Ku Klux Klan


The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the Klan, is an American Protestant-led white supremacist and far-right hate group, with various independent groups active at different times. It was founded in 1865 during Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South. Various historians have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist organization. The group is typically structured as a secret society composed of several distinct organizations that have historically employed terrorism, violence, and acts of intimidation to enforce their aims and oppress their targets, most notably African Americans, Jews, and Catholics. A leader of one of these organizations is called a grand wizard, and there have been three major iterations of the Klan, each with differing targets depending on time and place.
The first Klan was established during the Reconstruction era by Confederate veterans opposed to Reconstruction policies, and it carried out assaults and murders against politically active Black people and their white allies in the South. Federal law enforcement began taking action against the organization around 1871 and effectively suppressed it. The Klan sought to overthrow Republican state governments in the South, particularly through voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders. It was organized into numerous independent chapters across the Southern United States, each autonomous and highly secretive regarding membership and activities. Members created their own often elaborate costumes—robes, masks, and pointed hats—designed both to conceal their identities and to intimidate their victims.
The second iteration of the Klan emerged in the late 1910s and was the first to adopt cross burnings and standardized white-hooded robes. The KKK of the 1920s reached nationwide membership in the millions and reflected a broad cross-section of the native-born white Protestant population. The third and current iteration, formed in the mid-20th century, is significantly smaller and developed largely in reaction to the civil rights movement. It employed murder and bombings in pursuit of its goals. All three iterations have called for the "purification" of American society. In each era, membership remained secret, and estimates of total numbers were frequently exaggerated by both supporters and opponents.
Each iteration of the Klan is defined by non-overlapping time periods and consists of local chapters with no centralized leadership. All have reactionary positions such as white nationalism, anti-immigration policies, and—especially in later iterations—Nordicism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, right-wing populism, anti-communism, homophobia, anti-atheism, anti-globalization, and Islamophobia. Although many members of the KKK viewed themselves as upholding "one-hundred percent Americanism" and Christian morality, virtually every Christian denomination officially denounced the Ku Klux Klan.

Overview

First Klan

The first Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865, by six former officers of the Confederate Army: Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones, and James Crowe. It began as a fraternal social club inspired in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta. According to The Cyclopædia of Fraternities, the group borrowed elements of its initiation ceremonies from that organization, with the same stated purpose: "ludicrous initiations, the baffling of public curiosity, and amusement for members", in which "in each of these directions it was singularly successful". The manual of rituals was printed by Laps D. McCord of Pulaski. The origins of the hood are uncertain; it may have been adapted from the Spanish capirote hood, or it may derive from "folk traditions of carnival, circus, minstrelsy, Mardi Gras – or mid-century 'Calico Indians'" associated with the Anti-Rent War in upstate New York.
The Cyclopædia of Fraternities also stated: "Beginning in April, 1867, there was a gradual transformation.... The members had conjured up a veritable Frankenstein. They had played with an engine of power and mystery, though organized on entirely innocent lines, and found themselves overcome by a belief that something must lie behind it all—that there was, after all, a serious purpose, a work for the Klan to do."
The KKK had no organizational structure above the chapter level. However, similar groups across the South adopted comparable goals. Klan chapters promoted white supremacy and spread throughout the region as an insurgent movement resisting Reconstruction. Confederate veteran John W. Morton founded a Klan chapter in Nashville, Tennessee. As a secret vigilante organization, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies, seeking to restore white supremacy through threats and violence, including murder. According to J. Michael Martinez, the Klan "targeted white Northern leaders, Southern sympathizers and politically active Blacks." In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were designed to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes.
The first Klan had mixed results in achieving its objectives; although it significantly weakened Black political leadership through assassinations and threats of violence, driving some individuals out of public life, it also provoked a strong backlash, including the passage of federal legislation that historian Eric Foner describes as successful in "restoring order, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling Blacks to exercise their rights as citizens". Historian George C. Rable argues that the Klan was ultimately a political failure and was therefore abandoned by Democratic Party leaders in the South. He writes:
After the Klan was suppressed, similar insurgent paramilitary groups emerged that were explicitly dedicated to suppressing Republican voting and removing Republicans from office. These included the White League, founded in Louisiana in 1874, and the Red Shirts, which originated in Mississippi and later developed chapters in the Carolinas. The Red Shirts, for example, are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina, acting as the military arm of the Democratic Party and contributing to the restoration of white Democratic control of state legislatures throughout the South. According to Historian George C. Rable, the Red Shirts "formed a solid line around the ballot boxes and prevented Negros without Democratic tickets from approaching", and even when federal troops attempted to clear a path, "many had gone home".

Second Klan

In 1915, the second Klan was founded atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William Joseph Simmons. While Simmons relied on documents from the original Klan and on the recollections of surviving members, the revived organization drew significant inspiration from the wildly popular film The Birth of a Nation. The earlier Klan had not worn white costumes or burned crosses; these elements were introduced in Thomas Dixon's 1905 fictional novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, on which the film was based. When the film was shown in Atlanta in December of that year, Simmons and his new Klansmen paraded to the theater in robes and pointed hoods—many on robed horses—mirroring the imagery depicted in the film. These mass parades became a hallmark of the new Klan that had not existed in the first iteration.
Beginning in 1921, the second Klan adopted a modern business system that relied on full-time, paid recruiters, and it appealed to prospective members as a fraternal organization similar to many others flourishing at the time. The national headquarters profited from a monopoly on costume sales, while organizers retained initiation fees. The organization grew rapidly nationwide during a period of economic prosperity.
Writer W. J. Cash, in his 1941 book The Mind of the South, characterized the second Klan as "anti-Negro, anti-Alien, anti-Red, anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Darwin, anti-Modern, anti-Liberal, Fundamentalist, vastly Moral, militantly Protestant. And summing up these fears, it brought them into focus with the tradition of the past, and above all with the ancient Southern pattern of high romantic histrionics, violence and mass coercion of the scapegoat and the heretic." The organization preached "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and called for the purification of politics, advocating strict morality and stronger enforcement of Prohibition. Its official rhetoric emphasized the perceived threat of the Catholic Church, drawing on anti-Catholicism and nativism. Its appeal was directed exclusively toward white Protestants, and it opposed Jews, Black people, Catholics, and newly arriving Southern and Eastern European immigrants, many of whom were Jewish or Catholic.
Some local Klan groups threatened violence against rum-runners and individuals they considered "notorious sinners"; the relatively few violent incidents associated with the second Klan occurred primarily in the South. The Red Knights, a militant group formed in opposition to the Klan, responded violently to Klan provocations on several occasions.
The Second Klan was a formal fraternal organization with national and state structures. During its peak years, its publicity was managed by the Southern Publicity Association, owned and operated by Edward Young Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler, who created a Propagation Department to "publicize and recruit for the Klan in exchange for a percentage of the Klan's $10 initiation fee". During the first six months of Clarke and Taylor's campaign, "an additional 85,000 members joined" with further claims by Simmons in a 1922 New York Times interview that "the Klan was accepting 3,500 new members a day and had a total of five million members in all forty‑eight states plus Alaska and the Canal Zone". Even with claims of exaggeration, there was no doubt that "the Klan had undergone a dramatic reversal of fortune". At its height in the mid-1920s, the organization's membership was estimated at between three and eight million people.
In 1923, Simmons was ousted as leader of the KKK by Hiram Wesley Evans. From September 1923 onward, two national Ku Klux Klan organizations existed: the original group founded by Simmons and led by Evans, whose strength lay primarily in the southern United States, and a breakaway organization led by Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson based in Evansville, Indiana with membership concentrated in the Midwest.
Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders—especially Stephenson's conviction for the abduction, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer—and external opposition contributed to a sharp decline in membership in both national Klan groups. By 1930s, the main group's membership had fallen to about 30,000 by 1930, and it ultimately faded away in the 1940s.
Klan organizers also operated in Canada, particularly in Saskatchewan in 1926 and 1928, where Klansmen denounced immigrants from Eastern Europe as a threat to Canada's "Anglo-Saxon" heritage.

Third Klan

The "Ku Klux Klan" name was used by numerous independent local secret groups opposing the civil rights movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. These groups sometimes formed informal alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama, or with governors' offices, as in the case of George Wallace of Alabama. In Wallace's case, his campaign has been described as having "breathed oxygen into an old Klan hand", with Robert Chambliss organizing "Klansmen to put up Wallace signs" and "haul Wallace literature", and with Klan gossip alleging that Wallace had "forwarded $7,500 to Imperial Wizard Bobby Shelton to cover the boys' expenses" and promised them an "all-expenses-paid fishing trip to the Gulf if he was elected." Several activists associated with the so-called third Klan were convicted of murder in connection with the deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner|civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964] and of children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, including Robert Chambliss.
The United States government has classified the third Klan as a "subversive terrorist organization". In April 1997, FBI agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and for conspiring to blow up a natural gas processing plant. In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina, passed a resolution declaring the Klan a terrorist organization.
Groups associated with the third Klan have been in a state of consistent decline. Contributing factors include the public's negative perception of the group's image, platform, and history; infiltration and prosecution by law enforcement; financial penalties resulting from civil lawsuits; and the view among some radical right-wing groups that the Klan is outdated and unfashionable. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that between 2016 and 2019, the number of Klan groups in the United States dropped from 130 to 51. A 2016 report by the Anti-Defamation League estimated that just over 30 third Klan groups remained active. Estimates of total collective membership range from about 3,000 to 8,000. In addition to its active membership, the third Klan has an "unknown number of associates and supporters".

History

First Klan: 1865–1871

Creation, etymology, and naming

During Reconstruction in the South, six Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created the First Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865; it was known for a short time as the "Kuklux Clan". The name was probably formed in 1865 by combining the Greek kyklos with clan. The word had previously been used for other fraternal organizations in the South, such as Kuklos Adelphon. The Klan was one of several secret, oath-bound organizations that used means of violence to pursue political objectives, including the Southern Cross in New Orleans and the Knights of the White Camelia in Louisiana.
Historians view the first iteration as a violent effort to reverse the dramatically changed social order through extrajudicial means, with the goal of restoring white supremacy in the post-Civil War. In 1866, William L. Sharkey, the governor of Mississippi, reported widespread disorder, lack of control, and lawlessness. In other Southern states, armed bands of former Confederate soldiers roamed largely unchecked. In the context of this instability and weak authority, the Klan systematically used violence against Black people and their white allies as a means of intimidation, burning houses and killing Black people and leaving their bodies on the roads.
At an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, first-generation Klan activists attempted to create a hierarchical organization in which local chapters would report to a centralized national headquarters; most members were veterans familiar with military hierarchies. This effort failed, and local chapters and bands remained highly independent, never operating under any durable centralized structure.
File:Anti-kkk-cartoon.jpg|thumb|This Harper's Weekly cartoon links the 1868 Democratic candidates Horatio Seymour and Francis Preston Blair Jr. with secession and the Confederate cause.|alt=
Former Confederate brigadier general George Gordon developed the Prescript, which espoused white supremacist beliefs. For instance, an applicant was to be asked whether he favored "a white man's government", "the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights". The latter phrase refers to the Ironclad Oath, which stripped the vote from white persons who refused to swear that they had not borne arms against the Union.
Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was elected the first grand wizard and claimed to be the Klan's national leader. In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest said the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, the state governments of the radical Republicans, opposing individuals like Tennessee governor William Gannaway Brownlow, and "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags". He also argued that many Southerners believed that Black people were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues. One Alabama newspaper editor declared: "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."
Despite Gordon's and Forrest's work, local Klan chapters never accepted the Prescript as they operated autonomously with no hierarchical levels or a state headquarters. Members utilized violence to settle old personal feuds and local grudges, working to restore general white dominance in the disrupted post-war society. Historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership as the following:
Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of anti­black vigilante groups, dis­gruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, bored young men, sadists, rapists, white work­men fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freed­men and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being over­whelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called them­selves, or were called, Klansmen.

Historian Eric Foner observed that the Klan was "a military force" that served "the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy", as it had a purpose of "affect power relations... throughout Southern society" by thoroughly destroying the "Republican party's infrastructure", breaking the "Reconstruction state", reestablishing "control of the Black labor force" and "restoring racial subordination" in all aspects "of Southern life." The organization worked to stifle the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of Black individuals. The first Klan mobilized and spread into every Southern state, launching a coordinated campaign of terror against Republican leaders, both Black and white.

Activities and tactics

Whipping attacks, killings, and cruelty
Meant to resemble previous conditions of servitude, the early Klan's seemingly random whipping activities became a widespread practice. In a 1993 interview, William Sellers, born enslaved in Virginia, recalled that the Ku Klux Clan raids of Rockingham County would involve going into the huts of "the recently freed negros" or "catch some negro... on his way home from work...and cruelly whip him, leaving him to live or die". In Limestone Township, between 1870 to 1871, which is now Cherokee County, South Carolina, out of 77 documented attacks, "four were shot, sixty-seven whipped and six had their ears cropped".
The First Klan attacked Black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated white Republicans and Freedman's Bureau workers. When they killed Black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in society. Agents of the Freedman's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of Black people. Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in Jackson County, Florida, and hundreds more in other countries, including Madison, Alachua, Columbia, and Hamilton. Florida Freedman's Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen's beatings and murders of freedman and their white allies.
The Klan operated with "armed guerilla warfare" that "killed thousands of Negros". Some of the tactics included shooting into houses and burning them "sometimes with...occupants still inside", driving "Black farmers off their land", and staging political riots. The results were always certain as "ten to one hundred times as many Negros were killed as whites." Milder encounters, including some against white teachers, occurred. In Mississippi, one example involved Miss Allen of Illinois, who was visited by "about fifty men mounted and disguised" who "treated her gentlemanly and quietly" as they complained about the "heavy school-tax"; they said that "she must stop teaching and go away" and warned that "they never gave a second notice", leading to her "heed the warning" and leaving the United States.
Adopting masks
Since the South was heavily rural and people knew each other by their voices and mannerisms, Klan members adopted masks and robes to hide their identities, adding to the drama of their night rides. Since members were afraid or ashamed of doing this openly, "they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night." The night riders claimed to "be ghosts of Confederate soldiers... to frighten superstitious Blacks" but "few freedmen" took that seriously.
Suppressing the vote
Klan violence worked to suppress Black voting, and campaign seasons were deadly. More than 2,000 people were killed, wounded, or otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for President Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 Black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact. In the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock. By the November presidential election, Klan intimidation led to suppression of the Republican vote, and only one person voted for Ulysses S. Grant.
File:1875.08.23Prophet1A copy.jpg|thumb|upright|Garb and weapons of the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois, as posed for Joseph A. Dacus of the Missouri Republican, in August 1875.
Decrease in activity
By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease. Klan members hid behind masks and robes to avoid prosecution for freelance violence. Many influential Southern Democrats feared that Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to turn against it. There were outlandish claims made, such as Georgian B. H. Hill stating, "that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain."

Resistance

Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized "the anti-Ku Klux". They curtailed local violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning Black churches and schools. Armed Black people formed their own defense in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and patrolled the streets to protect their homes. While national sentiment rose against the Klan, it was "still regarded as something of a joke". In line with this view, Southern conservative newspapers and the Northern Democratic papers blamed these Southern atrocities on Radical Republicans, alleging that attempts were being made to "hide Radical Rottenness behind a cloud of Ku-Klux" and deriding this concern as "Ku-Klux fever", a supposed conspiracy to swell Republican power. National Democrats further claimed that it was "unnecessary to legislate against a myth" and argued that Republicans were using this issue to manufacture "an emotional issue for the 1870 campaigns" and were "waving the bloody shirt". Amid this controversy, several Southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.
File:BenFrankButler.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Benjamin Butler wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1871.
In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican senator John Scott convened a congressional committee that took extensive testimony from witnesses about Klan atrocities, producing multiple volumes of evidence. In February, former Union general and Massachusetts congressman Benjamin Butler introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871. This further increased the enmity that Southern white Democrats bore toward him. While the bill was being considered, further violence in the South swung support for its passage. The governor of South Carolina appealed for federal troops to assist his efforts in keeping control of the state. A riot and massacre occurred in a courthouse in Meridian, Mississippi, from which a Black state representative escaped by fleeing to the woods. The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus, which caused uproar among some newspapers and Democrats, who claimed that this centralized presidential power, trampled on the Constitution, that federal intervention was what caused the violence, and that it would "make twenty Ku-Klux where there is now one".
In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation. The Ku Klux Klan Act and the Enforcement Act of 1870 were used by the federal government to enforce civil rights provisions for individuals under the Constitution. The Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve after the 1871 Klan Act, so President Grant issued a suspension of habeas corpus and stationed federal troops in nine South Carolina counties by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. The Klansmen were apprehended and prosecuted in federal court. Judges Hugh Lennox Bond and George S. Bryan presided over South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials in Columbia, S.C., during December 1871. The defendants were given from three months to five years of incarceration, along with fines. More Black people served on juries in federal court than on local or state juries, so they had a chance to participate in the process. Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned during the crackdown, "once the national government became set upon a policy of military intervention whole populations which had scouted the authority of the weak 'Radical' government of the State became meek."

End and demise of the first Klan

Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and that he could muster 40,000 Klansmen within five days’ notice. However, the Klan had no membership rosters, no formal chapters, and no local officers, making it difficult for observers to determine its actual size. It created a sensation through the dramatic nature of its masked forays and the large number of murders attributed to its members.
In the early 1870s, federal grand juries issued hundreds of indictments against alleged Klan members for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina. Many people not formally inducted into the Klan used the Klan’s costume to hide their identities when carrying out independent acts of violence. Forrest called for the Klan to disband in 1869, arguing that it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace". Historian Stanley Horn argues that "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment". A Georgia-based reporter wrote in 1870: "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux".
In many states, officials were reluctant to use Black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised. Republican governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, adding to his unpopularity. This, together with extensive violence and fraud at the polls, caused the Republicans to lose their majority in the state legislature. Disaffection with Holden’s actions contributed to white Democratic legislators impeaching him and removing him from office, although their reasons for doing so were numerous. Klan operations ended in South Carolina and gradually withered away throughout the rest of the South. Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions. Historian Eric Foner argues that by 1872, the federal government's "evident willingness to bring its legal and coercive authority" broke "the Klan's back" and "produced a dramatic decline in violence" in the South, ending the "Reconstruction career of the Ku Klux Klan"; the Klan was damaged and splintered as an organization. Klan costumes—regalia and insignia|regalia]—disappeared from use by the early 1870s, as Forrest had others destroy them as part of the disbandment.
New groups of insurgents emerged in the mid-1870s, local paramilitary organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs, that intimidated and murdered Black political leaders. The White League and Red Shirts were distinguished by their willingness to cultivate publicity, working directly to overturn Republican officeholders and regain control of politics. In 1882, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional. It held that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not include the authority to regulate purely private conspiracies, leaving persons who had been victimized to seek relief in state courts, which were generally unsympathetic to such appeals.

Second Klan: 1915–1944

Reinitiation and reinstitution

In 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan and its activities. The second Ku Klux Klan was founded later that year by William Joseph Simmons, an itinerant Methodist preacher and effective speaker, at Stone Mountain near Atlanta, with fifteen "charter members". At the mountain, he "built an altar on which he placed an American flag, a Bible and an unsheathed sword", then "set fire to a crude wooden cross" and "muttered a few incantations about a 'practical fraternity among men'"; afterward, he "declared himself Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan." The second Klan's growth was based on a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, Prohibitionist, and anti-Semitic agenda that reflected contemporary social tensions, particularly those associated with recent immigration. The new organization and chapters adopted regalia featured in The Birth of a Nation, and members wore masks in public to conceal their identities.
''The Birth of a Nation''
Director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan. The film was based on the book and play The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon Jr. Much of the modern Klan's iconography is derived from it, including the standardized white costume and the burning cross. Its imagery drew on Dixon's romanticized concept of old England and Scotland, as portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott. The film's influence was amplified by an alleged claim of endorsement by President Woodrow Wilson. Dixon was an old friend of Wilson's and, before its release, there was a private showing of the film at the White House. A publicist claimed that Wilson said, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The likelihood of him saying this is doubtful, and he later issued a statement distancing himself from the film and criticizing its use of his writings following protests.

Goals

The first and third Klans were primarily active in the Southeastern United States and focused on enforcing white supremacy, especially against Black people. The second Klan, in contrast, broadened its appeal to people in the Midwestern and Western states who considered Catholics, Jews, and foreign-born minorities to be anti-American.
The second Klan saw perceived threats from multiple directions. According to historian Brian R. Farmer, "two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers". Much of the Klan's rhetoric emphasized guarding the home, and historian Kathleen Bee notes that its member sought to protect "the interests of white womanhood". Simmons published the pamphlet ABC of the Invisible Empire in Atlanta in 1917; in it, he identified the Klan's goals as "to shield the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood; to maintain white supremacy; to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism; and by a practical devotedness to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles and ideals of a pure Americanism".
Such moral-sounding purposes underlay its appeal as a fraternal organization, and it recruited members in rapidly growing cities such as Dallas and Detroit. Owing to a mass influx of immigrants and African Americans, the spread of anti-Catholic groups and religious intolerance, and intensifying class conflict, Detroit was the "unquestioned center of Klan strength", as "approximately half the Wolverine's 70,000 Klansmen resided in Detroit." In the case of Dallas, there were deep-rooted "fear of the Catholic Church" and "immigrant hordes" among "the Southern Protestants", and it was the "financial and fashion capital of the Southwest", offering a strategic location. It was believed in Dallas that "one in three men in the city were members of the white supremacist group." During the 1930s, particularly after James A. Colescott of Indiana became imperial wizard, opposition to Communism became another primary aim of the Klan.

Organization

New Klan founder William J. Simmons joined 12 different fraternal organizations and recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges—modeling the Klan after fraternal organizations. Klan organizers, called "Kleagles", signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and received costumes in return. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to officials. When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a rally, often with burning crosses, perhaps presented a Bible to a local Protestant preacher, and left with the money collected. The local chapters operated like many fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.
Simmons initially met with little success in recruiting members or raising money, and the Klan remained a small operation in the Atlanta area until 1920. The group produced publications for national circulation from its headquarters in Atlanta: Searchlight, Imperial Night-Hawk, and The Kourier.

Perceived moral threats

The second Klan was a response to fears regarding the growing power of Catholics and American Jews and the accompanying proliferation of non-Protestant cultural values. The Klan had a nationwide reach by the mid-1920s, with its densest per capita membership in Indiana. It became most prominent in cities with high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, as rural Protestants flocked to jobs in Detroit and Dayton in the Midwest, and Atlanta, Dallas, Memphis, and Houston in the South.
Members swore to uphold American values and Protestantism, and some Protestant ministers became involved at the local level. However, no major Protestant denomination officially endorsed the KKK; the Klan was repeatedly denounced by the major Protestant magazines, as well as by all major secular newspapers. It was supported by one small cult, the Pillar of Fire Church controlled by Bishop Alma Bridwell White, but she said she and her followers did not belong to the Klan. Historian Robert Moats Miller reported that "not a single endorsement was found by the present writer in the Methodist press" and Klan attacks in the media "were quite savage", as the Southern Baptist press condoned their "aims but condemned the methods." National denomination organizations never endorsed the Klan, but they rarely condemned it by name. Many nationally and regionally prominent churchmen did condemn it by name, and none endorsed it.
Historians agree that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over Prohibition. Historian Prendergast states that the KKK's "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation". The Klan opposed bootleggers, sometimes using violence. In 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas. Membership in the Klan and in other Prohibition groups overlapped, and they sometimes coordinated their activities.

Violence

The second Klan was less violent than either the first or third Klans. Yet, the second Klan, especially in the Southeast, was not an entirely non-violent organization; the most violent Klan activity was in Dallas, Texas. In April 1921, several members of the Klan kidnapped Alex Johnson, a Black man who had been accused of having sex with a white woman, burning the letters "KKK" into his forehead and giving him a severe beating by a riverbed. The police chief and district attorney refused to prosecute, publicly stating they believed that Johnson deserved this treatment. Reassured by approval of this whipping, Klansmen in Dallas whipped 68 people by the riverbed in 1992 alone. Although Johnson had been Black, most of the Dallas KKK's whipping victims were white men accused of offenses against their wives—adultery, wife beating, abandoning their wives, refusing to pay child support, or gambling.
Klansmen often invited local newspaper reporters to attend their whipping so that they could write a story about them in the next day's newspaper. All the Dallas newspapers strongly condemned the Klan. Historians report that the Morning News "diligently published thousands of anti-Klan editorials, exposés, and critical stories, informing its readership of Klan activities in their community as well as from around the state and the nation."
The Alabama KKK whipped both white and Black women who were accused of fornication or adultery. Although many people in Alabama were outraged by the whippings of white women, no Klansmen were ever convicted for the violence. Anti-Catholicism was a main concern of the Alabama Klan, and Hugo Black built his political career in the 1920s on fighting Catholicism. Black, a Democrat, went on to the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rapid growth and marketing

In 1920, Simmons handed the day-to-day activities of the national office to two professional publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke. The new leadership invigorated the Klan, and it grew rapidly. It appealed to new members by drawing on contemporary social tensions and emphasized responses to fears raised by the defiance of Prohibition and changing sexual norms. It promoted History of [antisemitism in the United States|anti-Jewish], anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and later anti-Communist positions. The organization presented itself as a fraternal, nativist, and strongly patriotic body, and its leaders stressed support for vigorous enforcement of Prohibition law. Membership expanded dramatically, reaching a peak by 1924 that is commonly estimated at between 1.5 million to 4 million, or roughly 4–15% of the eligible population, mainly based on the Klan's own claims. In Indiana, which had the highest reported Klan penetration, there were 162,267 members, or "18.44% of the eligible Indiana population"; applying those numbers to the entire United States yields an "upper bound of 5.2 million Klan members".
By the 1920s, most of its members lived in the Midwest and West. Nearly one in five of the eligible Indiana population were members. The Klan had a national base by 1925. In the South, where the great majority of whites were Democrats, most Klansmen were Democrats. In the rest of the country, the membership comprised Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Klan leaders tried to infiltrate political parties; as Cummings notes, "it was non-partisan in the sense that it pressed its nativist issues to both parties". Sociologist Rory McVeigh has explained the Klan's strategy in appealing to members of both parties:
Religion was a major selling point. Kelly J. Baker argues that Klansmen seriously embraced Protestantism as an essential component of their white supremacist, anti-Catholic, and paternalistic formulation of American democracy and national culture. Their cross functioned as a religious symbol, and their ritual honored Bibles and local ministers. As part of positioning themselves within the nation's religious landscape, the Klan also "launched campaigns to unify Protestants across denominal lines in its effort to save America from immigration and 'other evils'" and maintained a "requirement of church membership in a Protestant denomination" with a "centrality of churchgoing in print". In this framework, the Klan was not merely just a "marginal movement of reactionaries" but rather a group whose members sought what they viewed as an "authentic interpretation of Protestantism".
Economists Fryer and Levitt argue that the rapid growth of the Klan in the 1920s was partly the result of an innovative, multi-level marketing campaign. They also contend that, during this period, the Klan leadership focused more on monetizing the organization than achieving its political goals, and that local leaders profited from expanding their membership. The Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long.

Urbanization

Being based in urban areas, the second Klan reflected the major shifts of the population to cities in the North, West, and the South—being an urban organization. In Michigan, for example, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, where they constituted more than half of the state's membership. Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class white Protestants who feared the influx of newcomers to industrial cities: immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were predominantly Catholic or Jewish, as well as Black and white migrants from the rural South. As new populations moved into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods generated social tensions. Because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan expanded quickly in the Midwest, and it also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.
In the medium-sized industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts, in the 1920s, the Klan rose to local prominence but declined as a result of opposition from the Catholic Church. There was no associated violence, and the local newspaper ridiculed Klansmen as "night-shirt knights". About half of the members were Swedish Americans, including some first-generation immigrants. Ethnic and religious conflicts among more recent immigrants contributed to Klan's rise in the city, as Swedish Protestants competed with Irish Catholics—who had been entrenched there longer—for political and ideological influence.
In some states, historians have obtained membership rosters of local units and matched the names against city directories and other records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big-city newspapers were often hostile and portrayed Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indiana, however, shows that this rural stereotype was inaccurate for that state:
Indiana's Klansmen represented a wide cross section of society: they were not disproportionately urban or rural, nor were they significantly more or less likely than other members of society to be from the working class, middle class, or professional ranks. Klansmen were Protestants, of course, but they cannot be described exclusively or even predominantly as fundamentalists. In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.

Costumes and the burning cross

Wearing the distinctive white costumes permitted its members to have large-scale public activities, especially parades and cross-burning ceremonies. Sales of the costumes provided the main financing for the national organization, while initiation fees funded local and state organizers.
The second Klan embraced the burning Latin cross as a dramatic symbol with an intimidating tone. No crosses had been used as a symbol by the first Klan, but it became a symbol of the Klan's quasi-Christian message. Its lighting during meetings was often accompanied by prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism. In his novel The Clansman, Thomas Dixon Jr. borrows the idea that the first Klan had used fiery crosses from "the call to arms" of the Scottish Clans, and film director D. W. Griffith used this image in The Birth of a Nation; Simmons adopted the symbol wholesale from the movie, and the symbol and action have been associated with the Klan ever since.

Women

By the 1920s, the KKK had developed a women’s auxiliary, with chapters in many areas. Its activities included participation in parades, cross lightings, lectures, rallies, and boycotts of local businesses owned by Catholics and Jews. The Women’s Klan was active in promoting Prohibition, emphasizing liquor’s perceived negative impact on wives and children. Its efforts in public schools included distributing Bibles and petitioning for the dismissal of Catholic teachers. Their goals included "outlaw the Knights of Columbus" due to allegations of taking over the country, "remov Catholic encyclopedias from public schools", "barr the use of Catholic contractors by public agencies", and excluding Jewish and Catholic "vacationers in majority-Protestant suburban resorts".

Political role

The second Klan expanded with new chapters in Midwestern and Western cities and recruited Republicans, Democrats, and men without party affiliation. The goal of Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans make common cause in the North. The Klan had members in every region of the United States but was especially strong in the South and Midwest. At its peak, claimed Klan membership exceeded four million and, in some broad regions, amounted to about 20% of the adult white male population, reaching as high as 40% in certain areas. In Indiana, members were American-born white Protestants, and it had claimed it had more than 30% of white male Hoosiers as members. In 1924, it supported Republican Edward Jackson in his successful campaign for governor. The Klan moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it exercised significant influence within the provincial Conservative party in the 1920s and 1930s.
Catholic and liberal Democrats—who were strongest in northeastern cities—decided to make the Klan an issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. Their delegates proposed a resolution indirectly attacking the Klan; it was defeated by one vote out of 1,100. The leading presidential candidates were William Gibbs McAdoo, a Protestant with a base in the South and West where the Klan was strong, and New York governor Al Smith, a Catholic with a base in the large cities. After weeks of stalemate and bitter argumentation, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise candidate. In 1928, Thomas J. Heflin, the junior senator from Alabama, blamed the Democratic loss in the 1924 presidential election on Roman Catholics dividing the party, stating:
In some states, such as Alabama and California, Klan chapters backed certain political reform efforts. In 1924, Klan members were elected to the city council in Anaheim, California, a city dominated by an entrenched commercial-civil elite that was mostly German American. Given their tradition of moderate social drinking, many German Americans did not strongly support Prohibition—the mayor had been a saloon keeper. Led by the minister of the First Christian Church, the Klan represented a rising group of politically active non-ethic Germans who denounced the elite as corrupt, undemocratic, and self-serving. Historian Christopher Cocoltchos argues that the Klansmen sought to have a model, orderly community.
The Klan had about 1,200 members in Orange County, California, and the economic and occupational profiles of pro- and anti-Klan groups were similar and about equally prosperous. Klan members were Protestants, as were most of their opponents, but the latter also included many Catholic Germans. Individuals who joined the Klan had previously shown higher rates of voting and civic activism than their opponents, and Cocoltchos suggests that many in Orange County joined out of sense of civic engagement. The Klan slate easily won the local election in Anaheim in April 1924, then dismissed city employees known to be Catholic and replaced them with Klan appointees. The new city council sought stricter enforcement of Prohibition, and the local Klan chapter held large rallies and initiation ceremonies over the summer.
Opponents organized in response, bribed a Klansman for the secret membership list, and exposed Klan-backed candidates in the state primaries, defeating most of them. In 1925, anti-Klan forces regained control of local government and, in a special election, successfully recalled the Klansmen elected in 1924. The Klan in Anaheim quickly collapsed; its newspaper closed after losing a libel suit, and the minister who led the local Klavern moved to Kansas.
In the South, Klan members remained Democrats, as the region was effectively a one-party system for white voters. Local Klan chapters were closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other officials. Because most African Americans and many poor whites had been disenfranchised around the start of the 20th century, meaningful electoral competition for whites occurred only within the Democratic Party.
In Alabama, Klan members advocated better public schools, stricter Prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other measures they believed would benefit lower-class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a significant political force in the state, as leaders such as J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black sought to build political power against the Black Belt planter elite, which had long dominated state policies. In 1926, with Klan support, Bibb Graves—himself a former Klan chapter head—was elected governor. He promoted increased education funding, improved public health, new highway construction, and some pro-labor legislation. However, because the Alabama legislature refused to redistrict until 1972, the Klan was unable to dislodge the planters’ and rural areas’ entrenched control of legislative power.
Scholars and biographers have closely examined Hugo Black’s Klan involvement. Ball concludes that Black "sympathized with the group's economic, nativist, and anti-Catholic beliefs". Newman notes that Black "disliked the Catholic Church as an institution" and delivered over 100 anti-Catholic speeches to KKK meetings across Alabama during his 1926 campaign. Black was elected U.S. senator that year as a Democrat. In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court without knowing the full extent of his earlier Klan activity. The Senate confirmed him before his complete KKK connection became public; Black later stated that he left the Klan when he entered the Senate.
Although the KKK has generally viewed as anti-labor, historian Thomas R. Pegram writes that "local Klans supported striking white Protestant workers" while opposing interracial unions, and that working-class Klan sympathies "complicated urban socialist politics in the Midwest".

Resistance and decline

Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and local civic organizations, spoke out and organized against the Klan, gaining national attention. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership in most areas began to decline rapidly, in part because of these campaigns, as well as ineffective leadership and the exposure of abuses by the national organization.
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, founded in the early 20th century in response to attacks on Jewish Americans—including the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta—opposed the Klan's campaign to prohibit private schools, a measure aimed chiefly at Catholic parochial institutions. Other organizations worked to expose the Klan's secrecy; in Indiana, the publication of membership lists by a civic group contributed to a rapid decline in local enrollment. The NAACP conducted public education campaigns about Klan activities and lobbied Congress against Klan abuses.
Beyond external organizations attacking them, internal struggles suffocated the Klan. As an example, in Indiana, the scandal surrounding the 1925 murder trial of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson shattered the Klan's image as an upholder of law and order; by 1926, the group became "crippled and discredited". Stephenson, who had led Indiana and 22 northern states and had broken with the national Klan in 1923, was convicted of second-degree murder for his role in the rape and subsequent death of his past aide in Madge Oberholtzer. His conviction precipitated a dramatic collapse of the Klan in Indiana.
Historian Leonard Moore attributes the Klan's collapse to failures in leadership; Stephenson and the other salesmen "lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system" for goals of the Klan, arguing that the Klan for them was "nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power". Due to internal corruption and crimes tainting the movement, those concerned with their political goals and futures "had even less reason to work on the Klan's behalf" and it also "never required strong, dedicated leadership" until it "became a political force".
In Alabama, Klan vigilantes begun a wave of violence in 1927, targeting both Black and white residents for perceived violations of racial norms and moral standards. This provoked backlash that begun in the press. Grover C. Hall Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser from 1926, wrote a series of editorials attacking the Klan—what the paper later described as having "waged war on the resurgent ". In 1928, Hall earned the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for his "editorials against gangsterism, floggings and racial and religious intolerance". Other newspapers denounced the Klan as violent and "un-American", and law enforcement increased pressure on its activities. In the 1928 presidential election, the state voters overcame their initial opposition to the Catholic candidate Al Smith and voted the Democratic Party line as usual, as "despite Baptists' aversion to Smith's religion, many of them no doubt voted for him." However, in Oklahoma City, the minister of the largest Baptist congregation said, "If you vote for Al Smith you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned."
Although declining, the Klan demonstrated some influence when it staged a march along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1928. Nonetheless, by 1930, Alabama membership had fallen to fewer than 6,000, though small independent units remained active in Birmingham.
Klan groups continued operating in parts of Georgia during the 1930s. In Atlanta, "night riders" enforced their moral cores by flogging individuals—both white and Black—accused of violating them. In March 1940, they were implicated in the beating deaths of a young white couple abducted from a lovers' lane, and in the fatal flogging of a white barber for drinking, all in East Point, a suburb of Atlanta. More than 20 others were "brutally flogged". When police began investigating, they discovered that Klan records had disappeared from the East Point office. The cases were reported by the Chicago Tribune, the NAACP's Crisis magazine, and the local newspapers.

National changes and historiography

In 1939, after several years of decline brought on by the Great Depression, Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the national Klan organization to James A. Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician. They were unable to reverse the Klan's shrinking membership. In 1944, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the organization, and Colescott dissolved the national Klan by decree on April 23 of that year. Many local chapters continued to close years later.
After World War II, American author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan and provided internal information to journalists and law enforcement agencies. He also supplied secret code words and ritual details to writers of the Superman radio program, leading to episodes in which Superman confronted a thinly disguised version of the Klan. By exposing and trivializing the group's rituals, Kennedy helped undermine its mystique, which may have contributed to declining recruitment and membership. In the 1950s, he published a bestselling book The Klan Unmasked, further discussing his experiences with the Klan.
The historiography of the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s has evolved significantly over time. Early accounts relied primarily on contemporary mainstream sources, but from the late 20th century onward, historians increasingly drew on internal records and local chapter materials to produce social histories that analyze the movement's membership, community roots, and political influence. Historian Craig Fox argues that the second Klan "exercised a particularly compelling allure, its pull reflected in its sheer numerical popularity in towns and cities nationwide", suggesting that "unlike its historical namesakes, the organization involved largely ordinary citizens, from all walks of life" and that it "dwarfed all other Klan movements". Similarly, Thomas Pegram contends that "many joined the Klan for fraternal and social reasons or to pursue local political issues", reflecting an "intensified expression of widely shared civic and moral values...threatened by dramatic culture change in the aftermath of World War I."
Anti-modern interpretations
The Klan was a secret organization; apart from a few top leaders, most members did not publicly identify themselves and wore masks at rallies and parades. Investigators in the 1920s relied on Klan publicity, court cases, exposés by disgruntled members, newspaper reports, and conjecture to describe the organization’s activities. Almost all major national newspapers and magazines were hostile to the Klan. Historian Thomas R. Pegram argues that these published accounts tended to exaggerate the official viewpoint of Klan leaders and to repeat the interpretations of hostile newspapers and other opponents. According to Pegram, the resulting popular and scholarly interpretation of the Klan from the 1920s into the mid‑20th century emphasized its Southern roots and its violent, vigilante-style efforts to resist modernity, and scholars often compared it to European fascist movements.
Peter H. Amann states that, "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental.... never envisioned a change of political or economic system." Pegram characterizes this original interpretation as one that "depicted the Klan movement as an irrational rebuke of modernity by undereducated, economically marginal bigots, religious zealots, and dupes" and as viewing the Klan as "a movement of country parsons and small-town malcontents" that were dwarfed with "the dynamism of twentieth-century urban America".
New social history interpretations
The "social history" turn in historiography from the 1960s onward emphasized history from the bottom up; in the case of the Klan, historians used membership lists and minutes from local chapters across the country to examine the characteristics, beliefs, and behavior of typical members, giving less weight to accounts derived solely from elite or external sources. This research showed that the earlier interpretation was largely mistaken about the Klan's social base and activities: its members were not predominantly anti-modern, rural, or rustic, but were often relatively well-educated, middle-class joiners and community activities. Roughly half of the membership lived in rapidly growing industrial cities, and Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Denver, and Portland, Oregon, were among the Klan’s major strongholds during the 1920s. Pegram concludes that the Klan "was more of a civil exponent of white Protestant social values than a repressive hate group".
American writer Kelly J. Baker argues that religion was crucial, suggesting that the Klan was based on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans: Klan members "embraced Protestant Christianity and a crusade to save America from domestic as well as foreign threats." The Klan consisted of primarily Baptists, Methodists, and the Disciples of Christ. The Klan did not have a lot of members from the "more elite or liberal" denominations in Protestantism—Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Lutherans—who were less likely to join.
State-wide focus
Historians focused on states like Alabama and Indiana to analyze the Klan. In Indiana, traditional political historians focused on leaders like Indiana's Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, whose conviction in the case of Madge Oberholtzer helped rout the Klan nationwide. Historian Kenneth T. Jackson noted the 1920s Klan as a part of cities and urbanization—"the Invisible Empire had a strong urban flavor from the beginning"—and the local chapters acted as fraternal organization in a lot of the times. Historian Leonard Moore suggested that Klan was fearful of the changes in immigration and were fearful of those whom they believed subverted an ideal, Protestant moral standard. He argued that it was an interest group for "average white Protestants" believing their "values should be dominant." Earlier on, the University of Notre Dame was established near South Bend, Indiana, as Northern Indiana's industrial cites attracted large Catholic populations of European immigrants. In May 1924, students there blocked the Klansmen when they scheduled a regional meeting in the city, causing counterattacks, and the football coach Knute Rockne kept the students on campus to avoid further violence.
In Alabama, some activists joined the Klan to fight the old guard establishment; Hugo Black was a member who campaigned and won a seat in the U.S. Senate by focusing on anti-Catholicism. In rural Alabama, the Klan enforced Jim Crow laws, and its members resorted more to violence against Black people for apparent infringements of the social order of white supremacy. Racial terrorism was weaponized in smaller towns to suppress Black political activity; Elbert Williams of Brownsville, Tennessee, was lynched in 1940 for trying to organize Black residents to register to cast their vote, and Jesse Thorton of Luverne, Alabama, was lynched for not addressing a police officer as "Mister."
File:Children with Dr. Samuel Green, Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, July 24, 1948.jpg|thumb|Two children wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods stand on either side of Samuel Green, a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, at Stone Mountain, Georgia, on July 24, 1948.|alt=

Later Ku Klux Klan organizations (1940s-present)

In 1944, the second Ku Klux Klan was disbanded by Imperial Wizard James A. Colescott after the Internal Revenue Service levied a substantial tax liability against the organization. Two years later, in 1946, Samuel Green established a new Klan group at a ceremony on Stone Mountain, operating primarily within Georgia. Green was succeeded by Samuel Roper as Imperial Wizard in 1949, and Roper was followed by Eldon Edwards in 1950. Based in Atlanta, Edwards attempted to rebuild the organization by uniting disparate Klan factions across the United States. However, these efforts were short-lived, as internal rivalries and competition among regional groups led to renewed fragmentation.
In 1959, Roy Davis was elected to succeed Edwards as national leader. Edwards has previously appointed Davis Grand Dragon of Texas in an effort to consolidate their organizations, and Davis already led the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. During 1961 and 1962, Davis held rallies in Florida and other southern states to recruit new members. A longtime associate of William J. Simmons, Davis had been active in the Klan since its reorganization in 1915. The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan formed later in 1964 after breaking away from the Original Knights. According to an FBI report published in May 1965, the Klan had splintered into fourteen separate organizations with a combine membership of approximately 9,000. The report had identified Roy Davis's Original Knights as the largest faction, with about 1,500 members, while Robert Shelton of Alabama led another faction numbering between 400 and 600 members.
Congressional investigators found that by the end of 1965, most members of the Original Knights had joined Shelton’s United Klans, leading to the dissolution of the Original Knights. Shelton’s organization continued to absorb members from competing groups and remained the largest Klan faction into the 1970s, reaching an estimated peak of 30,000 members and an additional 250,000 non‑member supporters during the late 1960s.

1950s–1960s: Klan activity during the civil rights era

After the national organization's decline, smaller independent groups adopted the name "Ku Klux Klan", along with some variations. They had no formal relations with each other, and most had no connections to the second Klan, except for the terminology and costumes.
Beginning in the 1950s, individual Klan groups in Birmingham, Alabama resisted social change and the Black individuals' efforts to improve their life and standing, leading to bombings of houses in transitional neighborhoods; the city was nicknamed "Bombingham" due to the concentration of bombings. Since white individuals worked in the mining and steel industries, there was access to these materials.
Alabama Klan groups closely allied with the police under the tenure of police commissioner Bull Connor and operated with impunity; Connor allowed Klan members to attack Freedom Riders in 1961 for up to fifteen and twenty minutes before sending in the police. Due to failures to protect the Freedom Riders, the federal government established intervention and protection. In Alabama and Mississippi, members of the Klan tried to forge alliances with governors' administrations. In Birmingham and other places, the Klan bombed the houses of civil rights activists, sometimes weaponizing physical violence, intimidation, and assassination directly. Due to this disfranchisement of Black people, most could not serve on juries, which were all-white and could demonstrably deliver biased verdicts and sentences.
A Southern Regional Council report, a racial equality organization in Atlanta, suggested that the homes of 40 Black southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952; victims were mostly social activists, but some were those who refused to accept or uphold racism or were innocent bystanders.
[File:FBI Poster of Missing Civil Rights Workers.jpg|thumb|Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were three civil rights workers abducted and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan.]
Notorious murders
During the 1950s and 1960s, Klan members carried out a series of highly publicized murders and bombings that drew national attention and condemnation. These incidents include the 1951 Christmas Eve bombing of NAACP activists Harry and Harriette Moore in Mims, Florida, the 1957 murder of Willie Edwards Jr. in Alabama, the 1963 assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi, the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, and the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. Other cases from this period include the 1964 murders of two Black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, the 1965 killing of Viola Liuzzo in Alabama, the 1966 firebombing that led to the death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer, the murder of Clarence Triggs, and the 1967 bombings in Jackson, Mississippi, targeting Methodist activist Robert Kochtitzky, a synagogue, and residence of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum.

Resistance

There was considerable resistance among African Americans and white allies to the Klan. In 1953, newspaper publishers W. Horace Carter, who had campaigned for three years, and Willard Cole shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service citing "their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities". In a 1958 incident in North Carolina, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans for associating with white people, and threatened more actions. When the KKK held a nighttime rally nearby, they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbee. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.
While the Federal Bureau of Investigation had paid informants in the Klan, its relations with local law enforcement agencies and the Klan were often ambiguous. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, appeared more concerned about Communist links to civil rights activists than about controlling Klan excesses against citizens. In 1964, the FBI's COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights groups.
As 20th-century Supreme Court rulings extended federal enforcement of citizens' civil rights, the government revived the Enforcement Acts and the Klan Act from Reconstruction days. Federal prosecutors used these laws as the basis for investigations and indictments in the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo. They were also the basis for prosecution in 1991 in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic.
In 1965, the House Un-American Activities Committee started an investigation on the Klan, putting in the public spotlight its front organizations, finances, methods and divisions.

1970s–present

After federal legislation was passed prohibiting legal segregation and authorizing enforcement of protection of voting rights, KKK groups began to oppose court-ordered busing to desegregate schools, affirmative action, and the more open immigration authorized in the 1960s. In 1971, KKK members used bombs to destroy 10 school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. By 1975, there were known KKK groups on most college campuses in Louisiana as well as at Vanderbilt University, the University of Georgia, the University of Mississippi, the University of Akron, and the University of Southern California. The KKK was involved in intimidating Vietnamese refugees in the Galveston Bay Area.

Massacre of Communist Workers' Party protesters

On November 3, 1979, five communist protesters were killed by KKK and American Nazi Party members in Greensboro, North Carolina, in what is known as the Greensboro massacre. The Communist Workers' Party had sponsored a rally against the Klan in an effort to organize predominantly Black industrial workers in the area. Klan members drove up with arms in their car trunks, and attacked marchers.

Klan infiltrations

Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the KKK in 1979, reported that the FBI's COINTELPRO efforts were highly successful. Rival KKK factions accused each other's leaders of being FBI informants. William Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was revealed to have been working for the FBI.
Thompson also related that KKK leaders showed great concern about a series of civil lawsuits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming damages amounting to millions of dollars. These were filed after KKK members shot into a group of African Americans. Klansmen curtailed their activities in order to conserve money for defense against the lawsuits. The KKK also used lawsuits as tools; they filed a libel suit in order to prevent the publication of a paperback edition of Thompson's book but were unsuccessful.
A Jewish Defense League member known by the pseudonym "Annette" infiltrated neo-Nazi and Klan groups in 1979 and informed on two dozen Klansmen and neo-Nazis to JDL leader Edward Rainov. Edwin L. Reynolds, the Grand Dragon of the White Knights, a New Jersey Ku Klux Klan group, and two others were arrested "on charges of rape, aggravated assault and threatening to kill the woman". According to Annette the men lured her to a hotel room, handcuffed her and sexually assaulted her, breaking her wrists.

Chattanooga shooting

In 1980, three KKK members shot four elderly Black women in Chattanooga, Tennessee, following a KKK initiation rally. A fifth woman, Fannie Crumsey, was injured by flying glass in the incident. Attempted murder charges were filed against the three KKK members, two of whom—Bill Church and Larry Payne—were acquitted by an all-white jury. The third defendant, Marshall Thrash, was sentenced by the same jury to nine months on lesser charges. He was released after three months. In 1982, a jury awarded the five women $535,000 in a civil trial.

Michael Donald lynching

After Michael Donald was lynched in 1981 in Alabama, the FBI investigated his death. The US attorney prosecuted the case. Two local KKK members were convicted for his murder, including Henry Francis Hays who was sentenced to death. After exhausting the appeals process, Hays was executed by electric chair for Donald's death in Alabama on June 6, 1997. It was the first time since 1913 that a white person had been executed in Alabama for a crime against a black person.
With the support of attorneys Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center and state senator Michael A. Figures, Donald's mother Beulah Mae Donald sued the KKK in civil court in Alabama. Her lawsuit against the United Klans of America was tried in February 1987. The all-white jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching of Donald, and ordered the Klan to pay US$7 million, but the KKK did not have sufficient funds to pay the fine. They had to sell off their national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa.

Neo-Nazi alliances and Stormfront

In 1995, Don Black and Chloê Hardin, the ex-wife of the KKK grand wizard David Duke, began a small bulletin board system called Stormfront, which has become a prominent online forum for white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, hate speech, racism, and antisemitism in the early 21st century.
In a 2007 article by the ADL, it was reported that many KKK groups had formed strong alliances with other white supremacist groups, such as neo-Nazis. Some KKK groups have become increasingly "nazified", adopting the look and emblems of white power skinheads.

Current developments

The modern KKK is not one organization; rather, it is composed of small independent chapters across the United States. According to a 1999 ADL report, the KKK's estimated size then was "no more than a few thousand, organized into slightly more than 100 units". In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, estimated that there were "at least 29 separate, rival Klan groups currently active in the United States, and they compete with one another for members, dues, news media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan". The formation of independent chapters has made KKK groups more difficult to infiltrate, and researchers find it hard to estimate their numbers. Analysts believe that about two-thirds of KKK members are concentrated in the Southern United States, with another third situated primarily in the lower Midwest.
For some time, the Klan's numbers have been steadily dropping. This decline has been attributed to the Klan's lack of competence in the use of the Internet, their history of violence, a proliferation of competing hate groups, and a decline in the number of young racist activists who are willing to join groups at all.
In 2015, the number of KKK chapters nationwide grew from 72 to 190. The SPLC released a similar report stating that "there were significant increases in Klan as well as Black separatist groups".
A 2016 analysis by the SPLC found that hate groups in general were on the rise in the United States. The ADL published a report in 2016 that concluded: "Despite a persistent ability to attract media attention, organized Ku Klux Klan groups are actually continuing a long-term trend of decline. They remain a collection of mostly small, disjointed groups that continually change in name and leadership."
Recent KKK membership campaigns have exploited people's anxieties about illegal immigration, urban crime, and same-sex marriage. In 2006, J. Keith Akins argued that "Klan literature and propaganda is rabidly homophobic and encourages violence against gays and lesbians. ...Since the late 1970s, the Klan has increasingly focused its ire on this previously ignored population." Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Klan has produced Islamophobic propaganda and distributed anti-Islamic flyers.
The American Civil Liberties Union has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK in defense of their First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, and marches, as well as their right to field political candidates.
The February 14, 2019, edition of the Linden, Alabama, weekly newspaper The Democrat-Reporter carried an editorial titled "Klan needs to ride again" written by Goodloe Sutton—the newspaper's owner, publisher and editor—which urged the Klan to return to staging their night rides, because proposals were being made to raise taxes in the state. In an interview, Sutton suggested that Washington, D.C., could be "clean out" by way of lynchings. "We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them," Sutton said. He also specified that he was only referring to hanging "socialist-communists" and compared the Klan to the NAACP. The editorial and Sutton's subsequent comments provoked calls for his resignation from Alabama politicians and the Alabama Press Association, which later censured Sutton and suspended the newspaper's membership. In addition, the University of Southern Mississippi's School of Communication removed Sutton—who is an alumnus of that school—from its Mass Communication and Journalism Hall of Fame, and "strongly condemns" his remarks. Sutton was also stripped of a distinguished community journalism award he had been presented in 2009 by Auburn University's Journalism Advisory Council. Sutton expressed no regret and said that the editorial was intended to be "ironic", but that "not many people understand irony today."

Current Klan organizations

A list is maintained by the Anti-Defamation League :
Regarded by historians as America's first terrorist group, there have been various attempts to organize KKK chapters outside America in places such as: Asia, Europe and Oceania, with negligible results.

Africa

In apartheid-era South Africa in the 1960s, some far-right activists copied KKK actions, for example by writing "Ku Klux Klan Africa" on the ANC Cape Town offices or by wearing their costumes. In response, American Klan leader Terry Venable attempted to establish a branch at Rhodes University.
In the 1970s, Rhodesia had a Ku Klux Klan, led by Len Idensohn, attacking Ian Smith for his perceived moderation.

Americas

In Mexico, on 1924 vigilantes claimed to have organized themselves into a Klan against "criminals", publishing a program of "social epuration".
In São Paulo, Brazil, the website of a group called Imperial Klans of Brazil was shut down in 2003, and the group's leader was arrested.
The Klan has also been established in the Canal Zone.
The Klan was present in Cuba, under the name of Ku Klux Klan Kubano, directed against both West Indian migrant workers and Afro-Cuban and using the fear of the 1912 Negro Rebellion.

Asia

During the Vietnam War, klaverns were established on some US military bases, often tolerated by military authorities.
In the 1920s, the Klan briefly existed in Shanghai.

Europe

Recruitment activity has also been reported in the United Kingdom. In the 1960s, "klaverns" were established in the Midlands, the following decade saw visits by leading Klansmen, and the 1990s saw recruitment drives in London, Scotland and the Midlands and huge internal turmoil and splintering: for example a leader, Allan Beshella, had to resign after a 1972 conviction for child sex abuse was revealed. In 2018, Klan-clad far-right activists marched in front of a Northern Irish mosque.
In Germany, a KKK-related group, Ritter des Feurigen Kreuzes, was established in 1925 by returning naturalized German-born US citizens in Berlin who managed to gather around 300 persons of middle-class occupations such as merchants and clerks. It soon saw the original founders being removed by internal conflicts, and mocking newspapers about the affair. After the Nazis took over Germany, the group disbanded and its members joined the Nazis. In the spring of 1970 in Frankfurt, US Army specialist Edward Kaneta was beaten by four white sergeants for fraternizing with a black soldier, said to have been members of an on-base klavern with 47 members. In 1991, Dennis Mahon, then of Oklahoma's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, reportedly helped to organize Klan groups. Another German KKK-related group, the European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has organized and it gained notoriety in 2012 when the German media reported that two police officers who held membership in the organization would be allowed to keep their jobs. In 2019, the German authorities conducted raids against a possibly dangerous group called National Socialist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Deutschland.
In 2001, David Duke came to Moscow to network with local anti-Semitic Russian nationalists. Duke said that Russia was "the key to white survival" and blamed most of the events of the 20th century Russian history on the Jews.
In the 1920s, the Klan was rumoured to exist in Lithuania and Czechoslovakia.
The was founded in Russia in 1996 and its members wore Klan robes and performed rituals modelled after the Klan's. The Navi Clan staged an event where about 50 klansmen held a ritual with torches, led by Ilya Lazarenko. In 2006 the Russian Ku Klux Klan staged a mock execution of an alleged Tajik drug dealer. The perpetrators were dressed in robes and hanged the victim with a rope. Even though the victim survived, the court found the perpetrators had caused "psychological harm" and they were sentenced to three years of probation each.
Some dozens of people rioted in Hennala, Finland in September 2015 and threw rocks and fireworks at refugees and the Red Cross staff working in the Hennala refugee center. The riot attracted national attention due to Ku Klux Klan imagery used in the riot. Then Finance Minister Alexander Stubb condemned the riot, saying people clad in Ku Klux Klan robes with a Finnish flag is a "travesty".

Oceania

In Australia in the late 1990s, former One Nation party member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country, and circa 2012 the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First. Branches of the Klan have previously existed in New South Wales and Victoria, as well as allegedly in Queensland. Unlike in the United States, the Australian branches did not require members to be Christian, but did require them to be white.
On 16 February 1872, white settlers in the Kingdom of Fiji formed a chapter of the KKK. Established as part of settler efforts to resist the Fijian government, the chapter's members swore an oath to carry arms and not pay taxes. Its headquarters, a former hotel in Levuka, was fortified with several artillery pieces. On 24 February, the Fijian KKK hosted its first general meeting which published resolutions that asserted "the existing mode of government was contrary to the welfare of the community". The chapter's existence increased the level of chaos in Levuka and in one instance a white settler charged with the murder of a Fijian was released from prison by 70 KKK members. In March of that year, the chapter was renamed as the "British Subjects' Mutual Protection Society", which advocated for Fiji's annexation by Britain. Fiji became a British colony in 1874, and Governor Sir Hercules Robinson fully suppressed the BSMPS by 1875.
In the 1920s, the Klan had been rumoured to exist in New Zealand.

Titles and vocabulary

Membership in the Klan is secret. Like many fraternal organizations, the Klan uses signs and coded language that members can use to recognize one another. In conversation, a member may use the acronym AYAK to surreptitiously identify themselves to another potential member. The response AKIA completes the greeting.
Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words beginning with "Kl", including:
  • Klabeetreasurers
  • Klavernlocal organization
  • Imperial Kleaglerecruiter
  • Klecktokeninitiation fee
  • Kligrappsecretary
  • Klonvokationgathering
  • Kloranritual book
  • Kloreroedelegate
  • Imperial Kluddchaplain
All of the above terminology was created by William Joseph Simmons, as part of his 1915 revival of the Klan. The Reconstruction-era Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were "Wizard" for the overall leader of the Klan and "Night Hawk" for the official in charge of security.
The Imperial Kludd was the chaplain of the Imperial Klonvocation and he performed "such other duties as may be required by the Imperial Wizard".
The Imperial Kaliff was the second-highest position, after the imperial wizard.

Symbols

The Ku Klux Klan has utilized a variety of symbols over its history.

Blood Drop Cross

The most identifiable symbol used by the Klan for the past century has been the Mystic Insignia of a Klansman, commonly known as the Blood Drop Cross, a white cross on a red disk with what appears to be a blood drop in the middle. It was first used in the early 1900s, with the symbol in the center originally appearing as a red and white taijitu which in the subsequent years, lost the white lobe and was reinterpreted as a "blood drop".

Triangular Klan symbol

The Triangular Ku Klux Klan symbol is made of what looks like a triangle inside a triangle, similar to a Sierpiński triangle, but in fact represents three letter Ks interlocked and facing inward, referencing the name of the group. A variation on this symbol has the K's facing outwards instead of inwards. It is an old Klan symbol that has also been resurrected as a modern-day hate symbol.

Burning cross

Although predating the Klan, in modern times the symbol of the burning cross has become almost solely associated with the Ku Klux Klan and has become one of the most potent hate symbols in the United States. Burning crosses did not become associated with the Klan until Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, and its film adaptation, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation inspired members of the second Klan to take up the practice. In the modern day, the symbol of the burning cross is so associated with racial intimidation that it is used by many non-Klan racist elements and has spread to locations outside the United States.

Official websites

Because there are multiple Ku Klux Klan organizations, there are multiple official websites. Following are third-party lists of such organizations:
  • From the Southern Poverty Law Center: . .
  • From the Anti-Defamation League:
  • * . . Not organized as a list of names but many names appear in this report.
  • * – archived list

    Other links

  • . : first edition of the Klan's 1867 prescript.
  • . : first edition of the Klan's 1868 prescript.
  • as recorded in two manuscripts in 1871–1872 by Captain Albion Howe, from the collection of The Buffalo History Museum
  • ..
  • .. From the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, examines the influence of the second KKK in the state during the 1920s.
  • ., digitized by the Buffalo History Museum.
  • Video clip of 2014 . by biracial director and filmmaker Mo Asumang for her documentary The Aryan.
  • , multimedia, Life magazine, April 13, 2009
  • , author of Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871, Forest History Society, Inc., May 1978
  • . at .. Examines the Ku Klux Klan's role in Central Florida in the second quarter of the 20th century.
  • ., VCU Libraries.
  • , at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
  • . from The Literary Digest, August 1922.
  • ., Mt. Rainier, Maryland at the University of Maryland Libraries.

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