuban and using the fear of the 1912 Negro Rebellion.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: During the Vietnam War, klaverns were established on some US military bases, often tolerated by military authorities.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Recruitment activity has also been reported in the United Kingdom. In the 1960s, "klaverns" were established in the Midlands, the following decade saw visits by leading Klansmen, and the 1990s saw recruitment drives in London, Scotland and the Midlands and huge internal turnoil and splintering: for example a leader, Allan Beshella, had to resign after 1972 conviction for child sex abuse was revealed. On 2018, Klan-clad far-right activists marched in front of a Northern Irish mosque.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In Germany, a KKK-related group, "Ritter des Feurigen Kreuzes" ("Knights of the Fiery Cross"), was established in 1925 by returning naturalized German-born US citizens in Berlin who managed to gather around 300 persons of middle-class occupations such as merchants and clerks. It soon saw the original founders being removed by internal conflicts, and mocking newspapers about the affair. After the Nazis took over Germany, the group disbanded and its members joined the Nazis. On 1991, Dennis Mahon, then of Oklahoma's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, reportedly helped to organize Klan groups. Another German KKK-related group, the European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has organized and it gained notoriety in 2012 when the German media reported that two police officers who held membership in the organization would be allowed to keep their jobs. In 2019, the German authorities conducted raids against a possibly dangerous group called National Socialist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Deutschland.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: In Australia in the late 1990s, former One Nation member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country, and circa 2012 the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: A Ku Klux Klan group was established in Fiji in 1874 by white American and British settlers wanting to enact White supremacy, although its operations were quickly put to an end by the British who, although not officially yet established as the major authority of Fiji, had played a leading role in establishing a new constitutional monarchy, the Kingdom of Fiji, that was being threatened by the activities of the Fijian Klan, which owned fortresses and artillery. By March, it had become the "British Subjects' Mutual Protection Society", which included Francis Herbert Dufty.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Membership in the Klan is secret. Like many fraternal organizations, the Klan has signs that members can use to recognize one another. In conversation, a member may use the acronym "AYAK" (Are you a Klansman?) to surreptitiously identify themselves to another potential member. The response "AKIA" (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: All of the above terminology was created by William Joseph Simmons, as part of his 1915 revival of the Klan. The Reconstruction-era Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were "Wizard" for the overall leader of the Klan and "Night Hawk" for the official in charge of security.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The imperial kludd was the chaplain of the Imperial Klonvokation and he performed "such other duties as may be required by the imperial wizard".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The Primary symbol used by the clan for the past century has been the "Mystic Insignia of a Klansman", commonly known as the "Blood Drop Cross", a white cross on a red disk with what appears to be a blood drop in the middle. It was first used in the early 1900s, with the symbol in the center originally appearing as a red and white Ying Yang which in the subsequent years, lost the white part and was reinterpreted as a "blood drop".


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: The Triangular Ku Klux Klan symbol is made of what looks like a triangle inside a triangle, similar to a Sierpiński triangle, but in fact represents three letter Ks interlocked and facing inward, referencing the name of the group. A variation on this symbol has the K's facing outwards instead of inwards. It is an old Klan symbol that has also been resurrected in the modern day hate symbol.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Although predating the Klan, in modern times the symbol of the burning cross has become almost solely associated with the Ku Klux Klan and has become one of the most potent hate symbols in the United States. Burning crosses didn't become associated with the clan until Thomas Dixon's "The Clansman", and its film adaptation, D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" inspired members of the second Klan to take up the practice. In the modern day the symbol of the burning cross is so associated with racial intimidation that it is used by many non-Klan racist elements and has spread to locations outside the United States.


title: Ku Klux Klan

text: Because there are multiple Ku Klux Klan organizations, there are multiple official websites. Following are third-party lists of such organizations:


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Zoë Isabella Kravitz (born December 1, 1988) is an American actress, singer, and model. She made her acting debut in the romantic comedy film "No Reservations" (2007). Her breakthrough came with portraying Angel Salvadore in the superhero film "" (2011), which earned her nominations for a Teen Choice Award and a Scream Award. She rose to prominence playing Christina in "The Divergent Series" (2014–2016) and Leta Lestrange in the "Fantastic" "Beasts" film series (2016–2022).


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Kravitz earned praise for her lead roles in the HBO drama series "Big Little Lies" (2017–2019), which earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, and the Hulu romantic comedy series "High Fidelity" (2020). She appeared as Toast the Knowing in George Miller's "" (2015), and has starred in numerous independent films including "Dope" (2015), "Gemini" (2017), and "Kimi" (2022). She voiced Mary Jane Watson in "" (2018), and played Catwoman in the animated "The Lego Batman Movie" (2017) and the live-action DC film "The Batman" (2022). "Time" magazine named Kravitz one of the 100 Most Influential People in 2022.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Kravitz also works as a fashion model and musician. As of 2017, she is the face of YSL Beauté. Kravitz has also starred in campaigns for Tiffany & Co., Vera Wang, Balenciaga, Alexander Wang, Coach New York, Tumi, and Calvin Klein. She fronts the band Lolawolf and released the albums "Calm Down" in 2014 and "Tenderness" in 2020. Kravitz is set to make her directorial debut with "Pussy Island", which she also co-wrote and co-produced.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Kravitz was born in Venice, Los Angeles at the home of her parents, actress Lisa Bonet and musician Lenny Kravitz. Both her parents are of half African-American and half-Jewish descent. Her paternal grandmother, actress Roxie Roker (a first cousin once removed of television weather forecaster Al Roker), and her maternal grandfather, Allen Bonet, were African American, with some of her grandmother's family being from The Bahamas. Her paternal grandfather, NBC television news producer Sy Kravitz, and maternal grandmother, Arlene Litman, were both Ashkenazi Jews. Kravitz's paternal grandfather's family emigrated from Russia. Kravitz identifies as a secular Jew. The song "Flowers for Zoë", included on her father's second album "Mama Said", was written as a tribute to the two-year-old Zoë.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Kravitz's parents married in 1987 and divorced six years later, in 1993, when Zoë was five years old. She lived with her mother in Topanga Canyon and then moved to Miami at age 11 to live with her father, spending summers with her mother. Kravitz has a younger half-sister, Lola Iolani Momoa, and a half-brother, Nakoa-Wolf Manakauapo Namakaeha Momoa, from her mother's second marriage to actor Jason Momoa. Her godfather is movie producer Bruce Cohen, and her godmothers are actresses Marisa Tomei and Cree Summer.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Kravitz attended Miami Country Day School and Rudolf Steiner School in Manhattan graduating in 2007. Kravitz began studying that year at the acting conservatory under Scott McCrea at the State University of New York at Purchase where her peers included Micah Stock and Jason Ralph. She left college after a year and moved to Brooklyn, New York to work in films. She struggled with anorexia and bulimia throughout high school, until around age 24.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Kravitz landed her first film role while in high school, playing a babysitter hired by Catherine Zeta-Jones's character in the 2007 romantic comedy "No Reservations". In the same year she also appeared in the action thriller "The Brave One". In 2008, Kravitz appeared in the music video for Jay Z's "I Know" and was featured singing in will.i.am's music video for "We Are the Ones", in support of US presidential candidate Barack Obama. That same year she also appeared in the family drama "Birds of America" and neo noir comedy "Assassination of a High School President". She began making music at the age of 16. She fronted the New York/Philadelphia-based band Elevator Fight, which she formed in 2009. The band performed at the South by Southwest music festival and on the main stage of the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia in June 2009, along with The Roots, TV On The Radio, and The Black Keys. Kravitz stated in 2011 that her music is a hobby. She also performed with the cabaret troupe The Citizens Band.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: In 2009, Kravitz co-starred in the independent ensemble drama "The Greatest", in which her character is addicted to grief counseling groups. Also in 2009, she was named the face of Vera Wang's "Princess" fragrance in 2009, appearing on the website and in advertisements for the brand. In 2010, she appeared in "It's Kind of a Funny Story". Also that year, Kravitz appeared in "Twelve". Kravitz next starred in the romantic comedy "Beware the Gonzo" as the female lead and love interest of Ezra Miller's eponymous Gonzo. Kravitz was featured in a campaign for fashion designer Alexander Wang in 2010.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: In 2011, Kravitz appeared in the coming-of-age film "Yelling to the Sky". She also appeared in eight episodes of the Showtime television series "Californication", in which she portrayed Pearl, the vocalist of the all-female band Queens of Dogtown. That same year she portrayed the comic book character Angel Salvadore in "". Kravitz filmed her scenes in London and performed wire work for her role, to simulate her character's ability to fly. In late 2011, Kravitz completed work on a film with the working title "Treading Water", which was eventually released in 2013, renamed "The Boy Who Smells Like Fish". In the same year, she represented Vera Wang's new "Preppy Princess" fragrance.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: In 2013, she co-starred in "After Earth". In 2013, Kravitz released a jewelry line in collaboration with the Swarovski crystal company. She used ethnic and vintage jewelry, and her birthstone, Turquoise, as inspiration for her designs. In 2014, she portrayed the character Christina in "Divergent". Kravitz reprised her role in the sequels "" and "". Also in 2014, she starred in the independent drama "The Road Within" and the romantic comedy "Pretend We're Kissing". Kravitz started the band Lolawolf while in Los Angeles filming "The Road Within". Made up of members from the band Reputante, Lolawolf released an eponymous EP and debuted at the Mercury Lounge in November 2013. The band was named after Kravitz's younger siblings, Lola and Nakoa-Wolf. They released their debut album, "Calm Down", on October 21, 2014, and supported Lily Allen, Miley Cyrus, and Warpaint on tour in 2014. The band released the five-track EP, "Every Fuckin Day", on June 23, 2015.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Kravitz appeared in 2014's "Good Kill". In 2015, she appeared in the comedy-drama "Dope" and in "". In 2016, she co-starred in the action thriller "Vincent N Roxxy" and appeared in the independent film "Adam Green's Aladdin". Kravitz also had a role in the "Harry Potter" spin-off "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" as Leta Lestrange. In 2017, Kravitz starred in the mystery thriller "Gemini". In the same year, she appeared in the comedy film "Rough Night" and the animated superhero film "The Lego Batman Movie", in which she voiced the comic book character Selina Kyle / Catwoman. She also became the face of Brooklyn-based designer Alexis Bittar's jewelry line in 2015.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: From 2017 to 2019, Kravitz starred in the HBO drama series "Big Little Lies", in which she portrays Bonnie Carlson; for her performance, she earned two Black Reel Award nominations as well as a nomination for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Drama Series. Kravitz appeared in the 2018 science fiction action film "Kin" and reprised her role as Leta Lestrange in "", in a larger capacity. Also in 2018, she appeared on BBC Children in Need with Eddie Redmayne, setting up Alex Jones from "The One Show," with the help of children who fed them the answers to the interview questions. Kravitz was ranked one of the best dressed women in 2018 by fashion website Net-a-Porter. In the same year, Kravitz was featured on the song "Screwed" on Janelle Monáe's album "Dirty Computer". She was also featured on "Anti-Social Smokers Club" on Rae Sremmurd's third album "SR3MM".


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: In 2019, Kravitz was cast as the lead in the Hulu romantic comedy television series "High Fidelity", based on the 2000 film of the same name in which her mother stars. The series premiered on Valentine's Day, 2020 to critical acclaim with Kravitz's performance as Rob Gorgan receiving praise. Margaret Lyons of "The New York Times" described her performance as "mesmerizing", adding "She's so good, in fact, that it's almost impossible to believe she can't find someone to love her exactly as-is." Alison Herman of "The Ringer" called Kravitz a "bona-fide leading lady". Despite the critical success, "High Fidelity" was cancelled after one season. For her role in the series, Kravitz won a Black Reel Award and was nominated for a Satellite Award. Also in 2020, she starred as one of the leads in "Viena and the Fantomes".


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: Kravitz portrayed Selina Kyle / Catwoman, now in live action, in director Matt Reeves' "The Batman", which was released on March 4, 2022, to critical and commercial success, grossing over $700 million internationally. Kravitz's performance received positive reviews. "The Independent" wrote that "Kravitz's Catwoman brings an almost-extinct sensuality to the role", and in Christy Lemire's review of the film—written for "RogerEbert.com"—she stated that "This is no flirty, purring Catwoman: She's a fighter and a survivor with a loyal heart and a strong sense of what's right. ... Kravitz continues to reveal a fierce charisma and quiet strength." Kravitz also starred in filmmaker Steven Soderbergh's thriller "Kimi", which was released to generally positive reviews with her performance receiving praise.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: In June 2021, Kravitz announced plans to make her directorial debut in "Pussy Island", a film she also co-wrote. In August 2021, it was announced that Kravitz will star and serve as an executive producer on coming-of-age animated series "Phatty Patty", bankrolled by Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith's Westbrook Studios.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: In June 2022, it was announced that Kravitz will star in and produce the heist thriller "The Sundance Kid Might Have Some Regrets" for Warner Bros.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: She briefly dated Ezra Miller during filming on "Beware the Gonzo" and was in a relationship with actor Penn Badgley from 2011 to 2013.


title: Zoë Kravitz

text: In 2016, Kravitz began a relationship with actor Karl Glusman. They became engaged in February 2018, and were married at Kravitz's father's home in Paris on June 29, 2019. In December 2020, Kravitz filed for divorce, which was finalized in August 2021.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, ; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including "The Silmarillion". These, together with "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term "legendarium" to the larger part of these writings.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused him to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Tolkien's immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and Birmingham. The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town of Kreuzburg near Königsberg, which had been founded during medieval German eastward expansion, where his earliest-known paternal ancestor Michel Tolkien was born around 1620. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746) was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: His son, Christian Tolkien (1706–1791), moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and Johann (later known as John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family; the younger brother was J. R. R. Tolkien's second great-grandfather. In 1792, John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravell took over the Erdley Norton manufacture in London, which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravell & Tolkien. Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen. Other German relatives also joined the two brothers in London. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J. R. R. Tolkien, live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of people who evacuated East Prussia in 1945, at the end of World War II.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: According to Ryszard Derdziński, the Tolkien name is of Low Prussian origin and probably means "son/descendant of Tolk". Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word , meaning "foolhardy", and jokingly inserted himself as a "cameo" into "The Notion Club Papers" under the literally translated name Rashbold. However, Derdziński has demonstrated this to be a false etymology. While J. R. R. Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father".


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (later annexed by the British Empire; now Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa), to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, "née" Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on 17 February 1894.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some believe to have been later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event and no special hatred of spiders as an adult. In an earlier incident from Tolkien's infancy, a young family servant took the baby to his homestead, returning him the next morning.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane's farm Bag End, the name of which he used in his fiction.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked "Treasure Island" and "The Pied Piper" and thought "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll was "amusing but disturbing". He liked stories about "Red Indians" (Native Americans) and works of fantasy by George MacDonald. In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and their influence is apparent in some of his later writings.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family, which stopped all financial assistance to her. In 1904, when J. R. R. Tolkien was 12, his mother died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which she was renting. She was then about 34 years of age, about as old as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could survive without treatment—insulin would not be discovered until 1921, two decades later. Nine years after her death, Tolkien wrote, "My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith."


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Before her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to her close friend, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics. In a 1965 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled the influence of the man whom he always called "Father Francis": "He was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was—and he was "not". I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the 'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists." After his mother's death, Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham and attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and later St Philip's School. In 1903, he won a Foundation Scholarship and returned to King Edward's.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation. Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. Around 10 June 1909 he composed "The Book of the Foxrook", a sixteen-page notebook, where the "earliest example of one of his invented alphabets" appears. Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society they called the T.C.B.S. The initials stood for Tea Club and Barrovian Society, alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, secretly, in the school library. After leaving school, the members stayed in touch and, in December 1914, they held a council in London at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of 12 hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn, "the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams". They went across the Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald and on across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass, through the upper Valais to Brig and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially read classics but changed his course in 1913 to English language and literature, graduating in 1915 with first-class honours. Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright, whose "Primer of the Gothic Language" had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edgbaston. According to Humphrey Carpenter, "Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugarlumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty. ... With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love."


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: His guardian, Father Morgan, considered it "altogether unfortunate" that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman; Tolkien wrote that the combined tensions contributed to his having "muffed [his] exams". Morgan prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C. H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt "on the shelf" and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: On 8 January 1913, Tolkien travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien's proposal. She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring. Field was "dreadfully upset at first", and the Field family was "insulted and angry". Upon learning of Edith's new plans, Jessop wrote to her guardian, "I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentleman, but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a profession it would have been different."


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. Jessop, "like many others of his age and class ... strongly anti-Catholic", was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church at Warwick, on 22 March 1916. In his 1941 letter to Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In August 1914, Britain entered the First World War. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: "In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage." Instead, Tolkien, "endured the obloquy", and entered a programme by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that the hints were "becoming outspoken from relatives". He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on 15 July 1915. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Rugeley Camp near to Rugeley, Staffordshire, for 11 months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained: "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed." Following their wedding, Lieutenant and Mrs. Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp. On 2 June 1916, Tolkien received a telegram summoning him to Folkestone for posting to France. The Tolkiens spent the night before his departure in a room at the Plough & Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston, Birmingham. He later wrote: "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then... it was like a death."


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: On 5 June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. Like other soldiers arriving for the first time, he was sent to the British Expeditionary Force's (BEF) base depot at Étaples. On 7 June, he was informed that he had been assigned as a signals officer to the 11th (Service) Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. The battalion was part of the 74th Brigade, 25th Division. While waiting to be summoned to his unit, Tolkien sank into boredom. To pass the time, he composed a poem entitled "The Lonely Isle", which was inspired by his feelings during the sea crossing to Calais. To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements. He left Étaples on 27 June 1916 and joined his battalion at Rubempré, near Amiens. He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly from the mining, milling, and weaving towns of Lancashire. According to John Garth, he "felt an affinity for these working class men", but military protocol prohibited friendships with "other ranks". Instead, he was required to "take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters ... If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty." Tolkien later lamented, "The most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early July 1916. In between terms behind the lines at Bouzincourt, he participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient. Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death. Edith could track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front. The Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusiliers, recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by "hordes of lice" which found the Medical Officer's ointment merely "a kind of "hors d'oeuvre" and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour." On 27 October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by lice. He was invalided to England on 8 November 1916. Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the battle, when a German artillery shell landed on a first-aid post. Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: According to John Garth, Kitchener's army at once marked existing social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate situation together. Tolkien was grateful, writing that it had taught him "a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties".


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service. During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called "The Book of Lost Tales", beginning with "The Fall of Gondolin". "Lost Tales" represented Tolkien's attempt to create a mythology for England, a project he would abandon without ever completing. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps. It was at this time that Edith bore their first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien. In a 1941 letter, Tolkien described his son John as "(conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-Boat campaign) round about the Battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now". Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered,


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: On 16 July 1919 Tolkien was taken off active service, at Fovant, on Salisbury Plain, with a temporary disability pension.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant. His first civilian job after World War I was at the "Oxford English Dictionary", where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter "W". In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds, becoming the youngest member of the academic staff there. While at Leeds, he produced "A Middle English Vocabulary" and a definitive edition of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" with E. V. Gordon; both became academic standard works for several decades. He translated "Sir Gawain", "Pearl", and "Sir Orfeo". In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In mid-1919, he began to tutor undergraduates privately, most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's College, given that the women's colleges were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien as a married professor (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would not have been.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: During his time at Pembroke College Tolkien wrote "The Hobbit" and the first two volumes of "The Lord of the Rings", while living at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name "Nodens", following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In the 1920s, Tolkien undertook a translation of "Beowulf", which he finished in 1926, but did not publish. It was finally edited by his son and published in 2014, more than 40 years after Tolkien's death and almost 90 years after its completion.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Ten years after finishing his translation, Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work, "", which had a lasting influence on "Beowulf" research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to its purely linguistic elements. At the time, the consensus of scholarship deprecated "Beowulf" for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of "Beowulf" was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where "Beowulf" does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded "Beowulf": "Beowulf is among my most valued sources"; this influence may be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien began his series of lectures on "Beowulf" in a most striking way, entering the room silently, fixing the audience with a look, and suddenly declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem, starting "with a great cry of "Hwæt!"" It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it made the students realize that "Beowulf" was not just a set text but "a powerful piece of dramatic poetry". Decades later, W. H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the "unforgettable experience" of hearing him recite "Beowulf", and stating "The voice was the voice of Gandalf".


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In the run-up to the Second World War, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January 1939, he was asked to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in the event of national emergency. Beginning on 27 March, he took an instructional course at the London HQ of the Government Code and Cypher School. He was informed in October that his services would not be required.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. He served as an external examiner for University College, Galway (now NUI Galway), for many years. In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (of which University College, Galway, was a constituent college). Tolkien completed "The Lord of the Rings" in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel Tolkien (17 November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984), Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (18 June 1929 – 28 February 2022). Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C. S. Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult-figure, but admitted that "even the nose of a very modest idol ... cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!"


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper middle class. Tolkien's status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow Inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place. The genuine and deep affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other's health, in details like wrapping presents, in the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford so she could retire to Bournemouth, and in her pride in his becoming a famous author. They were tied together, too, by love for their children and grandchildren.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In his retirement Tolkien was a consultant and translator for "The Jerusalem Bible", published in 1966. He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate, but, due to other commitments, only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors and a translation of the Book of Jonah.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Edith died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford, where Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being back in the city.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year Honours and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. In the same year Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: He had the name Luthien engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with "Beren" added to his name. Tolkien's will was proven on 20 December 1973, with his estate valued at £190,577 (equivalent to £ in ).


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Tolkien's Catholicism was a significant factor in C. S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England. He once wrote to Rayner Unwin's daughter Camilla, who wished to know the purpose of life, that it was "to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks." He had a special devotion to the blessed sacrament, writing to his son Michael that in "the Blessed Sacrament ... you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that". He accordingly encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion, again writing to his son Michael that "the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion." He believed the Catholic Church to be true most of all because of the pride of place and the honour in which it holds the Blessed Sacrament. In the last years of his life, Tolkien resisted the liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, especially the use of English for the liturgy; he continued to make the responses in Latin, loudly, ignoring the rest of the congregation.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Tolkien's fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying outmoded attitudes to race. However, scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist both in peacetime and during the two World Wars. With the late 19th century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, some critics saw the mention of race mixing in "The Lord of the Rings" as embodying scientific racism. Other commentators saw in Tolkien's orcs a reflection of wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese. Critics have noted, too, that the work embodies a moral geography, with good in the West, evil in the East. Against this, scholars have noted that Tolkien was outraged in peacetime by Nazi racial theory, while during the Second World War he was equally disgusted by anti-German racial propaganda. Other scholars have stated that Tolkien's Middle-earth is definitely polycultural and polylingual, and that attacks on Tolkien based on "The Lord of the Rings" often omit relevant evidence from the text.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: During most of his own life conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views—except in some private letters, in which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-felling. In later years, a number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of "The Lord of the Rings", Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and untamed nature, and in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized world.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion", drew on a wide array of influences including his philological interest in language, Christianity, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. His philological work centred on the study of Old English literature, especially "Beowulf", and he acknowledged its importance to his writings. He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, and Greek language and mythology. Commentators have attempted to identify many literary and topological antecedents for characters, places and events in Tolkien's writings. Some writers were important to him, including the Arts and Crafts polymath William Morris, and he undoubtedly made use of some real place-names, such as Bag End, the name of his aunt's home. He acknowledged, too, John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard, authors of modern adventure stories that he enjoyed. The effects of some specific experiences have been identified. Tolkien's childhood in the English countryside, and its urbanization by the growth of Birmingham, influenced his creation of the Shire, while his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.


title: J. R. R. Tolkien

text: In addition to writing fiction, Tolkien was an author of academic literary criticism. His seminal 1936 lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic "Beowulf" by literary critics. The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English literature to this day. "Beowulf" is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction, with major details of both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" being adapted from the poem.