Laura Martin Rose

Laura Martin Rose (September 18, 1862 May 6, 1917) (born Laura Marcella Martin), known professionally as Mrs. S. E. F. Rose, was a historian and propagandist for the Ku Klux Klan employed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Biography

Title pages of "The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire" (1914) by Laura Martin Rose.Rose was born in 1862 near Pulaski, Tennessee, the town where the Ku Klux Klan would be formed three years later. After her marriage to Solon Edward Franklin Rose, she often identified herself with her husband's name, as Mrs. S. E. F. Rose.

Rose wrote a pamphlet, called Origins of the Ku Klux Klan, sold as a fundraiser by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, of which she was Mississippi division president. The funds were to be used to erect a Confederate monument at Jefferson Davis's home. The pamphlet promoted the Lost Cause narrative of the American Civil War and presented racist acts of violence as heroism. and by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Jacksonville in 1914, with aim of promoting it in schools throughout the American South. It was frequently promoted in Confederate Veteran, the official organ of the United Confederate Veterans.

Rose succeeded Mildred Rutherford as historian-general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1916. She died in 1917. As her book describes, some of the earliest meetings of the Klan were held at her grandfather's house.

According to journalist Michelle Serrano, Rose's textbook served to propagate white supremacy and helped to bring about the Jim Crow era of racist laws.