The Ku Klux Klan “made a lot of people straighten up,” Georgia State Rep. Tommy Benton (R-Jefferson) said last week in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Further, the Klan “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order,” according to Benton.
Benton, who is also a strong supporter of Confederate flags, holidays and heritage, said that while he does not necessarily agree with the ways the KKK carried out its beliefs, “It’s just the way things were.”
But to describe the Klan’s vigilantism as “just the way things were” is, to say the least, putting it lightly when looking back at what the Klan did to help “people straighten up” as Benton so eloquently stated.
