Black Legion (political movement)

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The Black Legion was a white supremacist organization which began in the Midwestern United States in the 1920s and the 1930s. It split off from the Ku Klux Klan and grew to prominence during the Great Depression. According to historian Rick Perlstein, the FBI estimated that its membership numbered "at 135,000, including a large number of public officials, including Detroit's police chief." Historian Peter H. Amann put the number at between 60,000 and 100,000, while John Earl Haynes said that it had at most only a few hundred members. The Black Legion is widely viewed as an even more violent and radical offshoot of the Klan. In 1936, the group was suspected of having killed as many as 50 people, including Charles Poole, an organizer for the federal Works Progress Administration. Eleven men were found guilty of Poole's murder. At the time of Poole's murder, the Associated Press described the organization as "a group of loosely federated night-riding bands operating in several States without...

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