Ku Klux Klan#End of the first Klan

{{see also|Nathan Bedford Forrest#Ku Klux Klan leadership}}

File:Ku Klux Klan costumes in North Carolina in 1870.jpg

The first Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865,{{cite book |title=The present-day Ku Klux Klan movement: Report by the Committee on Un-American activities |date=1967 |publisher=U. S. Government Printing Office |location=Washington, DC}} by six former officers of the Confederate Army:{{cite web|url=http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/history.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk |title=Ku Klux Klan{{snd}}Extremism in America |publisher=Anti-Defamation League |access-date=February 20, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110212043142/http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/history.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk |archive-date=February 12, 2011}} Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones, and James Crowe.{{cite web|date=October 23, 2018|title=Ku Klux Klan not founded by the Democratic Party|url=https://apnews.com/afs:Content:2336745806|access-date=July 19, 2020|website=AP News|archive-date=July 7, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200707094431/https://apnews.com/afs:Content:2336745806|url-status=live}} It started as a fraternal social club inspired at least in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta. It borrowed parts of the initiation ceremony from that group, with the same purpose: "ludicrous initiations, the baffling of public curiosity, and the amusement for members were the only objects of the Klan", according to Albert Stevens in 1907.{{sfn|Stevens|1907}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} The manual of rituals was printed by Laps D. McCord of Pulaski.{{cite news|last=Dixon| first=Thomas Jr. |title=The Ku Klux Klan: Some of Its Leaders|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-tennessean-klan-history-1905/79278901/|access-date=September 28, 2016|work=The Tennessean|date=August 27, 1905|via=Newspapers.com|page=22|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161023054555/https://www.newspapers.com/image/119491892/?terms=%22John%2BW.%2BMorton%22%2B%22ku%2Bklux%2Bklan%22|archive-date=October 23, 2016|url-status=live}} The origins of the hood are uncertain; it may have been appropriated from the Spanish capirote hood,Michael K. Jerryson (2020), [https://books.google.com/books?id=pfjtDwAAQBAJ&dq=Capirote+kkk&pg=PA217 Religious Violence Today: Faith and Conflict in the Modern World] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230407210437/https://books.google.com/books?id=pfjtDwAAQBAJ&dq=Capirote+kkk&pg=PA217 |date=April 7, 2023 }}, p. 217 or it may be traced to the uniform of Southern Mardi Gras celebrations.{{Cite magazine

| title = How the Klan Got Its Hood

| last = Kinney

| first = Alison

| magazine = The New Republic

| date = 8 January 2016

| access-date = 29 November 2022

| url = https://newrepublic.com/article/127242/klan-got-hood

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| archive-date = February 5, 2023

| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20230205134207/https://newrepublic.com/article/127242/klan-got-hood

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According to The Cyclopædia of Fraternities (1907), "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."{{sfn|Stevens|1907}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

The KKK had no organizational structure above the chapter level. However, there were similar groups across the South that adopted similar goals.{{sfn|Trelease|1995|p=18}} Klan chapters promoted white supremacy and spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement in resistance to Reconstruction. Confederate veteran John W. Morton founded a KKK chapter in Nashville, Tennessee.{{cite news|title=John W. Morton Passes Away in Shelby |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-tennessean-john-w-morton-jr-obit-p-2/4017133/|access-date=September 25, 2016|work=The Tennessean|date=November 21, 1914|pages=1–2|via=Newspapers.com|quote=To Captain Morton performed the ceremonies which initiated Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest into the KKK.|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161008185807/https://www.newspapers.com/image/119557576/?terms=%22John%2BW.%2BMorton%22 |archive-date=October 8, 2016 |url-status=live}} As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder. "They targeted white Northern leaders, Southern sympathizers and politically active Blacks."{{cite book|author=J. Michael Martinez|title=Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MV02AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA24| year=2007|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |isbn=978-0742572614|page=24}} In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes.{{cite web |last=Wormser |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Wormser |title=The Enforcement Acts (1870–71) |url=https://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html|publisher=PBS |series=Jim Crow Stories |access-date=May 12, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120304103101/http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html |archive-date=March 4, 2012 |url-status=live}}

The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives. It seriously weakened the Black political leadership through its use of assassinations and threats of violence, and it drove some people out of politics. On the other hand, it caused a sharp backlash, with passage of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of "restoring order, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling Blacks to exercise their rights as citizens".{{sfn|Foner|1988|p=458}} Historian George C. Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded by the Democratic Party leaders of the South. He says:

{{blockquote|The Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses; its lack of central organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists. More fundamentally, it declined because it failed to achieve its central objective – the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South.{{sfn|Rable|1984|pp=101, 110–111}}}}

After the Klan was suppressed, similar insurgent paramilitary groups arose that were explicitly directed at suppressing Republican voting and turning Republicans out of office: the White League, which started in Louisiana in 1874; and the Red Shirts, which started in Mississippi and developed chapters in the Carolinas. For instance, the Red Shirts are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina. They were described as acting as the military arm of the Democratic Party and are attributed with helping white Democrats regain control of state legislatures throughout the South.{{sfn|Rable|1984}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

{{see also|Ku Klux Klan in Canada|Indiana Klan}}

File:KKK night rally in Chicago c1920 cph.3b12355.jpg in the 1920s]]

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 memories of some surviving elders, the revived Klan was based significantly on the wildly popular film The Birth of a Nation. The earlier Klan had not worn the white costumes and had not burned crosses; these aspects were introduced in Thomas Dixon's book 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 – just like in the film. These mass parades became another hallmark of the new Klan that had not existed in the First Klan.{{cite web|title=A 1905 Silent Movie Revolutionizes American Film – and Radicalizes American Nationalists|publisher=Southern Hollows podcast |url=http://www.southernhollows.com/episodes/birthofanation|access-date=June 3, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180527210102/http://www.southernhollows.com/episodes/birthofanation|archive-date=May 27, 2018|url-status=live}}

Beginning in 1921, the Second Klan adopted a modern business system of using full-time, paid recruiters and it appealed to new members as a fraternal organization, of which many examples were flourishing at the time. The national headquarters made its profit through a monopoly on costume sales, while the organizers were paid through initiation fees. It grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions pitting urban versus rural America, it spread to every state and was prominent in many cities.

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, [and] 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."{{sfn|Cash|1941|p=337}} It preached "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality and better enforcement of Prohibition. Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti-Catholicism and nativism.{{sfn|Pegram|2011|pp=47–88}} Its appeal was directed exclusively toward white Protestants; it opposed Jews, Black people, Catholics, and newly arriving Southern and Eastern European immigrants, most of whom were Jewish or Catholic.{{sfn|Baker|2011|p=248}}

Some local groups threatened violence against rum runners and those they deemed "notorious sinners"; the relatively few violent episodes led by the Second KKK nearly all took place in the South.{{sfn|Jackson|1967|pp=241–242}} The Red Knights were a militant group organized in opposition to the Klan and it responded violently to Klan provocations on several occasions.{{cite book |last=MacLean |first=Nancy |title=Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan |publisher=Oxford University Press |date=1995 |isbn=978-0195098365}}

File:JudgeMagazine16Aug1924.jpg, August 16, 1924|alt=]]

The Second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. During its heyday, its publicity was handled by the Southern Publicity Association. Within the first six months of the Association's national recruitment campaign, Klan membership had increased by 85,000.{{sfn|Blee|1991}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization's membership was estimated as high as three to eight million members.{{Cite web |title=The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s |series=American Experience |publisher=PBS |url=https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-klan/ |access-date=2022-04-05 |website=www.pbs.org |language=en |archive-date=July 5, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220705230424/https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-klan/ |url-status=live }}

In 1923, Simmons was ousted as leader of the KKK by Hiram Wesley Evans. From September 1923 there were two Ku Klux Klan national organizations: the one founded by Simmons and led by Evans with its strength primarily in the southern United States, and a breakaway group led by Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson based in Evansville, Indiana with its membership primarily in the midwest.{{cite book |last=Lutholtz |first=M. William |date=1993 |title=Grand Dragon: D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana |url=http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781557530103 |location=West Lafayette, Indiana |publisher=Purdue University Press |pages=43, 89 |isbn=1557530467 |access-date=March 25, 2015 |archive-date=June 28, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220628014141/http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781557530103 |url-status=live }}

Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders – especially Stephenson's conviction for the abduction, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer – and external opposition brought about a collapse in the membership of both national Klan groups. The main group's membership had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.{{cite web |last=Lay |first=Shaun |title=Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century |url=http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2730 |website=New Georgia Encyclopedia |publisher=Coker College |access-date=August 26, 2005 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051025072407/http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2730 |archive-date=October 25, 2005 |url-status=live}}

Klan organizers also operated in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan in 1926–1928, where Klansmen denounced immigrants from Eastern Europe as a threat to Canada's "Anglo-Saxon" heritage.{{sfn|Sher|1983|pp=52–53}}{{sfn|Pitsula|2013}}

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. They sometimes forged informal alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama.{{sfn|McWhorter|2001}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} Several activists of the Third Klan were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and of children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963.

The United States government considers the Third Klan to be a "subversive terrorist organization".{{cite web |url=http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk |title=About the Ku Klux Klan |publisher=Anti-Defamation League |access-date=January 2, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091226085812/http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk |archive-date=December 26, 2009}}{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/16/us/inquiry-begun-on-klan-ties-of-2-icons-at-virginia-tech.html|title=Inquiry Begun on Klan Ties Of 2 Icons at Virginia Tech |work=The New York Times |date=November 16, 1997 |page=138 |access-date=January 2, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101006202735/http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/16/us/inquiry-begun-on-klan-ties-of-2-icons-at-virginia-tech.html |archive-date=October 6, 2010|url-status=live}}{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/us/06bowers.html|title=Samuel Bowers, 82, Klan Leader Convicted in Fatal Bombing, Dies|last=Lee|first=Jennifer|date=November 6, 2006|work=The New York Times|access-date=January 2, 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110512151534/http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/us/06bowers.html|archive-date=May 12, 2011|url-status=live}}{{cite news |url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-will-review-cross-burning-ban/|title=Court Will Review Cross Burning Ban|last=Brush|first=Pete|date=May 28, 2002|publisher=CBS News|access-date=January 2, 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101006224439/http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/28/supremecourt/main510317.shtml|archive-date=October 6, 2010|url-status=live}} 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.[http://dallas.fbi.gov/history.htm Dallas.FBI.gov "Domestic terrorism by the Klan remained a key concern"]. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100305075543/http://dallas.fbi.gov/history.htm |date=March 5, 2010 }}, FBI, Dallas office In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina, passed a resolution declaring the Klan a terrorist organization.{{cite news|url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=c0wPAAAAIBAJ&pg=6460,2081194&dq=klan+terrorist-organization&hl=en|title=Klan named terrorist organization in Charleston|date=October 14, 1999|agency=Reuters|access-date=January 2, 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150605152433/https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=c0wPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=J4YDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6460,2081194&dq=klan+terrorist-organization&hl=en|archive-date=June 5, 2015|url-status=live}}

The Third Klan groups have been in a state of consistent decline. A variety of factors are involved: the public's negative distaste of the group's image, platform, and history; infiltration and prosecution by law enforcement; civil lawsuit financial forfeitures; and the radical right-wing's perception of the Klan as outdated and unfashionable. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that between 2016 and 2019, the number of Klan groups in America dropped from 130 to just 51.{{Cite web|url=http://theconversation.com/the-kkk-is-in-rapid-decline-but-its-symbols-remain-worryingly-potent-112320|title=The KKK is in rapid decline – but its symbols remain worryingly potent|first=Kristofer|last=Allerfeldt|website=The Conversation|date=March 2019|access-date=May 16, 2022|archive-date=May 16, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220516151557/https://theconversation.com/the-kkk-is-in-rapid-decline-but-its-symbols-remain-worryingly-potent-112320|url-status=live}} A 2016 report by the Anti-Defamation League claims an estimate of just over 30 Third Klan groups still active.'l [https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/tattered-robes-state-of-kkk-2016.pdf "Tattered Robes: The State of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States"]. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171118095816/https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/tattered-robes-state-of-kkk-2016.pdf |date=November 18, 2017}}, Anti-Defamation League (2016). Estimates of total collective membership range from about 3,000 to 8,000.[https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan "Extremist Files: Ku Klux Klan"]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180406084839/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan |date=April 6, 2018}}, Southern Poverty Law Center (accessed October 21, 2017). In addition to its active membership, the Third Klan has an "unknown number of associates and supporters".

The name was probably formed in 1865 by combining the Greek {{lang|grc-Latn|kyklos}} (κύκλος, which means circle) with clan.{{harvnb|Horn|1939|p=11}} states that Reed proposed {{lang|grc|κύκλος}} ({{lang|grc-Latn|kyklos}}) and Kennedy added clan. {{harvnb|Wade|1987|p=33}} says that Kennedy came up with both words, but Crowe suggested transforming {{lang|grc|κύκλος}} into {{lang|grc-Latn|kuklux}}.{{cite web |url=http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-694 |title=Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era |website=New Georgia Encyclopedia |date=October 3, 2002 |access-date=February 20, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080919005917/http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-694 |archive-date=September 19, 2008 |url-status=live }} The word had previously been used for other fraternal organizations in the South such as Kuklos Adelphon.

{{main|First Klan}}

{{see also|Nathan Bedford Forrest#Ku Klux Klan membership}}

File:Kkk-carpetbagger-cartoon.jpg threatening that the KKK will lynch scalawags (left) and carpetbaggers (right) on March 4, 1869, the day President Grant takes office. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, September 1, 1868.{{efn|An analysis of this cartoon can be found in {{harvnb|Hubbs|2015}}}}]]

Six Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created the First Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, during the Reconstruction of the South.{{sfn|Horn|1939|p=9|ps=: The founders were John C. Lester, John B. Kennedy, James R. Crowe, Frank O. McCord, Richard R. Reed, and J. Calvin Jones.}}{{sfn|Fleming|1905|p=27}} The group was known for a short time as the "Kuklux Clan". The Ku Klux Klan was one of a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, which included the Southern Cross in New Orleans (1865) and the Knights of the White Camelia (1867) in Louisiana.{{sfn|Du Bois|1935|pp=679–680}}

Historians see the First KKK as part of the post-Civil War violent efforts to reverse the dramatically changed social situation by using extrajudicial means to restore white supremacy. In 1866, Mississippi governor William L. Sharkey reported widespread disorder, lack of control, and lawlessness. In other Southern states armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will. The Klan systematically used violence against black people and their white allies as intimidation. They burned houses and attacked and killed black people, leaving their bodies on the roads.{{sfn|Du Bois|1935|pp=671–675}}

File:Anti-kkk-cartoon.jpg and Francis Preston Blair Jr. with secession and the Confederate cause.[https://elections.harpweek.com/1868/cartoon-1868-Medium.asp?UniqueID=9&Year=1868#qmitemhl0_13_3 Harper's Weekly] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200803051551/https://elections.harpweek.com/1868/cartoon-1868-Medium.asp?UniqueID=9&Year=1868#qmitemhl0_13_3 |date=August 3, 2020 }}.|alt=]]

At an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, First Klan activists tried to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting to a national headquarters. Since most of the Klansmen were veterans, they were used to such military hierarchy, The effort did not succeed: the First Klan never operated under any centralized structure. Local chapters and bands were always highly independent.

File:NathanBedfordForrest.jpg in Confederate military uniform ]]

Former Confederate brigadier general George Gordon developed the Prescript, which espoused white supremacist belief. For instance, an applicant should be asked if he was in favor of "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".{{cite web |url=http://www.albany.edu/faculty/gz580/his101/kkk.html |title=Ku Klux Klan, Organization and Principles, 1868 |publisher=State University of New York at Albany |access-date=February 27, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303192240/http://www.albany.edu/faculty/gz580/his101/kkk.html |archive-date=March 3, 2016 }} The latter is a reference 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.{{cite book |title=A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest |last=Wills |first=Brian Steel |year=1992 |publisher=HarperCollins Publishers |location=New York|page=[https://archive.org/details/battlefromstart00bria/page/336 336] |isbn=978-0060924454 |url=https://archive.org/details/battlefromstart00bria/page/336 }} In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, radical Republican state governments. They opposed people such as Tennessee governor William Gannaway Brownlow, and other "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags".The Sun. "Civil War Threatened in Tennessee". September 3, 1868: 2; The Charleston Daily News. "A Talk with General Forrest". September 8, 1868: 1. Forrest argued that many Southerners believed that Black people were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues.Cincinnati Commercial, August 28, 1868, quoted in {{harvnb|Wade|1987}} One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."{{sfn|Horn|1939|p=27}}

Despite Gordon's and Forrest's work, local Klan units never accepted the Prescript and continued to operate autonomously. There were never hierarchical levels or state headquarters. Klan members used violence to settle old personal feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore general white dominance in the disrupted postwar society. The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership:

Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of anti-Black vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, 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 were called, Klansmen.{{sfn|Parsons|2005|p=816}}

{{Wikisource|Interview with Nathan Bedford Forrest}}

Historian Eric Foner observed: "In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the Black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life."{{sfn|Foner|1988|pp=425–426}} To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of Black people.The First Klan soon spread into every Southern state, launching a reign of terror against Republican leaders both Black and white..{{sfn|Foner|1988|p=342,425–426}}

In a 1933 interview, William Sellers, born enslaved in Virginia, recalled the post-war "raids of the Ku Klux, young white men of Rockingham County who would go into the huts of the recently freed negroes or catch some negro who had been working for thirty cents a day on his way home from work...and cruelly whip him, leaving him to live or die."{{Cite news |date=1933-07-07 |title=Former Negro Slave Resident of Shippenberg |pages=6 |work=The News-Chronicle |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-news-chronicle-former-negro-slave-re/129748355/ |access-date=2023-08-10 |via=Newspapers.com}} Seemingly random whipping attacks, meant to be suggestive of previous condition of servitude, were a widespread aspect of the early Klan; for example in 1870–71 in Limestone Township (now Cherokee County), South Carolina, of 77 documented attacks, "four were shot, sixty-seven whipped and six had had their ears cropped."{{Cite journal |last=Simkins |first=Francis B. |author-link=Francis Butler Simkins |date=1927 |title=The Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, 1868–1871 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2714040 |journal=The Journal of Negro History |volume=12 |issue=4 |pages=606–647 |doi=10.2307/2714040 |jstor=2714040 |s2cid=149858835 |issn=0022-2992 |access-date=August 10, 2023 |archive-date=August 10, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230810230435/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2714040 |url-status=live }}

File:Mississippi ku klux.jpg, September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family.{{cite web|url=http://www.preachthecross.net/history-of-the-ku-klux-klan/|title=History of the Ku Klux Klan – Preach the Cross|access-date=September 15, 2014|publisher=preachthecross.net|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140916012701/http://preachthecross.net/history-of-the-ku-klux-klan/|archive-date=September 16, 2014}}]]

{{Wikisource|Why the Ku Klux}}

Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides. The South was heavily rural and most people knew each other's faces, and sometimes could recognize the attackers by voice and mannerisms. "The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night."{{sfn|Du Bois|1935|pp=677–678}} The night riders of the First Klan "sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious Blacks. Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously."{{sfn|Foner|1988|p=432}}

The First Klan attacked Black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated white Republicans and Freedmen'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 Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of Black people.

"Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites." Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful Black farmers off their land. "Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault."{{sfn|Du Bois|1935|pp=674–675}}

File:George W. Ashburn.jpg was assassinated for his pro-Black sentiments.]]

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.{{sfn|Du Bois|1935|pp=680–681}}

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.{{cite web |url=http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-694 |title=Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era |author=Bryant, Jonathan M |website=The New Georgia Encyclopedia |publisher=Georgia Southern University |access-date=August 26, 2005 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080919005917/http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-694 |archive-date=September 19, 2008 |url-status=live }}

Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in Jackson County, Florida, and hundreds more in other counties including Madison, Alachua, Columbia, and Hamilton. Florida Freedmen's Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen's beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies.{{sfn|Newton|2001|pp=1–30|ps=. Newton quotes from the Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Enquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Vol. 13. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1872. Among historians of the Klan, this volume is also known as The KKK testimony.}}

File:1875.08.23Prophet1A copy.jpg, as posed for Joseph A. Dacus of the Missouri Republican, in August 1875.]]

Milder encounters, including some against white teachers, also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry:

One of these teachers (Miss Allen of Illinois), whose school was at Cotton Gin Port in Monroe County, was visited ... between one and two o'clock in the morning in March 1871, by about fifty men mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long white robe and his face was covered by a loose mask with scarlet stripes. She was ordered to get up and dress which she did at once and then admitted to her room the captain and lieutenant who in addition to the usual disguise had long horns on their heads and a sort of device in front. The lieutenant had a pistol in his hand and he and the captain sat down while eight or ten men stood inside the door and the porch was full. They treated her "gentlemanly and quietly" but complained of the heavy school-tax, said she must stop teaching and go away and warned her that they never gave a second notice. She heeded the warning and left the county.{{sfn|Rhodes|1920|pp=157–158}}

By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease.{{sfn|Horn|1939|p=375}} Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way 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.{{sfn|Wade|1987|p=102}} 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."{{sfn|Horn|1939|p=375}}

{{Wikisource|Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871}}

Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized "the anti-Ku Klux". They put an end to 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.{{sfn|Foner|1988|p=435}}

National sentiment gathered to crack down on the Klan, even though some Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan really existed, or believed that it was a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors.{{sfn|Wade|1987}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.{{cite book|last1=Ranney|first1=Joseph A|title=In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law|date=2006|publisher=Greenwood Publishing Group|isbn=978-0275989729|pages=57–58}}

File:BenFrankButler.jpg wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1871.]]

In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican senator John Scott convened a congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities, accumulating 12 volumes. In February, former Union general and congressman Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act). This added to the enmity that Southern white Democrats bore toward him.{{sfn|Horn|1939|p=373}} 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 Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse, from which a Black state representative escaped by fleeing to the woods.{{sfn|Wade|1987|p=88}} The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus.{{cite web| last=Scaturro |first=Frank |title=The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, 1869–1877 |url=http://faculty.css.edu/mkelsey/usgrant/granthist4.html |publisher=College of St. Scholastica |date=October 26, 2006 |access-date=March 5, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110719151209/http://faculty.css.edu/mkelsey/usgrant/granthist4.html |archive-date=July 19, 2011 }}

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 the 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.p. 5, United States Circuit Court (4th Circuit). Proceedings in the Ku Klux Trials at Columbia, S.C. in the United States Circuit Court. Edited by Benn Pitman and Louis Freeland Post. Columbia, SC: Republican Printing Company, 1872. The defendants were given from three months to five years of incarceration with fines.The New York Times. "Kuklux Trials{{snd}}Sentence of the Prisoners". December 29, 1871. 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."

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 chapters, and no local officers, so it was difficult for observers to judge its membership.The New York Times. "N. B. Forrest". September 3, 1868. It had created a sensation by the dramatic nature of its masked forays and because of its many murders.

In 1870, a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist organization"{{sfn|Trelease|1995}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} and issued hundreds of indictments 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.{{sfn|Trelease|1995}} Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had 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".Quotes from {{harvnb|Wade|1987|p=59}} 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".{{sfn|Horn|1939|p=360}} 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".{{sfn|Horn|1939|p=362}}

File:NCG-WilliamHolden.jpg of North Carolina]]

In many states, officials were reluctant to use Black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised.{{cite web |url=https://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html |title=The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow – The Enforcement Acts (1870–1871) |author=Wormser, Richard |publisher=Public Broadcasting Service |access-date=February 27, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160228064916/http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html |archive-date=February 28, 2016 |url-status=live }} Republican governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, adding to his unpopularity. This and 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, but their reasons for doing so were numerous.{{sfn|Wade|1987|p=85}}

Klan operations ended in South Carolina{{sfn|Wade|1987|p=102}} and gradually withered away throughout the rest of the South. Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions.{{harvnb|Wade|1987|p=109}}, writes that by 1874, "For many, the lapse of the enforcement acts was justified since their reason for being—the Ku-Klux Klan—had been effectively smashed as a result of the dramatic showdown in South Carolina".

Foner argues that:

{{blockquote|By 1872, the federal government's evident willingness to bring its legal and coercive authority to bear had broken the Klan's back and produced a dramatic decline in violence throughout the South. So ended the Reconstruction career of the Ku Klux Klan.{{sfn|Foner|1988|pp=458–459}}}}

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.{{sfn|Wade|1987|pp=109–110}} 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 ruled that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not include the right to regulate against private conspiracies. It recommended that persons who had been victimized should seek relief in state courts, which were entirely unsympathetic to such appeals.{{cite web |url=http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/opeds/historylesson1.pdf |title=History Lesson |author=Balkin, Jack M. |year=2002 |publisher=Yale University |access-date=February 27, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304054220/http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/opeds/historylesson1.pdf |archive-date=March 4, 2016}}

Klan costumes, also called "regalia", disappeared from use by the early 1870s,{{sfn|Wade|1987|p=109}} after Grand Wizard Forrest called for their destruction as part of disbanding the Klan. The Klan was broken as an organization by 1872.[https://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow: The Enforcement Acts, 1870–1871"], Public Broadcast Service {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171019161432/https://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html |date=October 19, 2017}}. Retrieved April 5, 2008.

In 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan and its endeavors. The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, with fifteen "charter members".{{cite news|title=The Various Shady Lives of the Ku Klux Klan|url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898581,00.html|magazine=Time|quote=An itinerant Methodist preacher named William Joseph Simmons started up the Klan again in Atlanta in 1915. Simmons, an ascetic-looking man, was a fetishist on fraternal organizations. He was already a "colonel" in the Woodmen of the World, but he decided to build an organization all his own. He was an effective speaker, with an affinity for alliteration; he had preached on "Women, Weddings and Wives", "Red Heads, Dead Heads and No Heads", and the "Kinship of Kourtship and Kissing". On Thanksgiving Eve 1915, Simmons took 15 friends to the top of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, built an altar on which he placed an American flag, a Bible and an unsheathed sword, set fire to a crude wooden cross, muttered a few incantations about a "practical fraternity among men", and declared himself Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.|date=April 9, 1965|access-date=August 1, 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090806144942/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898581,00.html|archive-date=August 6, 2009}} Its growth was based on a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, Prohibitionist and anti-Semitic agenda, which reflected contemporary social tensions, particularly recent immigration. The new organization and chapters adopted regalia featured in The Birth of a Nation; membership was kept secret by wearing masks in public.

File:Dixonfp.jpg]]

File:'The Fiery Cross of old Scotland's hills!'.jpg

File:Birth of a Nation theatrical poster.jpg, which has been widely credited with inspiring the 20th-century revival of the Ku Klux Klan]]

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 was based 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 enhanced 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 wrote a letter condemning the film following protests.{{cite book|author=John Milton Cooper Jr.|title=Woodrow Wilson: A Biography |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xOZVsyO4K2cC&pg=PA273|year=2011|publisher=Random House Digital, Inc.|pages=272–273|isbn=978-0307277909|access-date=June 27, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150414055749/http://books.google.com/books?id=xOZVsyO4K2cC&pg=PA273|archive-date=April 14, 2015|url-status=live}}

File:Ku Klux Klan Virginia 1922 Parade.jpg

File:KKK - St Patricks Dau (cr).jpg, from the shores of America. Among the "snakes" are various supposed negative attributes of the Church, including superstition, the union of church and state, control of public schools, and intolerance.]]

The first and third Klans were primarily Southeastern groups aimed against Black people. The second Klan, in contrast, broadened the scope of the organization to 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 threats from every direction. According to historian Brian R. Farmer, "two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers".Brian R. Farmer, American Conservatism: History, Theory and Practice (2005), p. 208.{{ISBN?}} Much of the Klan's energy went into guarding the home, and historian Kathleen Blee says that its members wanted to protect "the interests of white womanhood".{{sfn|Blee|1991|p=47}} Joseph 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".{{cite book|last=McWhirter|first=Cameron|title=Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America|date=2011|publisher=Henry Holt and Company, LLC| location=New York|isbn=978-0805089066|page=65}} Such moral-sounding purpose underlay its appeal as a fraternal organization, recruiting members with a promise of aid for settling into the new urban societies of rapidly growing cities such as Dallas and Detroit.{{sfn|Jackson|1967}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} During the 1930s, particularly after James A. Colescott of Indiana took over as imperial wizard, opposition to Communism became another primary aim of the Klan.

New Klan founder William J. Simmons joined 12 different fraternal organizations and recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, consciously modeling the Klan after fraternal organizations.{{cite news |url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898581,00.html |title=Nation: The Various Shady Lives of The Ku Klux Klan |magazine=Time |date=April 9, 1965 |access-date=December 24, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090806144942/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898581,00.html |archive-date=August 6, 2009 }} Klan organizers called "Kleagles" signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and received KKK costumes in return. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials. When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a rally, often with burning crosses, and perhaps presented a Bible to a local Protestant preacher. He left town with the money collected. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.

Simmons initially met with little success in either recruiting members or in 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 (1919–1924), Imperial Night-Hawk (1923–1924), and The Kourier.{{sfn|Jackson|1967|p=296}}{{cite magazine |url=https://archive.org/details/ImperialNighthawkVol.1No.77 |magazine=Imperial Nighthawk |volume=1 |issue=8 |date=January 1, 1923|location=Atlanta, Georgia |publisher=Knights of the Ku Klux Klan|via=Internet Archive|title=Imperial Nighthawk Vol. 1 No. 8 }}{{OCLC |magazine=The Kourier |date=January 1, 1924 |oclc=1755269}}

The second Klan was a response to the growing power of Catholics and American Jews and the accompanying proliferation of non-Protestant cultural values, as well as some high-profile instances of violence against whites.{{sfn|Baker|2011}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} 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. Close to half of Michigan's 80,000 Klansmen lived in Detroit.{{sfn|Jackson|1967|p=241}}

Members of the KKK swore to uphold American values and Christian morality, and some Protestant ministers became involved at the local level. However, no Protestant denomination officially endorsed the KKK;{{sfn|Jackson|1967|p=18}} indeed, the Klan was repeatedly denounced by the major Protestant magazines, as well as by all major secular newspapers.

File:klanatcampmeeting.jpg, for "Patriotic Day" during the Pillar of Fire Church's annual Camp Meeting.{{cite journal |first=L.S. |last= Lawrence |page=10 |journal= The Good Citizen |title=Patriotic Day at Zarephath Camp-Meeting |url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/8629844@N02/5965849098/sizes/l/in/photostream/ |quote=The Assembly Hall was filled in the evening, with about 100 klanswomen and a few klansmen in robes. The first speaker of the evening was Bishop White. She gave a fiery message on the topic of race and social equality....She expressed hope that the Klan would do its part in keeping the blood of America pure.|date=October 1929 |publisher=Pillar of Fire Church }}]]One notable exception was the Pillar of Fire Church, based in Zarephath, New Jersey.{{cite journal | author = Lynn S. Neal | author-link = Lynn S. Neal | year = 2009 | title = Christianizing the Klan: Alma White, Branford Clarke, and the Art of Religious Intolerance | journal = Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture | volume = 78 | issue = 2 | quote = White's words and Clarke's imagery combined in various ways to create a persuasive and powerful message of religious intolerance. | page = 350 }} Founder Alma Bridwell White was a vocal Klan supporter who repeatedly endorsed the organization, allowing it to hold meetings and even cross burnings at its churches.{{cite book |author-link=Kathleen Blee |title=Women of the Klan |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tcEyMwIpgRMC&q=women+of+the+klan |quote=Bishop White's transformation from minister to Klan propagandist is detailed in voluminous autobiographical and political writing. [Bishop] White's anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and racist message fit well into the Klan's efforts to convince white Protestant women that their collective interests as women....were best served by joining the Klan. |year=1991 |isbn=978-0-520-07876-5 |author1=Blee, Kathleen M |publisher=University of California Press |access-date=May 24, 2024 |archive-date=November 22, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231122002234/https://books.google.com/books?id=tcEyMwIpgRMC&q=women+of+the+klan#v=snippet&q=women%20of%20the%20klan&f=false |url-status=live }} White's pro-Klan writings were collected in her books The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty, and Heroes of the Fiery Cross.{{cite book |first=Alma |last=White |title=Heroes of the Fiery Cross |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=iQ80AAAAIAAJ&q=heroes+of+the+fiery+cross |quote=I believe in white supremacy. |year=1928 |publisher=The Good Citizen }}

Historian Robert Moats Miller reports that "not a single endorsement of the Klan was found by the present writer in the Methodist press, while many of the attacks on the Klan were quite savage. ...The Southern Baptist press condoned the aims but condemned the methods of the Klan." National denominational 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.{{sfn|Miller|1956|pp=350–368|loc=quotes on pages 360, 363}}

The second Klan was less violent than either the first or third Klan were. However, the second Klan, especially in the Southeast, was not an entirely non-violent organization. The most violent Klan 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. They burned the letters "KKK" into his forehead and gave him a severe beating by a riverbed. The police chief and district attorney refused to prosecute, explicitly and publicly stating they believed that Johnson deserved this treatment. Encouraged by the approval of this whipping, Klansmen in Dallas whipped 68 people by the riverbed in 1922 alone. Although Johnson had been Black, most of the Dallas KKK's whipping victims were white men who were accused of offenses against their wives such as adultery, wife beating, abandoning their wives, refusing to pay child support or gambling. Klansmen often invited local newspaper reporters to attend their whippings so they could write a story about it in the next day's newspaper.{{Cite web |url=https://oakcliff.advocatemag.com/2017/02/backstory-kkk-paraded-oak-cliff/ |title=Backstory: When the KKK paraded in Oak Cliff |access-date=March 17, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190327091648/https://oakcliff.advocatemag.com/2017/02/backstory-kkk-paraded-oak-cliff/ |archive-date=March 27, 2019 |url-status=live |date=February 28, 2017 }} 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."Amber Jolly and Ted Banks, "Dallas Ku Klux Klan No. 66," Handbook of Texas (2022) [https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/dallas-ku-klux-klan-no-66 online] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231103203607/https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/dallas-ku-klux-klan-no-66 |date=November 3, 2023 }}

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.{{Cite web |url=http://www.therandolphleader.com/opinion/columns/article_ba2ce3d7-16a0-5e6a-af20-d527135cd9b5.html |title=Baldwin: The Ku Klux Klan in Randolph County |date=March 3, 2010 |access-date=March 26, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190326234153/http://www.therandolphleader.com/opinion/columns/article_ba2ce3d7-16a0-5e6a-af20-d527135cd9b5.html |archive-date=March 26, 2019 |url-status=live }}{{Cite web |url=http://www.therandolphleader.com/opinion/columns/article_d1c0b824-a217-57b5-ad03-509e0fe88125.html |title=Baldwin: Local Klan enforced their version of law here |work=The Randolph Leader |date=March 10, 2010 |access-date=March 26, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190326234155/http://www.therandolphleader.com/opinion/columns/article_d1c0b824-a217-57b5-ad03-509e0fe88125.html |archive-date=March 26, 2019 |url-status=live |last1=Baldwin |first1=Rhonda Bailey }} 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.Daniel M. Berman, "Hugo L. Black: The Early Years". Catholic University Law Review (1959). 8 (2): 103–116 [https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3011&context=lawreview online] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240311192410/https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3011&context=lawreview |date=March 11, 2024 }}.

In 1920, Simmons handed the day-to-day activities of the national office over to two professional publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke.{{sfn|Newton|2009|p=70}} The new leadership invigorated the Klan and it grew rapidly. It appealed to new members based on current social tensions, and stressed responses to fears raised by defiance of Prohibition and new sexual freedoms. It emphasized anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant and later anti-Communist positions. It presented itself as a fraternal, nativist and strenuously patriotic organization; and its leaders emphasized support for vigorous enforcement of Prohibition laws. It expanded membership dramatically to a 1924 peak of 1.5 million to 4 million, which was between 4–15% of the eligible population.{{sfn|Fryer|Levitt|2012}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

By the 1920s, most of its members lived in the Midwest and West. Nearly one in five of the eligible Indiana population were members.{{sfn|Fryer|Levitt|2012}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} It had a national base by 1925. In the South, where the great majority of whites were Democrats, the Klansmen were Democrats. In the rest of the country, the membership comprised both Republicans and Democrats, as well as 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".{{cite book|first=Stephen D.|last=Cummings|title=Red States, Blue States, and the Coming Sharecropper Society|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=H4NNBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA119|year=2008|page=119|publisher=Algora |access-date=February 27, 2016| isbn=978-0875866277| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160416201847/https://books.google.com/books?id=H4NNBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA119|archive-date=April 16, 2016|url-status=live}} Sociologist Rory McVeigh has explained the Klan's strategy in appealing to members of both parties:

{{blockquote|Klan leaders hope to have all major candidates competing to win the movement's endorsement. ... The Klan's leadership wanted to keep their options open and repeatedly announced that the movement was not aligned with any political party. This non-alliance strategy was also valuable as a recruiting tool. The Klan drew its members from Democratic as well as Republican voters. If the movement had aligned itself with a single political party, it would have substantially narrowed its pool of potential recruits.{{sfn|McVeigh|2009|p=184}}}}

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 was a religious symbol, and their ritual honored Bibles and local ministers. But no nationally prominent religious leader said he was a Klan member.{{sfn|Baker|2011}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

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 argue that the Klan leadership focused more intently on monetizing the organization during this period than fulfilling the political goals of the organization. Local leaders profited from expanding their membership.{{sfn|Fryer|Levitt|2012}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

Historians agree that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over Prohibition.{{sfn|Pegram|2011|pp=119–156}} The historian Prendergast says that the KKK's "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation".{{sfn|Prendergast|1987|pp=25–52 [27]}} The Klan opposed bootleggers, sometimes with 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 activities.{{sfn|Barr|1999|p=370}}

File:theendkkk.jpg 1926]]

A significant characteristic of the second Klan was that it was an organization based in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in the North, West, and the South. In Michigan, for instance, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, where they made up more than half of the state's membership. Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class whites who feared the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were mostly Catholic or Jewish; and Black and white migrants from the South. As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods created social tensions. Because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the Midwest. The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.{{sfn|Jackson|1967}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

In the medium-size industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts, in the 1920s, the Klan ascended to power quickly but declined as a result of opposition from the Catholic Church. There was no violence and the local newspaper ridiculed Klansmen as "night-shirt knights". Half of the members were Swedish Americans, including some first-generation immigrants. The ethnic and religious conflicts among more recent immigrants contributed to the rise of the Klan in the city. Swedish Protestants were struggling against Irish Catholics, who had been entrenched longer, for political and ideological control of the city.Emily Parker (Fall 2009). {{"'}}Night-Shirt Knights' in the City: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Worcester, Massachusetts", New England Journal of History, Vol. 66 Issue 1, pp. 62–78.

In some states, historians have obtained membership rosters of some local units and matched the names against city directory and local records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big city newspapers were often hostile and ridiculed Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indiana showed that the rural stereotype was false 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.{{sfn|Moore|1991|p=9}}

The Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long. Membership in the Klan turned over rapidly as people found out that it was not the group which they had wanted. Millions joined and at its peak in the 1920s the organization claimed numbers that amounted to 15% of the nation's eligible population. The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan's decline.

File:Ku Klux Klan members and a burning cross, Denver, Colorado, 1921.jpg was introduced by William J. Simmons, the founder of the second Klan in 1915.]]

The distinctive white costume permitted large-scale public activities, especially parades and cross-burning ceremonies, while keeping the membership roles a secret. 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 display of symbolism, with a tone of intimidation.{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/us/supreme-court-roundup-free-speech-or-hate-speech-court-weighs-cross-burning.html?pagewanted=all|title=Supreme Court Roundup; Free Speech or Hate Speech? Court Weighs Cross Burning|last=Greenhouse|first=Linda|date=May 29, 2002|work=The New York Times|access-date=February 20, 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090724115314/http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/us/supreme-court-roundup-free-speech-or-hate-speech-court-weighs-cross-burning.html?pagewanted=all|archive-date=July 24, 2009|url-status=live}} 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.{{sfn|Wade|1998}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} 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,{{cite web |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z3xhhv4 |title=Were Scots responsible for the Ku Klux Klan? |last1=Oliver |first1=Neil |author-link=Neil Oliver |last2=Frantz Parsons |first2=Elaine |work=BBC Guides |publisher=BBC |access-date=October 4, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171023030843/http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z3xhhv4 |archive-date=October 23, 2017 |url-status=live }} 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.{{cite web |first=Cecil |last=Adams |url=http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1038/why-does-the-ku-klux-klan-burn-crosses |title=Why does the Ku Klux Klan burn crosses? |website=The Straight Dope |date=June 18, 1993 |access-date=December 24, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100619134951/http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1038/why-does-the-ku-klux-klan-burn-crosses |archive-date=June 19, 2010 |url-status=live }}

{{main|Women of the Ku Klux Klan}}

By the 1920s, the KKK 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, stressing liquor's negative impact on wives and children. Its efforts in public schools included distributing Bibles and petitioning for the dismissal of Catholic teachers. As a result of the Women's Klan's efforts, Texas would not hire Catholic teachers to work in its public schools. As sexual and financial scandals rocked the Klan leadership late in the 1920s, the organization's popularity among both men and women dropped off sharply.{{sfn|Blee|1991}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

File:klan-sheet-music.jpg

The second Klan expanded with new chapters in cities in the Midwest and West, and reached both Republicans and Democrats, as well as men without a party affiliation. The goal of Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans to make common cause in the North.Pegram, Thomas R. (2008). "Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement". Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era vol. 7 no. 1 pp. 89–119

The Klan had numerous members in every part of the United States but was particularly strong in the South and Midwest. At its peak, claimed Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas.Marty Gitlin (2009). The Ku Klux Klan: A Guide to an American Subculture. p. 20.{{ISBN?}} The Klan also moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it opposed Catholics.{{sfn|Sher|1983}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

In Indiana, members were American-born, white Protestants and covered a wide range of incomes and social levels. The Indiana Klan was perhaps the most prominent Ku Klux Klan in the nation. It claimed more than 30% of white male Hoosiers as members.{{cite web| url=http://www.centerforhistory.org/indiana_history_main7.html|title=Indiana History Chapter Seven|publisher=Northern Indiana Center for History|access-date=October 7, 2008 | url-status=usurped|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080411163028/http://www.centerforhistory.org/indiana_history_main7.html|archive-date=April 11, 2008}} In 1924 it supported Republican Edward Jackson in his successful campaign for governor.

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.Robert A. Slayton (2001). Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith. pp. 211–213{{ISBN?}} 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.{{cite journal |first=Lee N. |last=Allen |title=The McAdoo Campaign for the Presidential Nomination in 1924 |journal=Journal of Southern History |year=1963 |volume=29 |issue=2 |pages=211–228 |jstor=2205041 |doi=10.2307/2205041 }}{{cite book |first=Douglas B. |last=Craig |title=After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, 1920–1934 |year=1992 |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |at=ch. 2–3 |isbn=978-0807820582 }}

File:Children with Dr. Samuel Green, Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, July 24, 1948.jpg, a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, at Stone Mountain, Georgia, on July 24, 1948.|alt=]]

In some states, such as Alabama and California, KKK chapters had worked for political reform. In 1924, Klan members were elected to the city council in Anaheim, California. The city had been controlled by an entrenched commercial-civic elite that was mostly German American. Given their tradition of moderate social drinking, the German Americans did not strongly support Prohibition laws – the mayor had been a saloon keeper. Led by the minister of the First Christian Church, the Klan represented a rising group of politically oriented non-ethnic Germans who denounced the elite as corrupt, undemocratic and self-serving. The historian Christopher Cocoltchos says the Klansmen tried to create a model, orderly community. The Klan had about 1,200 members in Orange County, California. The economic and occupational profile of the pro- and anti-Klan groups shows the two 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 earlier demonstrated a much higher rate of voting and civic activism than did their opponents. Cocoltchos suggests that many of the individuals in Orange County joined the Klan out of that sense of civic activism. The Klan representatives easily won the local election in Anaheim in April 1924. They fired city employees who were known to be Catholic and replaced them with Klan appointees. The new city council tried to enforce Prohibition. After its victory, the Klan chapter held large rallies and initiation ceremonies over the summer. The opposition organized, bribed a Klansman for the secret membership list, and exposed the Klansmen running in the state primaries; they defeated most of the candidates. Klan opponents in 1925 took back local government and succeeded in a special election in recalling the Klansmen who had been elected in April 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.Christopher N. Cocoltchos (2004). "The Invisible Empire and the Search for the Orderly Community: The Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim, California". Shawn Lay, ed. The invisible empire in the West, pp. 97–120.{{ISBN?}}

In the South, Klan members were still Democratic, as it was essentially a one-party region for whites. Klan chapters were closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government. Due to disenfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites around the start of the 20th century, the only political activity for whites took place within the Democratic Party.

In Alabama, Klan members advocated better public schools, effective Prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other political measures to benefit lower-class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a political force in the state, as leaders such as J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black tried to build political power against the Black Belt wealthy planters, who had long dominated the state.{{sfn|Feldman|1999}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} In 1926, with Klan support, Bibb Graves won the Alabama governor's office. He was a former Klan chapter head. He pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. Because the Alabama state legislature refused to redistrict until 1972, and then under court order, the Klan was unable to break the planters' and rural areas' hold on legislative power.

Scholars and biographers have recently examined Hugo Black's Klan role. Ball finds regarding the KKK that Black "sympathized with the group's economic, nativist, and anti-Catholic beliefs".{{sfn|Ball|1996|p=16}} Newman says Black "disliked the Catholic Church as an institution" and gave over 100 anti-Catholic speeches to KKK meetings across Alabama in his 1926 election campaign.Roger K. Newman (1997). Hugo Black: A Biography. pp. 87, 104 {{ISBN?}} Black was elected US senator in 1926 as a Democrat. In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court without knowing how active in the Klan he had been in the 1920s. He was confirmed by his fellow Senators before the full KKK connection was known; Justice Black said he left the Klan when he became a senator.{{sfn|Ball|1996|p=96}}

File:D. C. Stephenson Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan in Indiana, c 1922.jpg, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan. His conviction in 1925 for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a white schoolteacher, led to the decline of the Indiana Klan.]]

Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan, gaining national attention. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith was formed in the early 20th century in response to attacks on Jewish Americans, including the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta, and to the Klan's campaign to prohibit private schools (which was chiefly aimed at Catholic parochial schools). Opposing groups worked to penetrate the Klan's secrecy. After one civic group in Indiana began to publish Klan membership lists, there was a rapid decline in the number of Klan members. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched public education campaigns in order to inform people about Klan activities and lobbied in Congress against Klan abuses. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership in most areas began to decline rapidly.{{sfn|Jackson|1967}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} Specific events contributed to the Klan's decline as well. In Indiana, the scandal surrounding the 1925 murder trial of Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the KKK as upholders of law and order. By 1926 the Klan was "crippled and discredited".{{cite web|url=http://www.in.gov/library/2848.htm|title=Ku Klux Klan in Indiana|publisher=Indiana State Library|date=November 2000|access-date=September 27, 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090918163319/http://www.in.gov/library/2848.htm|archive-date=September 18, 2009|url-status=live}} D. C. Stephenson was the grand dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states. In 1923 he had led the states under his control in order to break away from the national KKK organization. At his 1925 trial, he was convicted of second-degree murder for his part in the rape, and subsequent death, of Madge Oberholtzer.{{cite web |url=http://www.indianahistory.org/library/manuscripts/collection_guides/m0264.html |title=D. C. Stephenson manuscript collection |publisher=Indiana Historical Society |access-date=February 20, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100208221521/http://www.indianahistory.org/library/manuscripts/collection_guides/m0264.html |archive-date=February 8, 2010 }} After Stephenson's conviction, the Klan declined dramatically in Indiana.

The historian Leonard Moore says that a failure in leadership caused the Klan's collapse:

Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana's Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan's stated goals. They were uninterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement. For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power. These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership. More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan, or who pursued some of the interests of their Klan constituents, also accomplished little. Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience. When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan's behalf.{{sfn|Moore|1991|p=186}}

In Alabama, KKK vigilantes launched a wave of physical terror in 1927. They targeted both Black and white people for violations of racial norms and for perceived moral lapses.{{sfn|Rogers|Ward|Atkins|Flynt|1994|pp=432–433}} This led to a strong backlash, beginning in the media. Grover C. Hall Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser from 1926, wrote a series of editorials and articles that attacked the Klan. (Today the paper says it "waged war on the resurgent [KKK]".)[http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/99999999/CUSTOMERSERVICE01/91026023/History-Montgomery-Advertiser "History of the Montgomery Advertiser"]. Montgomery Advertiser: a Gannett Company. Retrieved November 8, 2013. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120825232802/http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/99999999/CUSTOMERSERVICE01/91026023/History-Montgomery-Advertiser |date=August 25, 2012 }} Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for the crusade, the 1928 Editorial Writing Pulitzer, citing "his editorials against gangsterism, floggings and racial and religious intolerance".{{sfn|Rogers|Ward|Atkins|Flynt|1994|p=433}}[http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Editorial-Writing "Editorial Writing"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131031075115/http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Editorial-Writing |date=October 31, 2013 }}. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved November 8, 2013. Other newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan, referring to the organization as violent and "un-American". Sheriffs cracked down on 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.{{Citation needed|reason=this claim is contradicted by the results of the 1928 election|date=February 2025}}

Although in decline, a measure of the Klan's influence was still evident when it staged its march along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1928. By 1930, Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than 6,000. Small independent units continued to be active in the industrial city of Birmingham.

KKK units were active through the 1930s in parts of Georgia, with a group of "night riders" in Atlanta enforcing their moral views by flogging people who violated them, whites as well as Black people. In March 1940, they were implicated in the beating murders of a young white couple taken from their car on a lovers lane, and flogged a white barber to death for drinking, both in East Point, a suburb of Atlanta. More than 20 others were "brutally flogged". As the police began to investigate, they found the records of the KKK had disappeared from their East Point office. The cases were reported by the Chicago Tribune[http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1940/03/24/page/19/article/klans-records-vanish-in-face-of-terror-quiz "Klan's Records Vanish in Terror Quiz/Floggers Linked to Killings in Lovers Lane"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170204085445/http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1940/03/24/page/19/article/klans-records-vanish-in-face-of-terror-quiz/ |date=February 4, 2017}}, Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1940; accessed February 3, 2017 and the NAACP in its Crisis magazine,{{cite magazine |date=October 1940 |title=Sixth Lynching |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7FoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA324 |magazine=The Crisis |publisher=National Association for the Advancement of Colored People |volume=47 |issue=10 |pages=323–324 |access-date=February 3, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170215093611/https://books.google.com/books?id=7FoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA324 |archive-date=February 15, 2017 |url-status=live}} as well as local papers.

In 1940, three lynchings of Black men by whites (no KKK affiliation is known) took place in the South: Elbert Williams was the first NAACP member known to be killed for civil rights activities: he was murdered in Brownsville, Tennessee, for working to register Black people to vote, and several other activists were run out of town; Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, for a minor social infraction; and 16-year-old Austin Callaway, a suspect in the assault of a white woman, was taken from jail in the middle of the night and killed by six white men in LaGrange, Georgia. In January 2017, the police chief and mayor of LaGrange apologized for their offices' failures to protect Callaway, at a reconciliation service marking his death.{{cite news |url=http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/26/us/lagrange-georgia-callaway-1940-lynching/ |title='Justice failed Austin Callaway': Town attempts to atone for 1940 lynching |first=Emanuella |last=Grinberg |publisher=CNN |date=January 27, 2017 |access-date=February 3, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170202065324/http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/26/us/lagrange-georgia-callaway-1940-lynching/ |archive-date=February 2, 2017 |url-status=live}}{{cite web|url=http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/nightly-news-full-broadcast-january-27th-864596547728|title=Nightly News Full Broadcast (January 27th)|publisher=NBC News|access-date=February 3, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170202064213/http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/nightly-news-full-broadcast-january-27th-864596547728|archive-date=February 2, 2017|url-status=live}}

In 1939, after experiencing several years of decline due to the Great Depression, the Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the national organization to James A. Colescott, an Indiana veterinary physician, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician. They could not revive the Klan's declining membership. In 1944, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott dissolved the organization by decree on April 23 of that year. Local Klan groups closed down over the following years.{{cite news |title=Georgia Orders Action to Revoke Charter of Klan. Federal Lien Also Put on File to Collect Income Taxes Dating Back to 1921. Governor Warns of a Special Session if Needed to Enact 'De-Hooding' Measures Tells of Phone Threats Georgia Acts to Crush the Klan. Federal Tax Lien Also Is Filed |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1946/05/31/archives/georgia-orders-action-to-revoke-charter-of-klan-federal-lien-also.html |quote=Governor Ellis Arnall today ordered the State's legal department to bring action to revoke the Georgia charter of the Ku Klux Klan. ... 'It is my further information that on June 4, 1944, the Ku Klux Klan ... |work=The New York Times |date=May 31, 1946 |access-date=January 12, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180723004703/https://www.nytimes.com/1946/05/31/archives/georgia-orders-action-to-revoke-charter-of-klan-federal-lien-also.html |archive-date=July 23, 2018 |url-status=live}}

After World War II, the folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan; he provided internal data to media and law enforcement agencies. He also provided secret code words to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in episodes in which Superman took on a thinly disguised version of the KKK. Kennedy stripped away the Klan's mystique and trivialized its rituals and code words, which may have contributed to the decline in Klan recruiting and membership.{{cite news |last=von Busack |first=Richard |title=Superman Versus the KKK |url=http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/07.02.98/comics-9826.html |url-status=live |work=MetroActive |access-date=February 27, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150511114046/http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/07.02.98/comics-9826.html |archive-date=May 11, 2015}} In the 1950s Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.{{sfn|Kennedy|1990}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

The historiography of the second Klan of the 1920s has changed over time. Early histories were based on mainstream sources of the time, but since the late 20th century, other histories have been written drawing from records and analysis of members of the chapters in social histories.{{sfn|Fox|2011}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}{{sfn|Pegram|2011|pp=221–228}}

File:Ku Klux Klan parade7.jpg, September 13, 1926]]

The KKK was a secret organization; apart from a few top leaders, most members never identified as such and wore masks in public. Investigators in the 1920s used KKK publicity, court cases, exposés by disgruntled Klansmen, newspaper reports, and speculation to write stories about what the Klan was doing. Almost all the major national newspapers and magazines were hostile to its activities. The historian Thomas R. Pegram says that published accounts exaggerated the official viewpoint of the Klan leadership and repeated the interpretations of hostile newspapers and the Klan's enemies. There was almost no evidence in that time regarding the behavior or beliefs of individual Klansmen. 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 the violent vigilante-style actions of the Klan in its efforts to turn back the clock of modernity. Scholars compared it to fascism in Europe.{{sfn|Chalmers|1987|p=322}} 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. ...[The KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system."{{cite journal |jstor= 493879 |title= A 'Dog in the Nighttime' Problem: American Fascism in the 1930s |journal= The History Teacher |volume= 19 |issue= 4 |last1= Amann |first1= Peter H. |year= 1986 |doi= 10.2307/493879 |page=562}}

Pegram says this original interpretation:

{{blockquote|...depicted the Klan movement as an irrational rebuke of modernity by undereducated, economically marginal bigots, religious zealots, and dupes willing to be manipulated by the Klan's cynical, mendacious leaders. It was, in this view, a movement of country parsons and small-town malcontents who were out of step with the dynamism of twentieth-century urban America.{{sfn|Pegram|2011|p=222}}}}

The "social history" revolution in historiography from the 1960s explored history from the bottom up. In terms of the Klan, it developed evidence based on the characteristics, beliefs, and behavior of the typical membership, and downplayed accounts by elite sources.{{sfn|Pegram|2011|p=225}}{{sfn|Moore|1996}} Historians discovered membership lists and the minutes of local meetings from KKK chapters scattered around the country. They discovered that the original interpretation was largely mistaken about the membership and activities of the Klan; the membership was not anti-modern, rural or rustic and consisted of fairly well-educated middle-class joiners and community activists. Half the members lived in the fast-growing industrial cities of the period: Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Denver, and Portland, Oregon, were Klan strongholds during the 1920s.Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (1967){{ISBN?}}

Studies find that in general, the KKK membership in these cities was from the stable, successful middle classes, with few members drawn from the elite or the working classes. Pegram, reviewing the studies, concludes, "the popular Klan of the 1920s, while diverse, was more of a civic exponent of white Protestant social values than a repressive hate group."{{sfn|Pegram|2011}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

Kelly J. Baker argues that religion was critical—the KKK based its hatred on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans: "Members embraced Protestant Christianity and a crusade to save America from domestic as well as foreign threats."{{sfn|Baker|2011|p=11}} Member were primarily Baptists, Methodists, and members of the Disciples of Christ, while men of "more elite or liberal" Protestant denominations such as Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Lutherans, were less likely to join.{{cite book |last=MacLean |first=Nancy K. |title=Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YmjRCwAAQBAJ&q=klan+baptists+methodists&pg=PA8 |publisher=Oxford University Press |date=1995 |page=8 |access-date=December 7, 2020 |isbn=978-0195098365}}

In Indiana, traditional political historians focused on notorious leaders, especially D. C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan, whose conviction for the 1925 kidnap, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer helped destroy the Ku Klux Klan movement nationwide. In his history of 1967, Kenneth T. Jackson described the Klan of the 1920s as associated with cities and urbanization, with chapters often acting as a kind of fraternal organization to aid people coming from other areas.{{sfn|Jackson|1967}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

Social historian Leonard Moore titled his monograph Citizen Klansmen (1997) and contrasted the intolerant rhetoric of the group's leaders with the actions of most of the membership. The Klan was white Protestant, established Americans who were fearful of change represented by new immigrants and Black migrants to the North. They were highly suspicious of Catholics, Jews and Black people, who they believed subverted ideal, Protestant moral standards. Violence was uncommon in most chapters. In Indiana, KKK members directed more threats and economic blacklisting primarily against fellow white Protestants for transgressions of community moral standards, such as adultery, wife-beating, gambling and heavy drinking. Up to one third of Indiana's Protestant men joined the order making it, Moore argued, "a kind of interest group for average white Protestants who believed that their values should be dominant in their community and state."{{sfn|Moore|1991}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

Northern Indiana's industrial cities had attracted a large Catholic population of European immigrants and their descendants. They established the University of Notre Dame, a major Catholic college near South Bend. In May 1924, when the KKK scheduled a regional meeting in the city, Notre Dame students blocked the Klansmen and stole some KKK regalia. On the next day, the Klansmen counterattacked. Finally, the college president and the football coach Knute Rockne kept the students on campus to avert further violence.Arthur Hope. The Story of Notre Dame (1999) ch 26 [http://archives.nd.edu/hope/hope26.htm online] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100301070126/http://archives.nd.edu/hope/hope26.htm |date=March 1, 2010}}See also the semi-fictional account {{cite book |last=Tucker |first=Todd |title=Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan |publisher=Loyola Press |year=2004 |isbn=978-0829417715}}

In Alabama, some young, white, urban activists joined the KKK to fight the old guard establishment. Hugo Black was a member before becoming nationally famous; he focused on anti-Catholicism. However, in rural Alabama the Klan continued to operate to enforce Jim Crow laws; its members resorted more often to violence against Black people for infringements of the social order of white supremacy.{{sfn|Feldman|1999}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

Racial terrorism was used 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 and vote; also that year, Jesse Thornton of Luverne, Alabama, was lynched for failing to address a police officer as "Mister"."Sixth Lynching", The Crisis, October 1940, p. 324

In 1944, the second KKK was disbanded by Imperial Wizard James A. Colescott after the IRS levied a large tax liability against the organization.{{cite news |title=Dr. Colescott Dies. Successor of Hiram W. Evans Disbanded Order in 1944. Joined Group in 1920s. |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1950/01/13/archives/dr-colescott-dies-exchief-of-klan-successor-of-hiram-w-evans.html |quote=Dr. James A. Colescott, former chief of the Ku Klux Klan, died last night in the United States veterans' Hospital at Coral Gables. His age was 53. ... |work=The New York Times |date=January 13, 1950 |access-date=February 11, 2009 |archive-date=February 4, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170204211450/http://www.nytimes.com/1950/01/13/archives/dr-colescott-dies-exchief-of-klan-successor-of-hiram-w-evans.html |url-status=live }} In 1946, Samuel Green reestablished the KKK at a ceremony on Stone Mountain.{{sfn|Quarles|1999|pp=80–83}} His group primarily operated in Georgia. Green was succeeded by Samuel Roper as Imperial Wizard in 1949, and Roper was succeeded by Eldon Edwards in 1950.Staff report (March 4, 1986). Samuel W. Roper, 90, was second director of GBI in early 1940s. Atlanta Journal-Constitution Based in Atlanta, Edwards worked to rebuild the organization by uniting the different factions of the KKK from other parts of the United States, but the strength of the organization was short-lived, and the group fractured as it competed with other klan organizations. In 1959, Roy Davis was elected to follow Edwards as national leader.{{cite news|title=Imperial Wizard Says KKK's Membership Very Small in Texas|date=February 11, 1961|work=Dallas Morning News}} Edwards had previously appointed Davis Grand Dragon of Texas in an effort to unite their two klan organizations. Davis was already leading the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Davis held rallies Florida and other southern states during 1961 and 1962 recruiting members. Davis had been a close associate of William J. Simmons and been active in the KKK since it first reformed in 1915.{{cite news|title=Ku Klux Klan Active In Shreveport Area|publisher=The Times of Shreveport|date=February 10, 1961}}{{cite news|title=Klan Is Renounced By 4,000 at Chattanooga|publisher=The Tennessean|date=October 4, 1924}}{{cite news|title=Simmons Order Growing Rapidly|publisher=Arkansas Gazette|date=October 6, 1924}}

Congress launched an investigation into the KKK in early 1964, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Davis, based in Dallas, resigned as Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights shortly after the Original Knights received a Congressional subpoena. The Original Knights became increasingly fractured in the immediate aftermath as many members were forced to testify before Congress.{{cite book |author=Committee on Un-American Activities |title=Activities of Ku Klux Klan Organizations of the United States; Parts 1–5 |publisher=United States Congress |date=January 1966 |page=49}} The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan formed in 1964 after splitting from the Original Knights.{{cite news|title=No Assistance Given In Case|date=May 18, 1965|publisher=Lake Charles American Press}} According to an FBI report published in May 1965, the KKK was divided into 14 different organizations at the time with a total membership of approximately 9,000. The FBI reported that Roy Davis's Original Knights was the largest faction and had about 1,500 members. Robert Shelton of Alabama was leading a faction of 400–600 members. Congressional investigators found that by the end of 1965 most members of Original Knights organization joined Shelton's United Klans and the Original Knights of the KKK disbanded. Shelton's United Klan continued to absorb members from the competing factions and remained the largest Klan group unto the 1970s, peaking with an estimated 30,000 members and another 250,000 non-member supporters during the late 1960s.{{cite news |title=Robert Shelton, 73, Leader of Big Klan Faction |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/us/robert-shelton-73-leader-of-big-klan-faction.html |work=The New York Times |date=March 20, 2003 |access-date=September 18, 2007 |archive-date=May 18, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090518014732/http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/us/robert-shelton-73-leader-of-big-klan-faction.html |url-status=live }}

After the decline of the national organization, small independent groups adopted the name "Ku Klux Klan", along with variations. They had no formal relationships with each other, and most had no connection to the second KKK, except for the fact that they copied its terminology and costumes. Beginning in the 1950s, for instance, individual Klan groups in Birmingham, Alabama, began to resist social change and Black people's efforts to improve their lives by bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods. The white men worked in mining and steel industries, with access to these materials. There were so many bombings of Black people's homes in Birmingham by Klan groups in the 1950s that the city was nicknamed "Bombingham".{{sfn|McWhorter|2001}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

During the tenure of Bull Connor as police commissioner in Birmingham, Klan groups were closely allied with the police and operated with impunity. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham in 1961, Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police to quell the attack.{{sfn|McWhorter|2001}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} When local and state authorities failed to protect the Freedom Riders and activists, the federal government began to establish intervention and protection. In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors' administrations.{{sfn|McWhorter|2001}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}} In Birmingham and elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil rights activists. In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation, and assassination directly against individuals. Continuing disfranchisement of Black people across the South meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all-white and demonstrably biased verdicts and sentences.{{sfn|McWhorter|2001}}

File:FBI Poster of Missing Civil Rights Workers.jpg, Chaney, and Schwerner were three civil rights workers abducted and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan.]]

According to a report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of 40 Black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some of the bombing victims were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who refused to bow to racist convention or were innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random violence.{{sfn|Egerton|1994|pp=562–563}}

Among the more notorious murders by Klan members in the 1950s and 1960s were:

• The 1951 Christmas Eve bombing of the home of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) activists Harry and Harriette Moore in Mims, Florida, resulting in their deaths."[http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/454.html Who Was Harry T. Moore?]" {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120118102012/http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/454.html |date=January 18, 2012 }} The Palm Beach Post, August 16, 1999.
• The 1957 murder of Willie Edwards Jr., who was forced by Klansmen to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.{{cite news |last=Cox |first=Major W. |title=Justice Still Absent in Bridge Death |url=http://www.majorcox.com/columns/edwards1.htm |work=Montgomery Advertiser |date=March 2, 1999 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101126110805/http://majorcox.com/columns/edwards1.htm |archive-date=November 26, 2010}}
• The 1963 assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In 1994, former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted.
• The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in September 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four African American girls and injured 22 people. The perpetrators were Klan members Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2001 and 2002. The fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died before he was indicted.
• The 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, three civil rights workers, in Mississippi. Seven men were convicted of federal civil rights charges in the 1960s. In June 2005, Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of state manslaughter charges.{{cite news |last=Axtman |first=Kris |title=Mississippi verdict greeted by a generation gap |url=http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0623/p01s03-ussc.html |work=The Christian Science Monitor |date=June 23, 2005 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060629153401/http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0623/p01s03-ussc.html |archive-date=June 29, 2006 |url-status=live }}
• The 1964 murder of two Black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in Mississippi. In August 2007, based on the confession of Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards, James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted. Seale was sentenced to serve three life sentences. Seale, who died in prison in 2011, was a former Mississippi policeman and sheriff's deputy.{{cite web |url=http://news.findlaw.com/usatoday/docs/crights/usseale12407ind.html |title=Reputed Klansman, Ex-Cop, and Sheriff's Deputy Indicted For The 1964 Murders of Two Young African-American Men in Mississippi; U.S. v. James Ford Seale |access-date=March 23, 2008 |date=January 24, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080328042914/http://news.findlaw.com/usatoday/docs/crights/usseale12407ind.html |archive-date=March 28, 2008 }}
• The 1965 Alabama murder of Viola Liuzzo. She was a Southern-raised Detroit mother of five who was visiting the state in order to attend a civil rights march. At the time of her murder, Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights marchers related to the Selma to Montgomery March.
• The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Samuel Bowers was convicted of his murder and sentenced to life. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial and the other's indictment was dismissed.
• In July 1966, in Bogalusa, Louisiana, a stronghold of Klan activity, Clarence Triggs was found murdered.{{cite news | last=Keller |first=Larry |title=Klan Murder Shines Light on Bogalusa, La |url=https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2009/klan-murder-shines-light-bogalusa-la. |url-status=live |work=Intelligence Report |date=May 29, 2009 |access-date=August 13, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170814055432/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2009/klan-murder-shines-light-bogalusa-la |archive-date=August 14, 2017}}
• The 1967 multiple bombings in Jackson, Mississippi, of the residence of a Methodist activist, Robert Kochtitzky, the synagogue, and the residence of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum. These were carried out by Klan member Thomas Albert Tarrants III, who was convicted in 1968. Another Klan bombing was averted in Meridian the same year.{{sfn|Nelson|1993|pp=208–211}}

There was considerable resistance among African Americans and white allies to the Klan. In 1953, newspaper publishers W. Horace Carter (Tabor City, North Carolina), who had campaigned for three years, and Willard Cole (Whiteville, North Carolina) 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"."[http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Public-Service Public Service]" {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131112124907/http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Public-Service |date=November 12, 2013 }}. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved November 8, 2013. 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.{{cite web |url=http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/jan2005/jan05.html |title=January 1958{{snd}}The Lumbees face the Klan |author=Graham, Nicholas |date=January 2005 |publisher=University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |access-date=June 26, 2005 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071024123305/http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/jan2005/jan05.html |archive-date=October 24, 2007 }}

While the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had paid informants in the Klan (for instance, in Birmingham in the early 1960s), 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.{{sfn|McWhorter|2001}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

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;{{cite web| url=http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-CivRts2.html |title=The Civil Rights Movement, 1964–1968 |author=Simon, Dennis M. |publisher=Southern Methodist University |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050827194827/http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-CivRts2.html |archive-date=August 27, 2005 }} 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.{{Cite journal|date=1965|title=Ku Klux Klan Probe Begun |url=https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal65-875-26759-1261051|journal=CQ Almanac|edition=21|pages=1517–1525|access-date=August 14, 2017}}

File:Kkk-march-violence.jpg, 1977]]

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.{{Cite news |last=Times |first=William K. Stevens Special to The New York |date=1973-05-22 |title=5 Ex-Klansmen Convicted in School Bus Bomb Plot |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/22/archives/5-exklansmen-convicted-in-school-bus-bomb-plot.html |access-date=2023-07-06 |issn=0362-4331 |archive-date=July 7, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230707162447/https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/22/archives/5-exklansmen-convicted-in-school-bus-bomb-plot.html |url-status=live }}{{Cite web |title=Daily Illini 10 September 1971 — Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections |url=https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19710910.2.14&e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN---------- |access-date=2023-07-06 |website=idnc.library.illinois.edu |archive-date=July 7, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230707161827/https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19710910.2.14&e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN---------- |url-status=live }} 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.{{cite news |title='Ladies' Become Vocal in Ku Klux Klan |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-post-crescent-the-post-crescent-wi-m/71436202/ |newspaper=The Post-Crescent |location=Appleton, Wisconsin |date=May 23, 1975 |page=9 |via=Newspapers.com |access-date=April 19, 2025 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160307035011/https://www.newspapers.com/image/22745082/?terms=%22vanderbilt%2Buniversity%22%2B%22ku%2Bklux%2Bklan%22 |archive-date=March 7, 2016 |url-status=live }} {{Open access}}

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.{{cite news |url=http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/18/remembering_the_1979_greensboro_massacre_25 |title=Remembering the 1979 Greensboro Massacre: 25 Years Later Survivors Form Country's First Truth and Reconciliation Commission |work=Democracy Now! |date=November 18, 2004 |access-date=August 15, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090806031642/http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/18/remembering_the_1979_greensboro_massacre_25 |archive-date=August 6, 2009 |url-status=live }} The Communist Workers' Party had sponsored a rally against the Klan in an effort to organize predominantly Black industrial workers in the area.Mark Hand (November 18, 2004). [http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand11182004/ "The Greensboro Massacre"]. Press Action. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081006171314/http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand11182004/ |date=October 6, 2008 }} Klan members drove up with arms in their car trunks, and attacked marchers.

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.{{sfn|Thompson|1982}}{{Specify|reason=need specific pages|date=August 2024}}

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.

In 1980, three KKK members shot four elderly Black women (Viola Ellison, Lela Evans, Opal Jackson, and Katherine Johnson) 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.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=r59bGyH4lOAC&q=1980+chattanooga+kkk+shootings&pg=PA22 |title=The White Separatist Movement in the United States: "White Power, White Pride!" |author=Betty A. Dobratz & Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile |publisher=JHU Press |date=2000|access-date=February 20, 2011|isbn=978-0801865374}}{{cite web |url=https://www.archives.gov/news/john-roberts/accession-60-89-0173/039-civil-rights-division-anti-klan/folder039.pdf |title=Women's Appeal for Justice in Chattanooga{{snd}}US Department of Justice |access-date=February 20, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110522025207/http://www.archives.gov/news/john-roberts/accession-60-89-0173/039-civil-rights-division-anti-klan/folder039.pdf |archive-date=May 22, 2011 |url-status=live}}{{cite web |url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=861&dat=19800422&id=5SMNAAAAIBAJ&pg=6077,4796456 |work=The Victoria Advocate |title=Bonds for Klan Upheld |via=Google News |date=April 22, 1980 |access-date=February 20, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150919034508/https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=861&dat=19800422&id=5SMNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QmsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6077,4796456 |archive-date=September 19, 2015 |url-status=live}} In 1982, a jury awarded the five women $535,000 in a civil trial.{{cite news |author=UPI |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/28/us/around-the-nation-jury-award-to-5-blacks-hailed-as-blow-to-klan.html?n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FB%2FBlack%20Culture%20and%20 |work=The New York Times |title=History Around the Nation; Jury Award to 5 Blacks Hailed as Blow to Klan |location=Chattanooga, TN |date=February 28, 1982 |access-date=February 20, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110512151509/http://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/28/us/around-the-nation-jury-award-to-5-blacks-hailed-as-blow-to-klan.html?n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FB%2FBlack%20Culture%20and%20 |archive-date=May 12, 2011 |url-status=live}}

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.{{cite news|title=Ex-Klansman sheds tears for victim before execution |url=http://www.deseretnews.com/article/564664/Ex-Klansman-sheds-tears-for-victim-before-execution.html?pg=all|access-date=June 15, 2016|work=Deseret News|date=June 6, 1997|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160804211903/http://www.deseretnews.com/article/564664/Ex-Klansman-sheds-tears-for-victim-before-execution.html?pg=all|archive-date=August 4, 2016|url-status=dead}} 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 (SPLC) 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.{{cite news |last=Kornbluth |first=Jesse |title=The Woman Who Beat The Klan |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/01/magazine/the-woman-who-beat-the-klan.html?pagewanted=all|url-status=live |work=The New York Times Magazine |date=November 1, 1987 |access-date=June 15, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160808010100/http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/01/magazine/the-woman-who-beat-the-klan.html?pagewanted=all |archive-date=August 8, 2016}}{{cite news|title=Klan Member Put to Death In Race Death|date=June 6, 1997|newspaper=The New York Times|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/06/us/klan-member-put-to-death-in-race-death.html|access-date=August 9, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151015053956/http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/06/us/klan-member-put-to-death-in-race-death.html|archive-date=October 15, 2015|url-status=live}}

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In 1995, Don Black and Chloê Hardin, the ex-wife of the KKK grand wizard David Duke, began a small bulletin board system (BBS) called Stormfront, which has become a prominent online forum for white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, hate speech, racism, and antisemitism in the early 21st century."[http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/5/143556/393 RedState, White Supremacy, and Responsibility]" {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160427010459/http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/5/143556/393 |date=April 27, 2016}}, Daily Kos, December 5, 2005.Bill O'Reilly, "[https://www.foxnews.com/story/circling-the-wagons-in-georgia Circling the Wagons in Georgia]" [https://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,86338,00.html], Fox News, May 8, 2003."[http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2001/dtv2001-0023.html WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center: Case No. DTV2001-0023]" {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170326190909/http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2001/dtv2001-0023.html |date=March 26, 2017}}, World Intellectual Property Organization, January 13, 2002.

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.{{cite web|url=http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/affiliations.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk |title=Ku Klux Klan{{snd}}Affiliations{{snd}}Extremism in America |publisher=Anti-Defamation League |access-date=July 28, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100729144311/http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/affiliations.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk |archive-date=July 29, 2010}}{{Cite web |title=Immigration fuels Klan surge {{!}} Facing South |url=https://www.facingsouth.org/2007/02/immigration-fuels-klan-surge.html |access-date=2023-07-04 |website=www.facingsouth.org |archive-date=July 4, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230704213942/https://www.facingsouth.org/2007/02/immigration-fuels-klan-surge.html |url-status=live }}{{Cite web |date=2007-02-06 |title=Report: Supremacist activity flourishes |url=https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16995297 |access-date=2023-07-04 |website=NBC News |language=en |archive-date=July 4, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230704214622/https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16995297 |url-status=live }}

The modern KKK is not one organization; rather, it is composed of small independent chapters across the United States.{{cite web|url=http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.asp |title=About the Ku Klux Klan{{snd}}Extremism in America |publisher=Anti-Defamation League |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100725122657/http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.asp |archive-date=July 25, 2010 }} 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".{{cite web|url=http://www.adl.org/backgrounders/american_knights_kkk.asp |title=Church of the American Knights of the KKK |access-date=July 28, 2010 |date=October 22, 1999 |publisher=Anti-Defamation League |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100901094652/http://www.adl.org/backgrounders/american_knights_kkk.asp |archive-date=September 1, 2010}} In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), 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".{{cite news |first=Liam |last=Stack |date=February 13, 2017 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/kkk-leader-death-frank-ancona.html |title=Leader of a Ku Klux Klan Group Is Found Dead in Missouri |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170215102320/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/kkk-leader-death-frank-ancona.html |archive-date=February 15, 2017 |work=The New York Times}} 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.{{cite web|url=http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp |title=Active U.S. Hate Groups |website=Intelligence Report |publisher=Southern Poverty Law Center |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050406181750/http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp |archive-date=April 6, 2005 }}{{cite web|url=http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.asp |title=About the Ku Klux Klan{{snd}}Extremism in America |publisher=Anti-Defamation League |access-date=July 28, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100725122657/http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.asp |archive-date=July 25, 2010 }}

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.{{cite news|last=Palmer|first=Brian|title=Ku Klux Kontraction: How did the KKK lose nearly one-third of its chapters in one year?|url=http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/03/ku_klux_klan_in_decline_why_did_the_kkk_lose_so_many_chapters_in_2010_.html|access-date=March 25, 2012|newspaper=Slate Magazine|date=March 8, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120325030239/http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/03/ku_klux_klan_in_decline_why_did_the_kkk_lose_so_many_chapters_in_2010_.html|archive-date=March 25, 2012|url-status=live}}

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.{{cite web|url=https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2016/year-hate-and-extremism|title=The Year in Hate and Extremism|date=February 17, 2016 |publisher=Southern Poverty Law|access-date=April 29, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160402041946/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2016/year-hate-and-extremism|archive-date=April 2, 2016|url-status=live}} 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.{{cite web |last=Knickerbocker |first=Brad |title=Anti-Immigrant Sentiments Fuel Ku Klux Klan Resurgence |url=http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0209/p02s02-ussc.html |url-status=live |website=The Christian Science Monitor |date=February 9, 2007 |access-date=April 5, 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080327201821/http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0209/p02s02-ussc.html |archive-date=March 27, 2008}} 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."{{cite journal |last1=Akins |first1=J. Keith |title=The Ku Klux Klan: America's Forgotten Terrorists |journal=Law Enforcement Executive Forum |issue=January 2006 |page=137 |url=https://iletsbeiforumjournal.com/images/Issues/FreeIssues/ILEEF%202006-5.7.pdf#page=144 |access-date=November 30, 2020 |publisher=Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board Executive Institute |archive-date=October 1, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201001232934/https://www.iletsbeiforumjournal.com/images/Issues/FreeIssues/ILEEF%202006-5.7.pdf#page=144 |url-status=usurped }} The Klan has produced Islamophobic propaganda and distributed anti-Islamic flyers.{{cite news|last=Rink|first=Matthew|date=September 25, 2020|title=KKK-supportive notes dropped in Erie County driveways|work=Erie Times-News|url=https://www.goerie.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/25/kkk-supportive-notes-dropped-in-erie-county-driveways/42691653/|access-date=March 10, 2021|archive-date=March 2, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210302191520/https://www.goerie.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/25/kkk-supportive-notes-dropped-in-erie-county-driveways/42691653/|url-status=live}}

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.{{cite news|title=A.C.L.U. Lawsuit Backs Klan In Seeking Permit for Cross |newspaper=The New York Times |date=December 16, 1993 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/16/us/aclu-lawsuit-backs-klan-in-seeking-permit-for-cross.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101006202846/http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/16/us/aclu-lawsuit-backs-klan-in-seeking-permit-for-cross.html |archive-date=October 6, 2010}} The ACLU professes a mission to defend the constitutional rights of all groups, whether left, center, or right.

{{anchor|Frank Ancona}}

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[ed] 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.Criss, Doug and Burnside, Tina (February 20, 2019). "[https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/19/media/alabama-newspaper-klan-trnd/index.html The editor of an Alabama newspaper is calling for the return of the Ku Klux Klan's infamous night rides]". CNN ({{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190222070832/https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/19/media/alabama-newspaper-klan-trnd/index.html |date=February 22, 2019}}). Sutton expressed no regret and said that the editorial was intended to be "ironic", but that "not many people understand irony today."Gore, Leada (February 21, 2019). "[https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/goodloe-sutton-writer-of-kkk-editorial-not-sorry-says-hed-do-it-all-over-again.html Goodloe Sutton, writer of KKK editorial, not sorry, says he'd 'do it all over again']". AL.com ({{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190222053000/https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/goodloe-sutton-writer-of-kkk-editorial-not-sorry-says-hed-do-it-all-over-again.html |date=February 22, 2019}}).

A list is maintained by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL):{{cite web

|title = Ku Klux Klan{{snd}}Extremism in America{{snd}}Active Groups (by state)

|publisher = Anti-Defamation League

|access-date = March 15, 2011

| year = 2011

|url = http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/active_group_2006.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110212042824/http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/active_group_2006.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk

|archive-date = February 12, 2011

}}

• Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, prevalent in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and other areas of the Southern U.S.
• Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
• Imperial Klans of America{{cite news | url=https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna27665247 | title=No. 2 Klan group on trial in Ky. teen's beating | agency=Associated Press | date=November 11, 2008 | access-date=November 22, 2008 | df=mdy-all | archive-date=October 4, 2013 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004232318/http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27665247/ | url-status=live }}
• Knights of the White Camelia{{cite web

|title=White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan{{snd}}Home page

|website=wckkkk.org

|publisher=White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

|access-date=March 15, 2011

| year=2011

|url=http://www.wckkkk.org/

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110208125116/http://www.wckkkk.org/

|archive-date=February 8, 2011

}}

• Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, headed by national director and self-claimed pastor Thomas Robb, and based in Harrison and Zinc, Arkansas.{{cite news|url=http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/Klan-vs-Rhino-Times.htm |title=Arkansas Klan Group Loses Legal Battle with North Carolina Newspaper |publisher=Anti-Defamation League |date=July 9, 2009 |access-date=August 15, 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100412051638/http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/Klan-vs-Rhino-Times.htm |archive-date=April 12, 2010 }}{{Cite web |url=https://kkk.bz/frequently-asked-questions/ |title=FAQ{{mdash}}The Knights Party |website=The Knights Party | language=en-US |archive-url=https://archive.today/20190923170746/https://kkk.bz/frequently-asked-questions/ |archive-date=September 23, 2019 |access-date=March 16, 2021 |url-status=usurped}} It claims to be the largest Klan organization in America today.{{Cite news |url=https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/knights-ku-klux-klan|title=Knights of the Ku Klux Klan |work=Southern Poverty Law Center|access-date=September 30, 2018|language=en|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181001070104/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/knights-ku-klux-klan |archive-date=October 1, 2018|url-status=live}}
• Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a North Carolina-based group headed by Will Quigg,{{cite news |first=Robert |last=Tait |title=The KKK leader who says he backs Hillary Clinton |newspaper=The Daily Telegraph |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/12192975/The-KKK-leader-who-says-he-backs-Hillary-Clinton.html |date=March 14, 2016 |access-date=March 15, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160314215153/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/12192975/The-KKK-leader-who-says-he-backs-Hillary-Clinton.html |archive-date=March 14, 2016 |url-status=live}} is currently thought to be the largest KKK chapter.{{cite news |first=Max |last=Blau |title='Still a racist nation': American bigotry on full display at KKK rally in South Carolina |newspaper=The Guardian |url=https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/19/kkk-clashes-south-carolina-racism |date=July 19, 2015 |access-date=March 15, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160317204601/http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/19/kkk-clashes-south-carolina-racism |archive-date=March 17, 2016 |url-status=live}}
• White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

Aside from the Ku Klux Klan in Canada, there have been various attempts to organize KKK chapters outside the United States in places such as: Asia, Europe and Oceania, with negligible results.{{sfn|Chalmers|1987|p=319}}

In apartheid 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.{{Cite book |last=Burke |first=Kyle |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_JhVDwAAQBAJ&dq=kkk+rhodesia&pg=PA53 |title=Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War |date=2018 |publisher=UNC Press Books |isbn=978-1469640747 |language=en}}

In the 1970s, Rhodesia had a Ku Klux Klan, led by Len Idensohn, attacking Ian Smith for his perceived moderation.{{Cite book |last=Kapungu |first=Leonard T. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZR91AAAAMAAJ&q=%2522ku+klux+klan%2522+rhodesia |title=Rhodesia: The Struggle for Freedom |date=1974 |publisher=Orbis Books |isbn=978-0883444351 |pages=48 |language=en}}{{Cite book |last=Caute |first=David |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=u2V0AAAAMAAJ&q=%2522Len+Idensohn%2522+rhodesia+klan |title=Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia |date=1983 |publisher=Allen Lane |isbn=978-0713913576 |page=211 |language=en}}

On 1924 vigilantes claimed to have organized themselves into a Klan against "criminals", publishing a program of "social epuration".{{Cite news |date=2020-12-05 |title=El día que llegó el Ku Klux Klan a México |language=es |url=https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/cultura/el-dia-que-llego-el-ku-klux-klan-mexico |access-date=2022-06-18 |archive-date=June 18, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220618211033/https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/cultura/el-dia-que-llego-el-ku-klux-klan-mexico |url-status=live }}

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.{{cite web|url=http://noticias.terra.com.br/brasil/noticias/0,,OI158042-EI306,00-Jovem+ligado+a+Ku+Klux+Klan+e+detido+em+Sao+Paulo.html|title=Jovem ligado Ku Klux Klan detido em So Paulo|work=Terra |access-date=March 11, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140311210858/http://noticias.terra.com.br/brasil/noticias/0,,OI158042-EI306,00-Jovem+ligado+a+Ku+Klux+Klan+e+detido+em+Sao+Paulo.html|archive-date=March 11, 2014 |url-status=live|language=pt-BR}}

The Klan has also been established in the Canal Zone.{{sfn|Chalmers|1987|p=319}}

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.{{sfn|Chalmers|1987|p=319}}{{Cite book |last1=Perez |first1=Louis A. Jr. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6IWzZM0I4QgC&dq=%2522ku+klux+klan%2522+cuba&pg=PA55 |title=Cuban Studies 40 |last2=Stoner |first2=K. Lynn |last3=Perez |first3=Gladys Marel Garcia |last4=Chapa |first4=Teresa |last5=Hynson |first5=Rachel M. |date=2010-01-31 |publisher=University of Pittsburgh Press |isbn=978-0822978480 |page=55 |language=en}}

During the Vietnam War, klaverns were established on some US military bases, often tolerated by military authorities.{{Cite book |last=Westheider |first=James E. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sQl4AAAAQBAJ&dq=vietnam+klaverns&pg=PA85 |title=The African American Experience in Vietnam: Brothers in Arms |date=2007 |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield Publishers |isbn=978-0742569515 |page=85 |language=en}}{{Cite book |last=Jordan |first=John H. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vSluDQAAQBAJ&dq=vietnam+klaverns&pg=PA26 |title=Vietnam, PTSD, USMC, Black-Americans and Me |date=2016 |publisher=Dorrance Publishing |isbn=978-1480972001 |language=en}}

In the 1920s, the Klan briefly existed in Shanghai.{{sfn|Chalmers|1987|p=319}}{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6p6GAAAAIAAJ&q=%2522Ku+Klux+Klan%2522+shanghai |title=Pacific Affairs |publisher=University of British Columbia |year=1992 |page=557 |language=en}}

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.{{Cite book |last=Ramdin |first=Ron |title=The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain |year=2017 |page=216}}{{Cite magazine |date=March 15, 1998 |title=The Klan Overseas |url=https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1998/klan-overseas |magazine=Intelligence Report |language=en |access-date=2022-06-18 |archive-date=June 18, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220618211006/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1998/klan-overseas |url-status=live }} In 2018, Klan-clad far-right activists marched in front of a Northern Irish mosque.{{Cite news |date=2018-11-04 |title=KKK garb on Northern Irish streets – then a swift display of unity |language=en |url=http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/04/northen-ireland-halloween-hate-crime |access-date=2022-06-18 |archive-date=June 18, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220618211031/https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/04/northen-ireland-halloween-hate-crime |url-status=live }}

In Germany, a KKK-related group, Ritter des Feurigen Kreuzes ("Knights of the Fiery Cross"), 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.{{cite web|url=https://www.politische-bildung-brandenburg.de/node/8756|title=Orden der Ritter vom feurigen Kreuz|website=politische-bildung-brandenburg.de|language=de}}{{Dead link|date=February 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}{{sfn|Chalmers|1987|p=319}}{{Cite book |last=Nagel |first=Irmela |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0QOvMkBfVXsC&q=%2522Ritter+des+Feurigen+Kreuzes%2522+klan |title=Fememorde und Fememordprozesse in der Weimarer Republik |date=1991 |publisher=Böhlau |isbn=978-3412062903 |language=de}} 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.{{cite news |url=http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-police-kept-jobs-despite-ku-klux-klan-involvement-a-847831.html |title=German Police Kept Jobs Despite KKK Involvement |work=Der Spiegel |date=August 2, 2012 |first=Florian |last=Gathmann |access-date=August 24, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120904131955/http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-police-kept-jobs-despite-ku-klux-klan-involvement-a-847831.html |archive-date=September 4, 2012 |url-status=live}}{{cite news |url=http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/369733/20120802/ku-klux-klan-nsu-germany-neo-nazi.htm |title=Ku Klux Klan: German Police Officers Allowed to Stay on Job Despite Links with European Branch of White Supremacists |work=International Business Times |date=July 2, 2014 |access-date=August 24, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120825011129/http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/369733/20120802/ku-klux-klan-nsu-germany-neo-nazi.htm |archive-date=August 25, 2012 |url-status=live}} In 2019, the German authorities conducted raids against a possibly dangerous group called National Socialist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Deutschland.{{cite web|url=https://apnews.com/article/ku-klux-klan-europe-germany-nazism-3e21cd103e61428897282531b850e094|title=German police raid far-right group members, find weapons|publisher=AP News|date=April 30, 2021|access-date=December 8, 2021|archive-date=December 9, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211209000903/https://apnews.com/article/ku-klux-klan-europe-germany-nazism-3e21cd103e61428897282531b850e094|url-status=live}}{{cite web|url=https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-raid-suspected-kkk-members-homes/a-47113523|title=German police raid suspected KKK members' homes|work=Deutsche Welle|access-date=December 8, 2021|archive-date=December 9, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211209000904/https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-raid-suspected-kkk-members-homes/a-47113523|url-status=live}}{{cite web|url=https://staatsanwaltschaft-stuttgart.justiz-bw.de/pb/,Lde/Startseite/Presse/Durchsuchung+Ku-Klux-Klan/?LISTPAGE=5675643|title=Bundesweite Durchsuchungen bei mutmaßlichen Mitgliedern der Gruppierung "National Socialist Knights of the Ku-Klux-Klan Deutschland"|work=Staatsanwanltschaft Stuttgart (in German)|date=January 16, 2019|access-date=December 8, 2021|archive-date=December 9, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211209001355/https://staatsanwaltschaft-stuttgart.justiz-bw.de/pb/,Lde/Startseite/Presse/Durchsuchung+Ku-Klux-Klan/?LISTPAGE=5675643|url-status=live}}

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.{{Cite web |last=Daniszewski |first=John |date=2001-01-06 |title=Ex-Klansman David Duke Sets Sights on Russian Anti-Semites |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-06-mn-9088-story.html |access-date=2023-10-05 |website=Los Angeles Times |language=en-US |archive-date=December 13, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221213193104/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-06-mn-9088-story.html |url-status=live }}{{Cite web |date=2001-02-02 |title=David Duke, To Russia With Hate – CBS News |url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/david-duke-to-russia-with-hate/ |access-date=2023-10-05 |website=www.cbsnews.com |language=en-US |archive-date=January 22, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220122042004/https://www.cbsnews.com/news/david-duke-to-russia-with-hate/ |url-status=live }}

In the 1920s, the Klan was rumoured to exist in Lithuania and Czechoslovakia.{{sfn|Chalmers|1987|p=319}}

In Australia in the late 1990s, former One Nation member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country,{{cite news|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/358783.stm|title=Ku Klux Klan sets up Australian branch|date=June 2, 1999|work=BBC News|access-date=July 19, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004214423/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/358783.stm|archive-date=October 4, 2013|url-status=live}}{{cite news|last=Ansley|first=Greg|url=http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=7865|title=Dark mystique of the KKK|date=June 5, 1999|newspaper=The New Zealand Herald|access-date=July 19, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120214155130/http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=7865|archive-date=February 14, 2012|url-status=live}} and circa 2012 the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First.{{cite news|last=Jensen|first=Erik|url=https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-have-infiltrated-party-kkk-20090709-der4.html|title=We have infiltrated party: KKK|date=July 10, 2009|newspaper=Sydney Morning Herald|access-date=July 19, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120426025511/http://www.smh.com.au/national/we-have-infiltrated-party-kkk-20090709-der4.html|archive-date=April 26, 2012|url-status=live}} Branches of the Klan have previously existed in New South Wales and Victoria, as well as allegedly in Queensland.{{cite web | url=http://nationalunitygovernment.org/content/killing-raises-ku-klux-klan-link-queensland | title=Killing raises Ku Klux Klan link in Queensland | Sovereign Union – First Nations Asserting Sovereignty | access-date=February 14, 2023 | archive-date=February 14, 2023 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230214054925/http://nationalunitygovernment.org/content/killing-raises-ku-klux-klan-link-queensland | url-status=live }} Unlike in the United States, the Australian branches did not require members to be Christian, but did require them to be white.

A Ku Klux Klan group was established in Fiji in 1874 by white American and British settlers wanting to enact White supremacy, although its operations were quickly put to an end by the British who, although not officially yet established as the major authority of Fiji, had played a leading role in establishing a new constitutional monarchy, the Kingdom of Fiji, that was being threatened by the activities of the Fijian Klan, which owned fortresses and artillery. By March, it had become the "British Subjects' Mutual Protection Society", which included Francis Herbert Dufty.{{Cite book |last=Gravelle |first=Kim |title=Fiji's Times: A History of Fiji |publisher=Suva: The Fiji Times |year=1988 |pages=120–124}}{{Cite book |last=Ali |first=Ahmed |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=K4U9Pg1K9hIC&q=Klan |title=The Federation Movement in Fiji, 1880–1902 |date=2008 |isbn=978-1440102158 |page=7 |publisher=iUniverse |language=en}}{{Cite news |date=7 June 2020 |title=Discovering Fiji: Cakobau and the Ku Klux Klan |language=en |url=https://www.fijitimes.com.fj/discovering-fiji-cakobau-and-the-ku-klux-klan/ |access-date=2022-06-25 |archive-date=October 27, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221027175021/https://www.fijitimes.com.fj/discovering-fiji-cakobau-and-the-ku-klux-klan/ |url-status=live }}{{Cite book |last=van Dijk |first=Kees |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lnAyBwAAQBAJ&q=%2522British%2520Subjects%27%2520Mutual%2520Protection%2520Society%2522%2520klan&pg=PA69 |title=Pacific Strife: the great powers and their political and economic rivalries in Asia and the Western Pacific, 1870–1914 |date=2015-03-14 |publisher=Amsterdam University Press |isbn=978-9048516193 |page=69 |language=en}}

In the 1920s, the Klan had been rumoured to exist in New Zealand.{{sfn|Chalmers|1987|p=319}}{{cite news |url=https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/06/photos-resurface-of-new-zealand-ku-klux-klan-marches-as-kiwis-told-to-get-off-their-high-horse.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200703205756/https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/06/photos-resurface-of-new-zealand-ku-klux-klan-marches-as-kiwis-told-to-get-off-their-high-horse.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=July 3, 2020 |title=Photos resurface of New Zealand Ku Klux Klan marches as Kiwis told to get off their high horse |author=Matt Burrows |date=2020-06-09 |publisher=Newshub }}

{{main|Kloran|Ku Klux Klan 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 (Are you a Klansman?) to surreptitiously identify themselves to another potential member. The response AKIA (A Klansman, I am.) completes the greeting.{{cite web |url=http://www.adl.org/hate_symbols/acronyms_KIGY.asp |title=A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos and Tattoos |publisher=Anti-Defamation League |access-date=July 19, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120815051939/http://www.adl.org/hate_symbols/acronyms_KIGY.asp |archive-date=August 15, 2012}}

Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words{{sfn|Axelrod|1997|p=160}} beginning with "Kl", including:

• Klabee{{snd}}treasurers
• Klavern{{snd}}local organization
• Imperial Kleagle{{snd}}recruiter
• Klecktoken{{snd}}initiation fee
• Kligrapp{{snd}}secretary
• Klonvokation{{snd}}gathering
• Kloran{{snd}}ritual book
• Kloreroe{{snd}}delegate
• Imperial Kludd{{snd}}chaplain

All of the above terminology was created by William Joseph Simmons, as part of his 1915 revival of the Klan.{{sfn|Wade|1987|p=142|ps=: {{"'}}It was rather difficult, sometimes, to make the two letters fit in,' he recalled later, 'but I did it somehow.{{'"}}}} 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.{{sfn|Quarles|1999|p=227|ps=: "Imperial Kludd: Is the Chaplain of the Imperial Klonvokation and shall perform such other duties as may be required by the Imperial Wizard ..."}}

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

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 yin-yang which in the subsequent years, lost the white part and was reinterpreted as a "blood drop".{{cite web |title=Blood Drop Cross |url=https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/blood-drop-cross |website=Anti-Defamation League |access-date=May 30, 2021 |archive-date=May 8, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210508233138/https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/blood-drop-cross |url-status=live }}

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.{{cite web |title=Triangular Klan Symbol |url=https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/triangular-klan-symbol |website=Anti-Defamation League |access-date=May 30, 2021 |archive-date=June 2, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210602213637/https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/triangular-klan-symbol |url-status=live }}

{{main|Cross burning}}

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.{{cite web |title=Burning Cross |url=https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/burning-cross |website=Anti-Defamation League |access-date=May 30, 2021 |archive-date=May 25, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210525105416/https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/burning-cross |url-status=live }} 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.{{cite news |last=Koerner |first=Brendan |title=Why Does the Ku Klux Klan Burn Crosses? |url=https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/12/why-does-the-ku-klux-klan-burn-crosses.html |access-date=November 10, 2021 |work=Slate |date=December 17, 2002 |archive-date=November 10, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211110155909/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/12/why-does-the-ku-klux-klan-burn-crosses.html |url-status=live }} 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.

File:KKK.svg|Blood Drop Cross

File:3 Triangles KKK.svg|Triangular Klan symbol

File:Klansmen in robes with burning cross (State's Exhibit No.4). The photographer for this shot is not listed or known, and it is likely that this photo was taken at a Klan cross burning in earlyJanuary (8223346951).jpg|Cross burning in Lumberton, North Carolina (1958)

File:KKK Burn resubmit.JPG|Cross burning in Oak Hill, Ohio (1987)

{{div col}}

• Anti-mask laws
• Black Legion (political movement)
• Camp Nordland
• History of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey
• Ku Klux Klan (honor society)
• Ku Klux Klan in Maine
• Ku Klux Klan members in United States politics
• Ku Klux Klan raid (Inglewood)
• Ku Klux Klan titles and vocabulary
• Leaders of the Ku Klux Klan
• List of Confederate monuments and memorials
• List of Ku Klux Klan organizations
• List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups
• List of white nationalist organizations
• Mass racial violence in the United States
• Ocoee massacre
• One Hundred Percent American
• Racism in the United States
• Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials
• Rosewood massacre
• Terrorism in the United States
• White supremacy in the United States

{{div col end}}

{{notelist}}

{{reflist}}

{{refbegin|30em}}

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• {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Kelly J. |author-link=Kelly J. Baker |title=Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 |date=2011 |publisher=University Press of Kansas |isbn=978-0700617920 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=O90lKQEACAAJ |access-date=November 17, 2021 |archive-date=April 7, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230407210443/https://books.google.com/books?id=O90lKQEACAAJ |url-status=live }}
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• {{cite book |last=Chalmers |first=David M.| author-link=David Mark Chalmers |title=Backfire: how the Ku Klux Klan helped the civil rights movement |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ziG-M2q3ckYC |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |year=2003 |access-date=February 27, 2016 |isbn=978-0742523104|ref=none}}
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• {{cite journal |last1=Fryer | first1=Roland G. Jr. |last2=Levitt |first2=Steven D. |title=Hatred and Profits: Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan |journal=Quarterly Journal of Economics |volume=127 |issue=4 |pages=1883–1925 |year=2012 |s2cid=155051122 |doi=10.1093/qje/qjs028}}
• {{cite book |title=Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871 |last=Horn |first=Stanley F. |year=1939 |publisher=Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation |location=Montclair, NJ}}
• {{cite book |last1=Hubbs |first1=G. Ward |title=Searching for Freedom After the Civil War: Klansman, Carpetbagger, Scalawag, and Freedman |date=2015 |publisher=University of Alabama Press |isbn=978-0817318604 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=KIVoCQAAQBAJ |language=en |access-date=January 16, 2017 |archive-date=April 24, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230424003149/https://books.google.com/books?id=KIVoCQAAQBAJ |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book|title=The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930|last=Jackson|first=Kenneth T.|year=1967|edition=1992|publisher=Oxford University Press|location=New York|url=https://archive.org/details/kukluxklanincity00jack|url-access=registration}}
• {{cite book |title=The Klan Unmasked |last=Kennedy |first=Stetson |author-link=Stetson Kennedy |year=1990 |publisher=University Press of Florida}}
• {{cite book |last=Klobuchar |first=Lisa |title=1963 Birmingham Church Bombing: The Ku Klux Klan's History of Terror |date=2009 |publisher=Capstone |isbn=978-0756540920 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SRSljuExVuIC&pg=PT43 |access-date=April 14, 2019 }}
• {{cite journal |last=Lewis |first=George |title="An Amorphous Code": The Ku Klux Klan and Un-Americanism, 1915–1965 |journal=Journal of American Studies |date=September 4, 2013 |volume=47 |issue=4 |pages=971–992 |doi=10.1017/S0021875813001357 |publisher=Cambridge University Press|s2cid=143647351|ref=none}}

• {{cite book |last=McVeigh |first=Rory |author-link=Rory M. McVeigh |title=The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-wing Movements and National Politics |date=2009 |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |isbn=978-0816656196 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VKerOfTH5hkC |access-date=November 14, 2021 |archive-date=April 24, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230424003150/https://books.google.com/books?id=VKerOfTH5hkC |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |last=McWhorter |first=Diane |title=Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution |publisher=Simon & Schuster |location=New York |year=2001}}
• {{cite journal |last=Miller |first=Robert Moats |title=A Note on the Relationship between the Protestant Churches and the Revived Ku Klux Klan |journal=The Journal of Southern History |volume=22 |issue=3 |pages=355–368 |date=August 1956 |jstor=2954550 |doi=10.2307/2954550}}
• {{cite book |last=Moore |first=Leonard J. |title=Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |location=Chapel Hill, NC |year=1991}}
• {{cite journal |last=Moore |first=Leonard J. |title=Good Old-Fashioned New Social History and the Twentieth-Century American Right |journal=Reviews in American History |date=December 1996 |volume=24 |issue=4 |pages=555–573 |doi=10.1353/rah.1996.0084 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/28819 |access-date=November 17, 2021 |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |s2cid=143600463 |archive-date=February 24, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210224063006/https://muse.jhu.edu/article/28819 |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |title=Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews |last=Nelson |first=Jack |author-link=Jack Nelson (journalist) |year=1993 |publisher=Simon & Schuster |location=New York |isbn=978-0671692230 |url=https://archive.org/details/terrorinnightthe00nels }}
• {{cite book |last1=Newton |first1=Michael |author-link=Michael Newton (author) |last2=Newton |first2=Judy Ann |title=The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia |publisher=Garland Publishing |location=New York / London |year=199|ref=none}}
• {{cite book |last=Newton |first=Michael |title=The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hxN2QgAACAAJ |publisher=University Press of Florida |date=2001 |access-date=November 17, 2021 |isbn=978-0813021201 |archive-date=April 8, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230408064418/https://books.google.com/books?id=hxN2QgAACAAJ |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |last=Newton |first=Michael |title=The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History |date=2009 |publisher=McFarland, Inc. |isbn=978-0786457045 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YSLCS7hg-DEC |access-date=November 17, 2021 }}
• {{cite journal |last=Parsons |first=Elaine Frantz |year=2005 |title=Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan |journal=The Journal of American History |volume=92 |issue=3 |pages=811–836 |doi=10.2307/3659969 |jstor=3659969}}
• {{cite book |last=Parsons |first=Elaine Frantz |title=Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction |date=2016 |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |location=Chapel Hill |isbn=978-1469625423|ref=none}}
• {{cite book |last=Pegram |first=Thomas R. |title=One Hundred Percent American |date=October 16, 2011 |publisher=Ivan R. Dee |isbn=978-1566639224 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aplUFE1XIcQC |access-date=November 13, 2021 |archive-date=August 12, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220812215318/https://books.google.com/books?id=aplUFE1XIcQC |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |last=Pitsula |first=James M. |title=Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BtJTCgAAQBAJ |publisher=University of British Columbia Press |date=2013 |access-date=November 13, 2021 |isbn=978-0774824927 |archive-date=April 24, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230424003159/https://books.google.com/books?id=BtJTCgAAQBAJ |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |last=Prendergast |first=Michael L. |chapter=A History of Alcohol Problem Prevention Efforts in the United States |editor-last=Holder |editor-first=Harold D. |title=Control Issues in Alcohol Abuse Prevention: Strategies for States and Communities |location=Greenwich, CT |publisher=JAI Press |year=1987}}
• {{cite book |last=Quarles |first=Chester L. |title=The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations: A History and Analysis |date=1999 |publisher=McFarland & Company |isbn=978-0786406470 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fhcnmDIQOW8C&q=imperial%20kludd |access-date=November 14, 2021 |archive-date=April 8, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230408064423/https://books.google.com/books?id=fhcnmDIQOW8C&q=imperial%20kludd |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |last=Rable |first=George C. |title=But There was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction |date=1984 |publisher=University of Georgia Press |isbn=978-0820330112 |edition=2007 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8qn37CH-i9IC |access-date=November 14, 2021 }}
• {{cite book |last=Rhodes |first=James Ford |author-link=James Ford Rhodes |title=History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896 |volume=7 |year=1920}}
• {{cite book |last=Richard |first=Mark Paul |title=Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s |date=2015 |publisher=University of Massachusetts Press |isbn=978-1625341884 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XUDAsgEACAAJ |access-date=November 13, 2021 |archive-date=April 24, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230424003155/https://books.google.com/books?id=XUDAsgEACAAJ |url-status=live|ref=none}}
• {{cite book |last1=Rogers |first1=William |first2=Robert |last2=Ward |first3=Leah |last3=Atkins |first4= Wayne |last4=Flynt |title=Alabama: The History of a Deep South State |year=1994 |publisher=University of Alabama Press |location=Tuscaloosa, AL}}
• {{cite book |last=Sánchez |first=Juan O. |title=Religion and the Ku Klux Klan: Biblical Appropriation in Their Literature and Songs |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1QcXDAAAQBAJ |date=2016 |publisher=McFarland & Company |access-date=November 13, 2021 |isbn=978-1476664859 |archive-date=April 24, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230424003156/https://books.google.com/books?id=1QcXDAAAQBAJ |url-status=live|ref=none}}

• {{cite book |last=Sher |first=Julian |author-link=Julian Sher |title=White Hoods: Canada's Ku Klux Klan |date=1983 |publisher=New Star Books |isbn=978-0919573123 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OnHaAAAAMAAJ |access-date=November 17, 2021 |archive-date=April 7, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230407210446/https://books.google.com/books?id=OnHaAAAAMAAJ |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |last=Stevens |first=Albert Clark |title=The Cyclopedia of Fraternities: A Compilation of Existing Authentic Information and the Results of Original Investigation As to More Than Six Hundred Secret Societies in the United States |date=1907 |publisher=Hamilton printing and publishing company |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=H-K3AAAAIAAJ |access-date=November 17, 2021 |archive-date=April 8, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230408064424/https://books.google.com/books?id=H-K3AAAAIAAJ |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |title=My Life in the Klan |last=Thompson |first=Jerry |year=1982 |publisher=Putnam |location=New York |url=http://dlib.nyu.edu/undercover/my-life-klan-jerry-thompson-nashville-tennessean |isbn=978-0399126956 |access-date=February 27, 2016 |archive-date=March 4, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304120257/http://dlib.nyu.edu/undercover/my-life-klan-jerry-thompson-nashville-tennessean }}
• {{cite book |last=Trelease |first=Allen W. |title=White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction |publisher=Louisiana State University Press |year=1995}}
• {{cite book |last=Wade |first=Wyn Craig |title=The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g_C3AAAAIAAJ |publisher=Simon & Schuster |date=1987 |access-date=November 13, 2021 |isbn=978-0195123579 |archive-date=April 7, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230407210447/https://books.google.com/books?id=g_C3AAAAIAAJ |url-status=live }}
• {{cite book |last=Wade |first=Wyn Craig |title=The Fiery Cross The Ku Klux Klan in America |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6O_XYBMhNYAC |publisher=Oxford University Press |date=1998 |access-date=November 13, 2021 |isbn=978-0195123579 }}

{{refend}}

• Eagles, Charles W., "Urban-Rural Conflict in the 1920s: A Historiographical Assessment". Historian (1986) 49#1 pp. 26–48.
• Horowitz, David A., "The Normality of Extremism: The Ku Klux Klan Revisited". Society (1998) 35#6 pp. 71–77.
• Johnsen, Julia E. ed. (1926). [https://archive.org/details/kukluxklan00john/page/10/mode/2up Ku Klux Klan]. H.H. Wilson Reference Shelf. Organized like a debate handbook with pro and con arguments from primary sources.
• Lay, Shawn, ed., The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s (2nd ed. University of Illinois Press, 2004)
• Lewis, Michael, and Serbu, Jacqueline, "Kommemorating the Ku Klux Klan". Sociological Quarterly (1999) 40#1: 139–158. Deals with the memory of the KKK in Pulaski, Tennessee. [http://www.jimelwood.net/students/chiba/lewis_serbu_2008.pdf Online]; {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200803051952/http://www.jimelwood.net/students/chiba/lewis_serbu_2008.pdf |date=August 3, 2020 }}.
• {{Cite journal |last=Moore |first=Leonard J. |title=Historical Interpretations of the 1920s Klan: The Traditional View and the Populist Revision |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=24 |issue=2 |pages=341–357 |year=1990 |jstor=3787502 |doi=10.1353/jsh/24.2.341}}
• {{Cite news |last=Shah |first=Khushbu |title=The KKK's Mount Rushmore: The problem with Stone Mountain |url=https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/oct/24/stone-mountain-is-it-time-to-remove-americas-biggest-confederate-memorial |newspaper=The Guardian |date=October 24, 2018 |access-date=October 24, 2018 |archive-date=October 24, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181024152615/https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/oct/24/stone-mountain-is-it-time-to-remove-americas-biggest-confederate-memorial |url-status=live }}
• {{Cite journal |last=Sneed |first=Edgar P. |title=A Historiography of Reconstruction in Texas: Some Myths and Problems |journal=The Southwestern Historical Quarterly |volume=72 |issue=4 |pages=435–448 |year=1969 |jstor=30236539}}

{{Commons category}}

{{wikisource|Portal:Ku Klux Klan}}

{{wikinews|Ku Klux Klan}}

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: [https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan Ku Klux Klan]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180406084839/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan |date=April 6, 2018 }}.
• From the Anti-Defamation League:
• [https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/tattered-robes-state-of-kkk-2016.pdf Tattered Robes: The State of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171118095816/https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/tattered-robes-state-of-kkk-2016.pdf |date=November 18, 2017 }} (2016). Not organized as a list of names but many names appear in this report.
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20110212042824/http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/active_group_2006.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk Ku Klux Klan – Active Groups (By State)] (2011) – archived list

• [http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/5397/rec/1 Prescript of the * * ]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121023144801/http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/5397/rec/1 |date=October 23, 2012 }}: first edition of the Klan's 1867 prescript.
• [http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/5396/rec/2 Revised and Amended Prescript of the Order of the * * *]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121023144740/http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/5396/rec/2 |date=October 23, 2012 }}: first edition of the Klan's 1868 prescript.
• [https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Howe%2C+Albion+%281841-1873%29%22 The Ku Klux Klan in Shelby, N.C.] as recorded in two manuscripts in 1871–1872 by Captain Albion Howe (1841–1873), from the collection of The Buffalo History Museum
• [http://library.uncg.edu/dp/crg/ Civil Rights Greensboro]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140706023439/http://library.uncg.edu/dp/crg/ |date=July 6, 2014 }}.
• [http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_intro.htm The Ku Klux Klan in Washington State]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120909122853/http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_intro.htm |date=September 9, 2012 }}. From the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, examines the influence of the second KKK in the state during the 1920s.
• [http://www.nyheritage.org/collections/buffalo-ku-klux-klan-chapter-list-members Buffalo Ku Klux Klan Membership List]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210422002938/http://www.nyheritage.org/collections/buffalo-ku-klux-klan-chapter-list-members |date=April 22, 2021 }}, digitized by the Buffalo History Museum.
• Video clip of 2014 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOInoSHHwWA interview with hooded KKK member]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220807151515/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOInoSHHwWA |date=August 7, 2022 }} by biracial director and filmmaker Mo Asumang for her documentary The Aryan.
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20090716065944/http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/25151/life-goes-inside-todays-kkk "Inside Today's KKK"], multimedia, Life magazine, April 13, 2009
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20170326190608/http://www.foresthistory.org/research/biltmore_project/ohis/hornohi.pdf Interview with Stanley F. Horn], author of Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871 (1939), Forest History Society, Inc., May 1978
• [http://stars.library.ucf.edu/ahistoryofcentralfloridapodcast/41/ Icons of Hate]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160311012618/http://stars.library.ucf.edu/ahistoryofcentralfloridapodcast/41/ |date=March 11, 2016 }} at [http://stars.library.ucf.edu/ahistoryofcentralfloridapodcast/ A History of Central Florida Podcast]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180714150509/http://stars.library.ucf.edu/ahistoryofcentralfloridapodcast/ |date=July 14, 2018 }}. Examines the Ku Klux Klan's role in Central Florida in the second quarter of the 20th century.
• [https://archive.org/details/KKK-FBI FBI file on the Ku Klux Klan]
• [https://archive.org/details/KKK1871CongressionalTestimony 1871 Congressional Testimony on the Ku Klux Klan]
• [https://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/ Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan, 1915–1940]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161013073158/https://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/ |date=October 13, 2016 }}, VCU Libraries.
• [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8zj6p Ku Klux Klan collection, circa 1875–1990], at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
• [http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/article-summary/kkk-methods "Quaint Customs and Methods of the Ku Klux Klan"]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200802224558/http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/article-summary/kkk-methods |date=August 2, 2020 }} from The Literary Digest, August 1922.
• [https://archives.lib.umd.edu/repositories/2/resources/1592 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Klan No. 51 records]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200802224320/https://archives.lib.umd.edu/repositories/2/resources/1592 |date=August 2, 2020 }}, Mt. Rainier, Maryland at the University of Maryland Libraries.

{{Ku Klux Klan}}

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