Cross Burnings

Cross burnings date back many centuries back to the Scottish clans. The Ku Klux Klan got their act of cross burnings from the ancient Scottish practices of burning crosses on the hillside to warn the military of a battle. Even though the Ku Klux Klan never first intended to use the cross burnings as a way to terrorize minorities it wasn’t until The Clansman came out and was put on the big screens that the Ku Klux Klan got the idea of using crosses to intimidate African Americans and other minorities that went against the clan’s ideals.

Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake
The first major piece of literature that brought the cross burnings into attention was Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, a poem that described the old Scottish traditions of setting a cross on fire on a hilltop to warn the gather Scottish troops or warn that a battle was eminent. This piece of literature was popular in the south of America but it came out long before the first Ku Klux Klan in America even formed.

Thomas Dixon's The Clansman
The first major pro-KKK novel that brought the ideals of the cross burning from the ancient Scottish clans to the KKK was The Clansman, a novel that attempted to make comparisons between the Scottish practices to the KKK. The Clansman called the cross burning, “an ancient symbol of an unconquered race of men.”

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
However, though the book was not immensely popular the Ku Klux Klan never actually started burning crosses until Thomas Dixon, the author of The Clansman, sold the movie rights to D.W. Griffith, who made the film The Birth of a Nation based on Dixon’s book The Clansman. The movie portrayed the movie’s hero burning a cross and driving out the black “oppressors,” all the while firing up Wagner’s orchestra “The Ride of the Valkyries” because this is during the silent era, where movies didn’t have people talking. This movie based off of Thomas Dixon’s novel is what inspired the ideal of the cross burning in the KKK. However, even though the KKK burns crosses back in the Scottish traditions the cross that they burned on the hillside was not that of the Roman cross but rather St. Andrew’s cross, which was in the shape of an X.

How the Media Influenced the Cross Burnings
The first Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1866, never actually burned crosses but rather it was the media that spread the idea of the cross burning to signify the “burning away of evil,” essentially this means any minorities that are against the clan’s ideals and anyone who was of a different color, from literature and eventually to the movies the media seduced the clan’s ideals of using the cross. The cross has been one such trademark of the Ku Klux Klan ever since it’s second coming together 10 years after the movie aired, on Stone Mountain near Atlanta in 1915, when the clan burned a cross on Thanksgiving night.