President Joe Biden condemned United States Senators who were open members of the Ku Klux Klan during a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Tuesday, but did not mention the role of the Democrat party in the racist organization.
Citing a book from historian Jon Meacham, Biden said at least five or seven members of the United States Senate were open members of the KKK in the 1920s. (Meacham’s book, The Soul of America actually cites 16 members of the United States Senate who belonged to the KKK)
The vast majority of Klan members at the time were overwhelmingly white Democrat politicians in the South.
“The flames from those burning crosses torched every region of the country,” Biden said.
He recalled a picture of 30,000 thousands of Klan members in hats and robes marching in Washington, DC.
Biden expressed solidarity with African-Americans, noting the Klan was also anti-Catholic. He said:
One of the reasons why it was founded, was because of guys like me who are Catholic.
It wasn’t about African-Americans then, it was about making sure that all those Polish and Irish and Italian and Eastern-European Catholics who came to the United States after World War I would not pollute Christianity.
Biden said the hatred fueled by the Klan was now represented in America’s institutions, warning “That hate became embedded systematically and systemically in our laws and our culture.”
The president did not mention he delivered a eulogy for former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) who was once an “exalted cyclops” in the KKK.
Biden decried Americans who remained silent about racist sins from the past.
“We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened, or doesn’t impact us today, because it does impact us today,” he said. “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know.”
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