Ku Klux Klan medal given to a South Carolina man

Ku Klux Klan (KKK) medal acquired by Sanford Vandifer Rogers Jr. in Spartanburg County, South Carolina during the 1920s while he was a member. Sanford was born in 1864. His father, Sanford senior, was a Confederate soldier who died in a Union prisoner of war camp in Elmira, New York just before he was born. The KKK promoted the idea that whites are inherently superior to other races. This idea was supported by the racially motivated, pseudoscientific American eugenics movement, which attempted to establish a hierarchy of races. These racist ideas were used to justify the exclusion of African Americans from their inherent rights and the creation of segregation and sterilization laws. Before Nazi Germany, the United States led the world in forced sterilizations. The United States’ Jim Crow and sterilization laws, as well as the eugenics program, served as precedents and helped enable passage of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws which excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having relations with persons of “German or related blood.”