Donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2018 by the descendants of Sanford Vandifer Rogers Jr.
Sanford Vandifer Rogers Jr. (1864-1928) was born in Spartanburg County, South Carolina to Sanford senior and Demy Ann Pearson Rogers. Sanford senior was a Confederate soldier in the Civil War who died in a Union prisoner of war camp in Elmira New York. Sanford Jr. married Selena Bagwell and the couple had nine children. Sanford lived in Spartanburg South Carolina his entire life.
Thin, circular, brass medal with cut out letters in the center and a line of engraved text above and below. An additional line of text is engraved along the curved, bottom edge. A small circular hole with slight green discoloration is at the top. The surface is smooth and the medal has a plain back.
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overall: | Depth: 0.625 inches (1.588 cm) | Diameter: 1.750 inches (4.445 cm)
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.”
Ku Klux Klan medal given to a South Carolina man