logo

45 pages 1 hour read

P. Djèlí Clark

Ring Shout

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Background

Historical Context: The Ku Klux Klan

The major premise of Clark’s novella is speculation about what would happen in a world in which the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group, was powered by magic. Clark combines reality and fiction to develop the world of the novella more fully. Founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the historical Ku Klux Klan (colloquially known as “the Klan”) used terror, murder, and lynchings to intimidate Black Americans during Reconstruction, a post-Civil-War period during which Black Americans gained legal rights as citizens. Inspired by the white supremacist film Birth of a Nation, Walter J. Simmons organized a cross burning near Atlanta, Georgia, at Stone Mountain in 1915 to drive up recruitment to the Klan. In the novella, Simmons is “a regular old witch” who initiated that second Klan era by conjuring up the Ku Kluxes (30).

Clark draws on other historical elements of the Klan in the novella. In reality, and in the novella, the white-hooded Klanspeople rampaged in the 1910s and 1920s, with their forces augmented by less organized white mobs. The killing of Maryse’s family reflects a small part of the reality of such attacks. The novella also includes mentions of Klan actions and white mob violence that destroyed Black communities in towns like Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) and Rosewood, Florida (1923), events that are the work of Ku Kluxes in the novella. The events of the novella begin in 1922, right in between these two harrowing events.

More specific elements of the historical Klan appear in the novella. Throughout the Klan’s history, its membership and leadership were known for grandiose titles such as “Grand Wizard” and “Grand Cyclops.” In the novella, Clark uses the Grand Cyclops’s name for the hidden, major antagonist that threatens humanity, underscoring the connection between the historical world and the speculative world. Finally, Clark uses Stone Mountain, today a site of a Confederate memorial that is the largest high relief sculpture in the world, as the setting for the ultimate showdown between the resistance and the Grand Cyclops. Clark departs from historical reality to make the battle there a decisive defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in the South. In reality, the federal government continually intervened to suppress the Klan, but the group exists in some form to this day.

Cultural Context: Birth of a Nation

In Ring Shout, Birth of a Nation is a kind of mass spell designed to transform ordinary anti-Black racists into monsters who support the biggest monster of them all, the Grand Cyclops. The impact of the film in the book’s world is not far off from the impact of the film in reality, minus the magic.

First released in 1915, Birth of a Nation is a silent D. W. Griffith film based on Thomas Dixon’s novella The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, published in 1905. The film is the story of two families, one from the US North and one from the US South, during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. In the film, Griffith portrays white characters sympathetically, but he represents Black characters using racist stereotypes of them as violent, potential rapists of white women and people in need of discipline to restore order to the US South. In the film, that order comes at the end of Reconstruction, with the Ku Klux Klan as heroic figures in this endeavor. The film even includes a direct representation of lynching as a justified punishment for violent behavior on the part of a Black American man.

The film’s critical, technical, and popular success made it a potent cultural force historically. It was so popular that it was the first movie screened inside the White House, with President Woodrow Wilson, his family, Dixon, and Griffith in the audience. From the White House to ordinary towns, the film helped spread racist stereotypes of Black Americans. It reinforced the hardening of racist attitudes that led to white mob violence against Black Americans, culminating in the Red Summer of 1919 when membership in the Ku Klux Klan numbered in the millions and during which riots and other racialized violence surged.

Historically, Simmons, the man most responsible for the founding of the second Klan, saw the film as inspiration. While he didn’t screen the film on Stone Mountain, he did lead a cross burning there to consolidate the second iteration of the Klan. Clark maintains the historical detail of the burning cross because of the dramatic nature of the scene, which encapsulates the threat posed by the Klan, Butcher Clyde, and the Grand Cyclops. In real life and the world of the novella, the film became a powerful piece of racist propaganda that helped spread white supremacist ideas far and wide.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text