Cross burnings

Cross burning or cross lighting is a practice widely associated with the Ku Klux Klan, although the historical practice long predates the Klan's inception–as far back as Peter of Bruys (1117–1131), who burned crosses in protest of the veneration of crosses. In the early 20th century, the Klan burned crosses on hillsides or near the homes of those they wished to intimidate.

In Scotland, the fiery cross, known as the Crann Tara, was used as a declaration of war. The sight of it commanded all clan members to rally to the defense of the area. On other occasions, a small burning cross would be carried from town to town. It was used as recently as the War of 1812 to mobilise the Scottish Fencibles and militia settled in Glengarry County, Ontario against the invaders, and in 1820 over 800 fighting men of Clan Grant were gathered, by the passing of the Fiery Cross, to come to the aid of their Clan Lord and his sister in the village of Elgin. The most recent well-known use in Scotland itself was in 1745, during the Jacobite rising, and it was subsequently described in the novels and poetry of Walter Scott.

In D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the film adaptation of Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman, there are two examples of the burning of a cross. The first was when a former Confederate colonel's little sister had died by jumping off a cliff while being chased by a black captain who announced he wished to marry her and chased her when she refused. She finally threatened to jump off the cliff unless he stopped, and he pursued her. Her brother had held her in his arms at the bottom of the cliff, and she identified her attacker. This was in the setting that the Piedmont legislature had legalized interracial marriages. The small grouping of the clan burned a small cross, perhaps 8 inches tall, that had been drenched in the young girl's blood, and with the testimony of the colonel, based on the girl's dying words, there was a small trial, and the captain was found guilty of murder and executed. His body was placed on the front porch of the Governor of South Carolina's house with a square piece of white sheeting with the initials KKK.

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