Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a historically significant White supremacist organization that emerged in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the Klan began as a fraternal order for White, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestants opposed to Reconstruction and the rights of newly freed African Americans. Over the years, the KKK developed a reputation for violence, employing methods such as whippings, kidnappings, and lynchings to instill fear and maintain white supremacy. The group has experienced several resurgences, notably in the early 20th century when it expanded its focus to include anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiments, aligning itself with nativist and nationalist ideologies.
As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, the Klan became increasingly violent, perpetrating acts of terrorism against African Americans and civil rights activists. Despite numerous legal challenges and a decline in membership over the decades, the Klan has not completely disappeared; it has re-emerged in various forms and remains active in promoting hate-filled ideologies. By 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated that there were around ten active Klan groups in the U.S., with some presence in other countries. While the KKK still uses social media to spread its message, it has largely been overshadowed by other extremist groups advocating for similar ideologies.
Ku Klux Klan
SIGNIFICANCE: A violent group of White supremacists, disaffected by the outcome of the American Civil War (1861–5), that grew into an organization of institutionalized race hatred and inspired other groups of the twenty and twenty-first centuries that adopted the same name and practices.
With the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the South, tension arose between old-order Southern White people who had previously supported slavery and Radical Republicans devoted to a strict plan of Reconstruction that required Southern states to repeal their Black codes and other racist laws and guarantee voting and other civil rights to African Americans. Federal instruments for ensuring African American rights included the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Union Leagues. In reaction to the activities of these organizations, White supremacist organizations sprouted, primarily throughout the Southern states, in the years immediately following the Civil War: the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, the Invisible Circle, the Pale Faces, and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
Beginnings
The last of these would eventually lend its name to a confederation of such organizations, but in 1866 it was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a fraternal order for White, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestants joined by their opposition to Reconstructionism and an agenda to promote White, Southern dominance. This incarnation of the Klan established many of the strange rituals and violent activities for which the KKK became known throughout its history. They named the South the “invisible empire,” with “realms” consisting of the Southern states. A “grand dragon” headed each realm, and the entire “empire” was led by Grand Wizard General Nathan B. Forrest. Positions of leadership were dubbed “giant,” “cyclops,” “geni,” “hydra,” “goblin.” The white robes and pointed cowls stem from this era; these were donned in the belief that African Americans were superstitious and would be intimidated by the menacing, ghostlike appearance of their oppressors, who thus also maintained anonymity while conducting their activities.
Soon the Klan was perpetrating acts of violence, including whippings, house-burnings, kidnappings, and lynchings. As the violence escalated, Forrest disbanded the Klan in 1869, and on May 31, 1870, and April 20, 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Acts, or Force Acts, designed to break up the violent White supremacist groups.
Second Rise of the Klan
The next rise of the Klan presaged the period of the Red Scare (1919–20) and the Immigration Act of 1921, the first such legislation in the United States to establish immigration quotas on the basis of national origin; this period was marked by high levels of prejudice in mainstream US society toward immigrants, Black Americans, Jewish Americans, and other minority groups. In November 1915, on Stone Mountain, Georgia, a second Ku Klux Klan was founded by preacher William J. Simmons, proclaiming it a “high-class, mystic, social, patriotic” society that claimed to be devoted to defending womanhood, White Protestant values, and “native-born, white, gentile Americans.” Such an image of the Klan was perpetrated by the popular 1915 film The Birth of a Nation , in which an African American is shown attempting to attack a White woman, and the Klan, in robes and cowls, rides to the rescue.
The new Klan cloaked itself as a patriotic organization devoted to preserving traditional American values against enemies in the nation’s midst. An upsurge of nationalist and nativist fervor swelled the ranks of the Klan, this time far beyond the borders of the South. This second Klan adopted the rituals and regalia of its predecessor as well as the same anti-Black ideology, to which it added anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-birth control, anti-Darwinist, and anti-Prohibition stances. Promoted by ad-man Edward Y. Clarke, its membership reached approximately one hundred thousand by 1921 and over the next five years, by some estimates, grew to five million, including even members of Congress.
The second Klan perpetrated more than five hundred hangings and burnings of African Americans. In 1924, forty thousand Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., sending a message to the federal government that the government of the United States should represent the country's White, Protestant population. Ultimately, the Klan’s growing wave of violence, including the rape and murder of an Indiana education official by prominent Klansman D.C. Stephenson, alienated many of its members, whose numbers dropped to about thirty thousand by 1930.
Klan activities increased again prior to World War II (1939–45), and membership rose toward the one hundred thousand mark, but in 1944 Congress assessed the organization more than a half million dollars in back taxes, and the national Klan organization dissolved itself to escape. Two years later, however, Atlanta physician Samuel Green united smaller Klan groups into the Association of Georgia Klans and was soon joined by other reincarnations, such as the Federated Ku Klux Klans, the Original Southern Klans, and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. These groups revived the agenda of previous Klans and were responsible for hundreds of criminal acts. Of equal concern was the Klan’s political influence; a governor of Texas was elected with the support of the Klan, as was a senator from Maine. Even a Supreme Court justice, Hugo L. Black, revealed in 1937 that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Civil Rights Movement
In the 1940s, many states passed laws that revoked Klan charters, and many southern communities issued regulations against masks. The US Justice Department placed the Klan on its list of subversive elements, and in 1952 the Federal Bureau of Investigation used the Lindbergh law (one of the 1934 Crime Control Acts) against the Klan. Another direct challenge to the principles of the KKK came in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of the Civil Rights movement and civil rights legislation. Prominent civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied early in the decade that it would be a “season of suffering.” On September 15, 1963, a Klan bomb tore apart the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young children. Despite the outrage of much of the nation, the violence continued, led by members of the Klan who made a mockery of the courts and the laws that they had broken. Less than a year after the bombing, three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi, including one African American and two White activists from the North involved in voter registration. This infamous event was later documented in the 1988 motion picture Mississippi Burning. In another incident, Viola Lee Liuzzo was killed for driving freedom marchers from site to site. Such acts prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a televised speech in March 1965, to denounce the Klan as he announced the arrest of four Klansmen for murder.
Decentralization
After the conviction of many of its members in the 1960s, the organization became somewhat dormant, and its roster of members reflected low numbers. Still, as it had in previous periods of dormancy, the Klan refused to die. Busing for integration of public schools in the 1970s engendered Klan opposition in the South and the North. In 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Klan members, with the assistance of the American Nazi Party, killed several members of a leftist group known as the Communist Workers' Party in a daylight battle on an open street. Klan members also patrolled the US-Mexican border, armed with weapons and citizen-band radios, trying to send undocumented migrants back to Mexico. The Klan was active in places such as suburban California, at times driving out African Americans who attempted to move there. During the 1970s, on the Gulf Coast, many boats flew the infamous AKIA flag, an acronym for “A Klansman I Am,” a motto that dates back to the 1920s. Klan members tried to discourage or run out Vietnamese fishers who had been resettled there as refugees.
Klan leaders active starting in the 1970s included James Venable, for whom the Klan became little more than a hobby, and Bill Wilkinson, a former disciple of David Duke, a prominent KKK member and former Grand Wizard who ran for president in 1988. Robert Shelton, long a grand dragon, helped elect two Alabama governors. Duke, a Klan leader until the late 1980s, decided to run for political office and was elected a congressman from Louisiana despite his well-publicized past associations; in 1991, he ran for governor, almost winning. In the 1980s the Klan stepped up its anti-Semitic activities, planning multiple bombings in Nashville. Klan leaders in the 1990s trained their members and their children for what they believed was an imminent race war, learning survival skills and weaponry at remote camps throughout the country.
A major blow was struck against the Klan by the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Alabama, when, in 1984, attorney Morris Dees began pressing civil suits against several Klan members, effectively removing their personal assets, funds received from members, and even buildings owned by the Klan.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, by 2015 the Klan, identified primarily as a hate group, had divided into several different, disorganized, and even clashing chapters. Estimating the total number of members within these chapters to be between five and eight thousand, the Anti-Defamation League cited undocumented immigration and same-sex marriage as two major contemporary issues taken up by the Klan groups. Despite the rise of the Internet, Klan groups were largely unable to successfully utilize this forum to increase their ranks.
After a White police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, inciting mass protest, the Traditionalist American Knights of the KKK issued fliers threatening to take action against the protesters if they caused any harm to peaceful citizens of the neighborhood. On the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, a number of Klan members left fliers on doorsteps throughout the city denouncing the words of King as well as immigration. In June of that year, following the racially-motivated murders of nine African Americans during a shooting at their church in Charleston, South Carolina, the local chapter of the Klan got support from the South Carolina government to hold a rally in support of continuing to display the controversial Confederate flag in that state.
By 2023, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Klan organizations in the US had declined in numbers, although an estimated ten Klan groups remained active in the US. Other groups which claimed an affiliation with the Klan had been identified in other countries, including Canada, Germany, and Australia. Similar to other US White supremacist groups, by that time the Klan had begun using mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and X (Twitter) to promote its ideology and attempt to recruit new members. Still, despite its ongoing presence in the US, the Klan had largely been eclipsed by other groups promoting White nationalism, neo-Nazism, and similar ideologies.
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