Albert Pike, Freemasonry, and the Ku Klux Klan

Freemason wrote:

General Nathan Bedford Forrest was chosen Imperial Wizard of the Klan.
Albert Pike organized the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas after General Forrest appointed Pike the Grand Dragon of that Realm. The Tennessee leaders of the Klan at the time of its founding were prominent Masons subordinate to Grand Commander Pike. Pike's old comrade and financial backer Robert Toombs returned from England in 1868. Toombs was appointed dictator of Scottish Rite activities inside Georgia, and Toombs and his family ran all aspects of the Klan within Georgia. President Ulysses Grant said that the Klan worked ``by force and terror to prevent all political action not in accord with the views of the members; to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right to a free ballot; to suppress [i.e. burn] schools in which colored children were taught and to reduce the colored people to a condition akin to that of slavery.'' In his newspaper {The Memphis Daily Appeal{ for April 16, 1868, publisher Albert Pike wrote:``With negroes for witnesses and jurors, the administration of justice becomes a blasphemous mockery. A Loyal League of negroes can cause any white man to be arrested, and can prove any charges it chooses to have made against him.``The disenfranchised people of the South ... can find no protection for property, liberty or life, except in secret association.... We would unite every white man in the South, who is opposed to negro suffrage, into one great Order of Southern Brotherhood, with an organization complete, active, vigorous, in which a few should execute the concentrated will of all, and whose very existence should be concealed from all but its members.''