For a larger view click on the image. Image courtesy of Dave Leventhal.

Florida Representative Alan Grayson (D – FL District 6) invoked the image of a burning cross in a fundraising email. The intent of his email was to discredit the TEA Party of Florida and its affiliates. In using this image of a burning cross perhaps Rep. Grayson does not know nor understand the history of the Ku Klux Klan?

Here are some facts about who really created and supported the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1926, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a guest speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silverlake, New Jersey. Sanger wrote in her biography, “Eventually the lights were switched on, the audience seated itself, and I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak. Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York.”

Sanger was a proponent of Eugenics, the racial cleansing of American society. In Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12, Sanger wrote, “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities.  The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

According to Wikipedia:

From the mid-1870s on in the Deep South, violence rose. In Mississippi, Louisiana, the Carolinas and Florida especially, the Democratic Party relied on paramilitary “White Line” groups such as the White Camelia to terrorize, intimidate and assassinate African American and white Republicans in an organized drive to regain power. In Mississippi, it was the Red Shirts; in Louisiana, the White League that were paramilitary groups carrying out goals of the Democratic Party to suppress black voting. Insurgents targeted politically active African Americans and unleashed violence in general community intimidation. Grant’s desire to keep Ohio in the Republican aisle and his attorney general’s maneuvering led to a failure to support the Mississippi governor with Federal troops. The campaign of terror worked. In Yazoo County, for instance, with a Negro population of 12,000, only seven votes were cast for Republicans. In 1875, Democrats swept into power in the state legislature.

Once Democrats regained power in Mississippi, Democrats in other states adopted the Mississippi Plan to control the election of 1876, using informal armed militias to assassinate political leaders, hunt down community members, intimidate and turn away voters, effectively suppressing African American suffrage and civil rights. In state after state, Democrats swept back to power.From 1868 to 1876, most years had 50–100 lynchings.

White Democrats passed laws and constitutional amendments making voter registration more complicated, to further exclude black voters from the polls.

Bob Unruh of World Net Daily, in his column “KKK’s 1st targets were Republicans” reports, “The original targets of the Ku Klux Klan were Republicans, both black and white, according to a new television program and book, which describe how the Democrats started the KKK and for decades harassed the GOP with lynchings and threats. An estimated 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites died at the end of KKK ropes from 1882 to 1964.”

“The documentation has been assembled by David Barton of Wallbuilders and published in his book “Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White,” which reveals that not only did the Democrats work hand-in-glove with the Ku Klux Klan for generations, they started the KKK and endorsed its mayhem,” writes Barton.

It appears Rep. Grayson and Democrats with the help of the IRS are again targeting those who oppose them and big government. Invoking the burning cross is in character especially for those who believe in supremacism.

The below video is the full text of Margaret Sanger’s autobiographical recollections on addressing the Ku Klux Klan: