The Klan: America’s White Cancer

October 26, 3:00 PM

Veterans Room, Oak Park Public Library

834 Lake Street

Oak Park, Illinois, Friday, September 21, 2018; Explore the stories behind the three waves of the Ku Klux Klan, with emphasis on the Second Wave, which in the 1920s stormed the American Heartland, quietly racist while rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant. The narrator is Iowa historian Michael Luick-Thrams, whose great-grandfather namesake was active in the Iowa Klan in the mid-1920s. Dr. Luick-Thrams offers a case study of one Klan member’s background, and decades later his family’s struggle to integrate the man they knew with the one they did not. The presentation poses important yet uncomfortable questions, like: “To what degree has racism become inseparable from the lives of both minorities and those said to belong to ‘the majority’ in the US?” A richly illustrated Power Point presentation (with clips of a KKK march in Washington, 1925) will be followed by both small- and large-group discussion.

This program is a collaboration of the Oak Park Friends (Quakers) and the Oak Park Public Library.

Those who have visited the new Oak Park River Forest Museum, 129 Lake Street, may have noticed with dismay a charter for the Women of the Ku Klux Klan of Oak Park, dated 1926. The Klan: America’s White Cancer offers an opportunity to explore the reality that some Oak Park residents embraced Klan attitudes in the not so distant past.

Michael Luick-Thrams, Ph.D. is Director of TRACES Center for History and Culture. Over the next 5 weeks at 60 venues in 4 states, Dr. Luick-Thrams will be speaking on “Hidden Histories, Taboo Topics.” In Chicago, four presentations are sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council. Contact him at MichaelLuickThrams@gmail.com