The Searchlight, the official paper of the Klan, teems with anti-Jewish literature. Secret documents and stories are passed around privately among the organizers and used in gaining recruits.
"Chaplain" Ridley is one of the most rabid of the campaigners against the Jews. He never lets an opportunity go by to ridicule Jews and stir up prejudice.
In the first place, Jews are barred from the Ku Klux Klan. In a questionnaire that must be filled in by those who are initiated these questions are asked:
"Are you a gentile or a jew? What is your religious faith? Of what church are you a member (if any)? Of what religious faith are your parents?"
CHAPLAIN ATTACKS JEWS
"Chaplain" Ridley in The Searchlight, writes:
"I cannot help being what I am racially. I am not a Jew, nor a negro nor a foreigner. I am an Anglo-Saxon white man, so ordained by the hand and will of God, and so constituted and trained that I cannot conscientiously take either my politics or my religion from some secluded ass on the other side of the world.
"Now, if somebody else happens to be a Jew, I can't help it any more than he can. Or if he happens to be black, I can't help that, either. If he were born under a foreign flag, I couldn't help it—but there is one thing I can do. I can object to his un-American propaganda being preached in my home or practiced in the solemn assembly of real Americans."
The Searchlight constantly mixes Jews and negroes in ridiculous "movements." For instance, one writer in the issue of July 30, 1921, declares that his investigations have demonstrated that Jewish plotters are stirring up the negroes to make a race war so that the government will be destroyed.
The writer goes on: