Ku Klux Klan

Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally in 1922.

KKK redirects here: for other uses see KKK (disambiguation).

Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of a number of past and present fraternal organizations in the United States that have advocated white supremacy, anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Catholicism, homophobia, and nativism. These organizations have often used terrorism, violence and acts of intimidation such as cross burnings to oppress African Americans and others.

The first Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 as a response to the radical reconstruction that followed the Civil War, and disappeared with the return of the pre-war ruling groups to power in 1870, its mission accomplished.

William Joseph Simmons founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915.

The founding in 1915 of a second distinct group using the same name was inspired by the newfound power of the modern mass media, via the film The Birth of a Nation along with inflammatory anti-Semitic newspaper accounts surrounding the trial and lynching of accused murderer Leo Frank. The second KKK was a formal membership organization, with a national and state structure, that paid thousands of men to organize local chapters all over the country. Millions joined and, at its peak in the 1920s, the organization included about 15 percent of the nation's eligible population. The second KKK typically preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and anti-Semitism, and some local groups took part in lynchings and other violent activities. Its popularity fell during the Great Depression, and membership fell further during World War II, due to scandals resulting from prominent members' crimes and its support of the Nazis.

The name "Ku Klux Klan" has since been used by many different unrelated groups, including many who opposed the Civil Rights Act and desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. Some members of these groups eventually were convicted of murder and manslaughter in the deaths of Civil Rights workers and children (such as in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama). Today dozens of organizations with chapters across the United States and other countries use all or part of the name in their titles, but their total membership is estimated to be only a few thousand. These groups, with operations in separated small local units, are considered extreme hate groups. The modern KKK has been repudiated by all mainstream media and mainstream political and religious leaders.

The first Ku Klux Klan

A cartoon threatening that the KKK would lynch carpetbaggers, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, 1868

A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic party as continuations of the Confederacy

Nathan Bedford Forrest

At the end of the U.S Civil War radical members of Congress attempted to destroy the white power structure of the Rebel states. The Freedman's Bureau was established by Congress on 3rd March, 1865. The bureau was designed to protect the interests of former slaves. This included helping them to find new employment and to improve educational and health facilities. In the year that followed the bureau spent $17,000,000 establishing 4,000 schools, 100 hospitals and providing homes and food for former slaves.

Attempts by Congress to extend the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson in February, 1866. In April 1866, Johnson also vetoed the Civil Rights Bill that was designed to protect freed slaves from Southern Black Codes (laws that placed severe restrictions on freed slaves such as prohibiting their right to vote, forbidding them to sit on juries, limiting their right to testify against white men, carrying weapons in public places and working in certain occupations).

The election of 1866 increased the number of Radical Republicans in Congress. The following year Congress passed the first Reconstruction Act. The South was now divided into five military districts, each under a major general. New elections were to be held in each state with freed male slaves being allowed to vote. The act also included an amendment that offered readmission to the Southern states after they had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and guaranteed adult male suffrage. Johnson immediately vetoed the bill but Congress re-passed the bill the same day.

The first branch of the Ku Klux Klan was established in Pulaski, Tennessee, in May, 1866. A year later a general organization of local Klans was established in Nashville in April, 1867. Most of the leaders were former members of the Confederate Army and the first Grand Wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, an outstanding general during the American Civil War. During the next two years Klansmen wearing masks, white cardboard hats and draped in white sheets, tortured and killed black Americans and sympathetic whites. Immigrants, who they blamed for the election of Radical Republicans, were also targets of their hatred. Between 1868 and 1870 the Ku Klux Klan played an important role in restoring white rule in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia.

A San Antonio, Texas political scientist, Mario Marcel Salas, argues that some of first Klan groups were organized in Texas under the name of Knights of the Golden Circle and the Order of the Lone Star of the West, and existed before the 1866 date. In extrapolating information from John Salmon "Rip" Ford's notes, and an edited work of those notes by Stephen B. Oates, in "Rip Ford's Texas," Salas says one of the first Klan groups was organized in 1856. This group was active in San Antonio, Texas and was in part an offshoot of the "Know Nothing Party." The Knights of the Golden Circle aimed to establish slave empires in Mexico and Cuba. John "Rip" Ford was a member of this racist group. Later, Samuel Maverick of "Maverick horse fame," and during the Reconstruction period in San Antonio, would be one of the founders of the KKK in San Antonio.

At first the main objective of white supremacy organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White Brotherhood, the Men of Justice, the Constitutional Union Guards and the Knights of the White Camelia was to stop black people from voting. After white governments had been established in the South the Ku Klux Klan continued to undermine the power of blacks. Successful black businessmen were attacked and any attempt to form black protection groups such as trade unions was quickly dealt with. Lynch mobs and other acts of terrorism directed towards blacks, Jews and those who attempted to aid in the formation of black organizations became common and widespread.

Radical Republicans in Congress such as Benjamin Butler urged President Ulysses S. Grant to take action against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1870 he instigated an investigation into the organization and the following year a Grand Jury reported that: "There has existed since 1868, in many counties of the state, an organization known as the Ku Klux Klan, or Invisible Empire of the South, which embraces in its membership a large proportion of the white population of every profession and class. The Klan has a constitution and bylaws, which provides, among other things, that each member shall furnish himself with a pistol, a Ku Klux gown and a signal instrument. The operations of the Klan are executed in the night and are invariably directed against members of the Republican Party. The Klan is inflicting summary vengeance on the colored citizens of these citizens by breaking into their houses at the dead of night, dragging them from their beds, torturing them in the most inhuman manner, and in many instances murdering."

Congress passed the Ku Klux Act and it became law on 20th April, 1871. This gave the president the power to intervene in troubled states with the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in countries where disturbances occurred. However, because its objective of white supremacy in the South had been achieved, the organization practically disappeared.

Decline and suppression

The first Klan was never well organized. As a secret or "invisible" group, it had no membership rosters, no dues, no newspapers, no spokesmen, no chapters, no local officers, and no state or national officials. Its popularity came from its reputation, which was greatly enhanced by its outlandish costumes and its wild and threatening theatrics. As historian Elaine Frantz Parsons discovered:

"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, bored young men, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, [S]outhern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen."

As has been previously stated, Forrest's national organization had little control over the local Klans. One Klan official complained that his own "so-called 'Chief'-ship was purely nominal, I having not the least authority over the reckless young country boys who were most active in 'night-riding,' whipping, etc., all of which was outside of the intent and constitution of the Klan . . ." Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating that it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace." Due to the national organization's lack of control, this proclamation was more a symptom of the Klan's decline than a cause of it. Historian Stanley Horn writes that "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment." A reporter in Georgia wrote in January 1870 that "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."

Gov. William Holden of North Carolina attempted to use the state militia against the Klan, and was voted out of office.

Although the Klan was being used more and more often as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted against it. In lynching cases, whites were almost never indicted by all-white coroner's juries, and even when there was an indictment, all-white trial juries were extremely unlikely to vote for conviction. In many states there were fears that the use of black militiamen would ignite a race war. When Republican Governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, the result was a backlash that lost him the upcoming election.

Despite this power, there was resistance to Klan terror. "Occasionally, organized groups successfully confronted the Klan. White Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized 'the anti-Ku Klux,' which put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks patrolled the streets of Bennettsville, South Carolina, to prevent Klan assaults."

There was also a national movement to crack down on the Klan, even though many Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan even existed or was just a creation of nervous Republican governors in the South. In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican senator John Scott convened a committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. Many Southern states had already passed anti-Klan legislation, and in February Congressman (and former Union general) Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts (who was widely reviled by Southern whites) introduced federal legislation modeled on it. The tide was turned in favor of the bill by an appeal from the governor of South Carolina for federal troops, and by reports of a riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi courthouse, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.

Benjamin Franklin Butler wrote the 1871 Klan Act.

In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation, the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was used along with the 1870 Force Act to enforce the civil rights provisions of the Constitution. Under the Klan Act, federal troops were used rather than state militias, and Klansmen were prosecuted in national court, where juries were often predominantly black. Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned, and habeas corpus was suspended in nine counties in South Carolina. These efforts were so successful that the Klan was destroyed in that state and decimated throughout the rest of the country, where it had already been in decline for several years. Prosecutions were led by Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman. The tapering off of the federal government's actions under the Klan Act, ca. 1871–74, went along with the final extinction of the Klan, although in some areas similar activities, including intimidation and murder of black voters, continued under the auspices of local organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs. Even though the Klan no longer existed, it had achieved many of its goals, such as denying voting rights to Southern blacks.

It took several more years for the Klan to be destroyed entirely. On Easter Sunday, 1873, the Colfax massacre occurred -- the bloodiest single instance of racial violence in the Reconstruction era. The massacre began when black citizens fought back against the Klan and its allies in the White League. As Louisiana black teacher and legislator John G. Lewis later remarked, "They attempted (armed self-defense) in Colfax. The result was that on Easter Sunday of 1873, when the sun went down that night, it went down on the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes."

In 1882, long after the end of the first Klan, the Supreme Court ruled in United States vs. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional, saying that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend to private conspiracies. However, the Force Act and the Klan Act have been invoked in later civil rights conflicts, including the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo; and Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic in 1991.

The second Klan

In the four and a half decades after the suppression of the first Ku Klux Klan, race relations in the United States remained very bad -- the nadir of American race relations is often placed in this era and according to Tuskegee Institute the 1890s were the peak decade for lynchings.

Creation

Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation

The founding of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 demonstrated the newfound power of modern mass media. That year saw three closely related events:

• The film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan.
• Leo Frank, a Jewish man accused of the rape and murder of a young white girl named Mary Phagan, was lynched against a backdrop of media frenzy.
• The second Ku Klux Klan was founded with a new anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic agenda. The bulk of the founders were from an organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, and the new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the original Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.

An illustration from The Clansman: "Take dat f'um yo equal—"

D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan, which was by then a fading memory. His film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon who said his purpose was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!" The film created a nationwide craze for the Klan. At a preview in Los Angeles, actors dressed as Klansmen were hired to ride by as a promotional stunt, and real-life members of the newly reorganized Klan rode up and down the street at its later official premiere in Atlanta. In some cases, enthusiastic southern audiences fired their guns into the screen.

Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the standardized white costume and the burning cross, are imitations of the film, whose imagery was itself based on Dixon's romanticized concept of old Scotland as portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott rather than on the Reconstruction Klan.

The film's popularity and influence were enhanced by a White House screening by historian and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (see below, under Political Influence) as a favor to one of his students from Johns Hopkins in the 1890s. Dixon arranged a special White House preview (the first screening of a movie in the White House) without telling the President what the motion picture was about.

A quote from Woodrow Wilson used in the film

The Birth of a Nation includes extensive quotations from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People, e.g., "The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." Wilson and his family had lived in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War and had been strong Confederate supporters at the time, caring for wounded Confederate soldiers at Wilson's father's church. When he was a young man in Columbia, South Carolina, Wilson, like most Southern whites, opposed Reconstruction, and as president he allowed his cabinet officers to resegregate the federal government for the first time since Reconstruction. When a delegation of blacks protested his discriminatory actions, Wilson told them that "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen". In 1914, he told New York Times that "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it".

Wilson most likely did not make the statement, "It is like writing history with lightning, my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The quote does not appear in any primary sources and Dixon himself did not mention this quote in his unpublished biography. In fact Wilson felt he had been tricked by Dixon and told his aides that he did not like the film. In a 1923 letter to Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas Wilson noted of the reborn Klan, “...no more obnoxious or harmful organization has ever shown itself in our affairs.” In 1915 Wilson tried to remain aloof from the controversy, but finally, on April 30, he issued a non-denial denial. Wilson's refusal to denouce the film helped Griffith to defend it against legal attack by the NAACP.

The lynching of Leo Frank

The lynching that year of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager, also played a role in the formation of the second Klan. In sensationalistic newspaper accounts, Frank was accused of fantastic sexual crimes and of the murder of a Mary Phagan, a girl employed at his factory. He was convicted of murder after a questionable trial in Georgia (the judge asked that Frank and his counsel not be present when the verdict was announced due to the violent mob of people surrounding the court house). His appeals, taken all the way to the United States Supreme Court, ultimately failed (although Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented, condemning the intimidation of the jury as failing to provide due process of law). The governor then commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, but a mob calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from the prison farm and lynched him. Ironically, much of the evidence in the murder actually pointed to the factory's black janitor, Jim Conley, whom the prosecution claimed only helped Frank to dispose of the body.

File:Stone-mountain2.jpg

The huge Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, site of the founding of the second Klan; work was begun in 1923 with funding mainly from the Klan, and was completed in 1970.

For many Southerners who believed Frank was guilty, there was a strong resonance between the Frank trial and The Birth of a Nation. They saw an analogy between Mary Phagan and the film's character, Flora, a young virgin who throws herself off a cliff to avoid being raped by the black character, Gus, described as "a renegade, a product of the vicious doctrines spread by the carpetbaggers."

The Frank trial was used skillfully by Georgia politician and publisher Thomas E. Watson, the editor for The Jeffersonian magazine at the time and later a leader in the reorganization of the Klan, who was later elected to the U.S. Senate. The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a meeting led by William J. Simmons on top of Stone Mountain, and attended by aging members of the original Klan, along with members of the Knights of Mary Phagan.

Simmons found inspiration for this second Klan in the original Klan's "Prescripts," written in 1867 by George Gordon (a former Confederate brigadier general) in an attempt to give the original Klan a sense of national organization. The Prescript states as the Klan's purposes:

• First: To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of the Confederate soldiers.

• Second: To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States ...

• Third: To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity with the laws of the land.

Membership

Historians in recent years 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 unanimously hostile and often ridiculed the Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indiana shows the stereotype was false:

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 predominately as fundamentalists. In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.

The Klan was successful in recruiting throughout the country, but the membership turned over rapidly. Still, millions joined and at its peak in the 1920s the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population and had chapters across the United States. There were even clans founded in Canada, most notably in Saskatchewan, where there was a large clan movement against Catholic immigrants.

This Klan was operated as a profit-making venture by its leaders, and participated in the boom in fraternal organizations at the time. Organizers signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and bought KKK costumes. 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 huge rally, often with burning crosses and perhaps a ceremonial presentation of a Bible to a local Protestant minister. He left town with all the money. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations, occasionally bringing in speakers. The state and national officials had little or no control over the locals and rarely or never attempted to forge them into political activist groups.

Activities

The burning cross is a symbol used by the Klan to create terror. Cross burning is said to have been introduced by William J. Simmons, the founder of the second Klan in 1915.

In keeping with its origins in the Leo Frank lynching, the reorganized Klan had a new anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist and anti-immigrant slant. This was consistent with the new Klan's greater success at recruiting in the Midwest than in the South. As with the Nazi party's propaganda in Germany, recruiters made effective use of the idea that America's problems were caused by Blacks, Jewish bankers, or similar groups.

The new Klan differed from the original in that while the first Klan had been Democratic and Southern, this new Klan, although it still boasted members from the Democratic Party, was to a greater degree Republican and was influential throughout the United States, with major political influence on politicians in several states.

In the 1920s and 1930s a faction of the Klan called the Black Legion was very active in the Midwest. Rather than wearing white robes, the Legion wore black uniforms reminiscent of pirates. The Black Legion was the most violent and zealous faction of the Klan, and was notable for targeting and assassinating communists and socialists.

In addition, Klan groups also took part in lynchings, even going so far as to murder Black soldiers returning from World War I while they were still in uniform. The Klan warned Blacks that they must respect the rights of the white race "in whose country they are permitted to reside."

Sheet music to "We Are All Loyal Klansmen," 1923

Political influence

The second Ku Klux Klan rose to great prominence and spread from the South into the Midwest and Northern states and even into Canada. At its peak, Klan membership exceeded 4 million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, as high as 40% in some areas. Most of the membership resided in Midwestern states.

Through sympathetic elected officials, the KKK controlled the governments of Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon in addition to some of the Southern legislatures. Klan influence was particularly strong in Indiana, where Republican Klansman Edward Jackson was elected governor in 1924, and the entire apparatus of state government was riddled with Klansmen. In another well-known example from the same year, the Klan decided to make Anaheim, California, into a model Klan city; it secretly took over the city council, but was voted out in a special recall election.

File:Anaheim-klan.jpg

Klansmen in Anaheim, California, 1924

Klan delegates played a significant role at the pathsetting 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City, often called the "Klanbake Convention" as a result. The convention initially pitted Klan-backed candidate William McAdoo against New York Governor Al Smith, who drew the opposition of the group because of his Catholic faith. After days of stalemates and rioting, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise. Klan delegates defeated a Democratic Party platform plank that would have condemned their organization. On July 4 1924, thousands of Klansmen converged on a nearby field in New Jersey where they participated in cross burnings, burned effigies of Smith, and celebrated their defeat of the platform plank.

There is also evidence that in certain states, such as Alabama, the KKK was not a mere hate group and showed a genuine desire for political and social reform. Because of the elite conservative political structure in Alabama, the state's Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other "progressive" political measures. In many ways these progressive political goals, which benefited ordinary and lower class white people in the state, were the result of the Klan offering these same people their first chance to install their own political champions into office.

Klan members march in Washington, 1925.

By 1925 the Klan was a powerful political force in the state, as powerful figures like J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black manipulated the KKK membership against the power of the "Big Mule" industrialists and Black Belt planters who had long dominated the state. Black was elected Senator in 1926 and became a leading supporter of the New Deal. Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937, the revelation that he was a former Klansman shocked the country but he stayed on the Court. In 1926 Bibb Graves, a former chapter head, won the governor's office with KKK members' support. He led one of the most progressive administrations in the state's history, pushing for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation.

However, as a result of these political victories, KKK vigilantes, thinking they enjoyed governmental protection, launched a wave of physical terror across Alabama in 1927, targeting both blacks and whites. The Klan not only targeted people for violating racial norms but also for perceived moral lapses. In Birmingham, the Klan raided local brothels and roadhouses. In Troy, Alabama, the Klan reported to parents the names of teenagers they caught making out in cars. One local Klan group also "kidnapped a white divorcee and stripped her to her waist, tied her to a tree, and whipped her savagely." The conservative elite counterattacked. Grover C. Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, began a series of editorials and articles attacking the Klan for their "racial and religious intolerance." Hall ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for his crusade. Other newspapers also kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan as violent and un-American. Sheriffs cracked down on Klan violence. The counterattack worked; the state voted for Catholic Al Smith for president in 1928, and the Klan's official membership in Alabama plunged to under six thousand by 1930.

At the peak of the Klan's political power, a number of highly notable political figures in the U.S. and Canada joined the Klan or flirted with membership. The list includes two Supreme Court justices and, according to evidence which is in some cases contested, possibly two presidents.

Main article: Notable Ku Klux Klan members in national politics

File:D C Stephenson mugshot.gif

D.C. Stephenson's prison mugshot, 1926

Decline

The second Klan collapsed partly as a result of the backlash against their actions and partly as a result of a scandal involving David Stephenson (at the time a member of the Republican Party, after previous active membership in the Socialist Party and then in the Democratic Party), the Grand Dragon of Indiana and fourteen other states, who was convicted of the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer in a sensational trial (she was bitten so many times that one man who saw her described her condition as having been "chewed by a cannibal"). According to historian Leonard Moore, at the heart of the backlash to the Klan's actions and the resulting scandals was a leadership failure which caused the organization'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 disinterested 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.

As a result of these scandals, the Klan fell out of public favor in the 1930s and withdrew from political activity. Grand Wizard Hiram Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician, but they were unable to staunch the exodus of members. The Klan's image was further damaged by Colescott's association with Nazi-sympathizer organizations, the Klan's involvement with the 1943 Detroit Race Riot, and efforts to disrupt the American war effort during World War II. In 1944 the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944.

Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in 1928.

Folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan after World War II and provided information on the Klan to media and law enforcement agencies. He also provided Klan information, including secret code words, to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in a series of four episodes in which Superman took on the KKK. Kennedy's intention to strip away the Klan's mystique and trivialize the Klan's rituals and code words likely did have a negative impact on Klan recruiting and membership. Kennedy eventually wrote a book based on his experiences, which became a bestseller during the 1950s and further damaged the Klan.

Later Ku Klux Klans

After the breakup of the second Klan, the name "Ku Klux Klan" began to be used by a number of independent groups. The following table shows the change in the Klan's estimated membership over time. (The years given in the table represent approximate time periods.)

year	membership
1920	4,000,000
1924	6,000,000
1930	30,000
1970	2,000
2000	3,000

Beginning in the 1950s, a large number of the individual Klan groups began to resist the civil rights movement. This resistance involved numerous acts of violence and intimidation. Among the more notorious events of this time period were:

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Anthony and Viola Liuzzo, 1949

• The assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In 1994, former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of Evers' murder.
• The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, also in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers was convicted of Dahmer's murder. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the other's indictment was dismissed.
• The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, which killed four children. Four Klansmen were named as suspects in they were not prosecuted until years later. The Klan members were Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted of murder in 2001 and 2002. The fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died before he was indicted.
• The murder of Willie Edwards, Jr., in 1957. Edwards was forced by Klansmen to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.
• The 1964 murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. In June 2005, Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter in the murders.
• The 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo, a Southern-raised white mother of five who was visiting the South from her home in Detroit to attend a civil rights march. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights Marchers.

In addition to these murders, Klan groups also killed a number of others during this time period, with many of these acts going unreported. For example, in 1951 Harry T. Moore, a school-teacher and state director of the NAACP, died with his wife, Harriette, when their house was bombed. Even though an FBI investigation at the time turned up several suspects, no one was prosecuted in the case. "Forty years later, a former Marine and Ku Klux Klansman told NAACP officials that he and other Klansmen had conspired with law enforcement officials to plan and carry out the murder.... According to a subsequent report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some, like Harry Moore, were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who had refused to bow to racist convention, or were simply innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random white terrorism."

However, while the post-war Klan groups were extremely violent, this was also the period that saw a successful push back against the KKK. For example, in a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans who had associated with white people, and then held a nighttime rally nearby, only to find themselves surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed.

Violence at a Klan march in Mobile, Alabama, 1977

In 1964, the FBI's COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Klan. COINTELPRO occupied a curiously ambiguous position in the civil rights movement, since it used its tactics of infiltration, disinformation, and violence against violent far-left and far-right groups such as the Klan and the Weathermen, but simultaneously against peaceful organizations such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This ambivalence was shown dramatically in the case of the murder of Liuzzo, who was shot on the road by four Klansmen in a car, of whom one was an FBI informant. After she was murdered, the FBI spread false rumors that she was a communist, and that she had abandoned her children in order to have sex with black civil rights workers. Regardless of the FBI's ambivalence, Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the Klan in 1979, reported that COINTELPRO's efforts had been highly successful in disrupting the Klan. Rival Klan factions both accused each other's leaders of being FBI informants, and one leader, Bill Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was in fact later revealed to have been working for the FBI.

Once the century-long struggle over black voting rights in the South had ended, the Klans shifted their focus to other issues, including affirmative action, immigration, and especially busing ordered by the courts in order to desegregate schools. In 1971, Klansmen used bombs to destroy ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, and charismatic Klansman David Duke was active in South Boston during the school busing crisis of 1974. Duke also made efforts to update its image, urging Klansmen to "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." Duke was leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from 1974 until he resigned from the Klan in 1978. In 1980, he formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a white nationalist political organization. He was elected to the Louisiana State House of Representatives in 1989 as a Republican, even though the party threw its support to a different Republican candidate.

File:Kkk-donald-cartoon.jpg

An inflammatory cartoon that was used as evidence in the civil trial resulting from Michael Donald's murder

In this period, resistance to the Klan became more common. Thompson reported that in his brief membership in the Klan, his truck was shot at, he was yelled at by black children, and a Klan rally that he attended turned into a riot when black soldiers on an adjacent military base taunted the Klansmen. Attempts by the Klan to march were often met with counterprotests, and violence sometimes ensued.

File:Lynching-of-michael-donald.jpg

The lynching of Michael Donald, 1981

Vulnerability to lawsuits has encouraged the trend away from central organization, as when, for example, the lynching of Michael Donald in 1981 led to a civil suit that bankrupted one Klan group, the United Klans of America. Thompson related how many Klan leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series of multimillion-dollar lawsuits brought against them as individuals by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a result of a shootout between Klansmen and a group of African Americans, and curtailed their activities in order to conserve money for defense against the suits. Lawsuits were also used as tools by the Klan, however, and the paperback publication of Thompson's book was canceled because of a libel suit brought by the Klan.

Klan activity has also been diverted into other racist groups and movements, such as Christian Identity, neo-Nazi groups, and racist skinheads.

The Ku Klux Klan today

File:KKK holocaust a zionist hoax.jpg

KKK members displaying the Nazi salute and advocating Holocaust denial

Although often still discussed in contemporary American politics as representing the quintessential "fringe" end of the far-right spectrum, today the group only exists in the form of a number of isolated, scattered groups with a total membership numbering no more than a few thousand. In a 2002 report on "Extremism in America", the Jewish Anti-Defamation League wrote "Today, there is no such thing as the Ku Klux Klan. Fragmentation, decentralization and decline have continued unabated." However, they also noted that the "need for justification runs deep in the disaffected and is unlikely to disappear, regardless of how low the Klan's fortunes eventually sink."

Today the only known former member of the Klan to hold a federal office in the United States is Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who says he "deeply regrets" joining the Klan over half a century ago, when he was about 24 years old. There are currently no known members of the Klan who also hold a Federal office.

Some of the larger KKK organizations currently in operation include:

• Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, prevalent in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and other areas of the Southeastern US.
• Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
• Imperial Klans of America
• Knights of the White Kamelia
• Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, headed by National Director Pastor Thom Robb, and based in Zinc, Arkansas. Claims to be biggest Klan organization in America today. It refers to itself as the "sixth era Klan" and continues to be a racist group.

There are also a number of smaller organizations using the Klan name.

As of 2005, there were an estimated 3,000 Klan members, divided between estimates of 100 and 158 chapters of a variety of splinter organizations, about two-thirds of which were in former Confederate states. The other third are primarily in the Midwest.

The ACLU has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK in defense of their First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, and marches, and their right to field political candidates.

In a July 2005 incident, a Hispanic man's house was burned down in Hamilton, Ohio, after accusations that he sexually assaulted a nine-year-old white girl. Klan members in Klan robes showed up afterward to distribute pamphlets. In May 2006, a Ku Klux Klan group led an anti-immigration march in Russellville, Alabama.

Ku Klux Klan vocabulary

Membership in the Klan is secret, and the Klan, like many fraternal organizations, has signs members can use to recognize one another. A member may use the acronym AYAK (Are you a Klansman?) in conversation to surreptitiously identify himself to another potential member. The response AKIA (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.

Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words beginning with "KL" including:

• Klabee: treasurers
• Kleagle: recruiter
• Klecktoken: initiation fee
• Kligrapp: secretary
• Klonvocation: gathering
• Kloreroe: delegate
• Kludd: chaplain
• Klavern: meeting venue

All of the above terminology was created by William Simmons, as part of his 1915 "revival" of the Klan. The Reconstruction-era Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were "Wizard" (or Imperial Wizard) for the overall leader of the Klan, "Night Hawk" for the official in charge of security, and a few others, mostly for regional officers of the organization.

See also

• KKK auxiliaries
• WKKK (Women's KKK)
• Ku Klux Klan regalia and insignia
• American Protective Association
• History of the United States (1865–1918)
• Jim Crow laws
• Knights of the Golden Circle
• Silent Brotherhood
• Terrorism
• Wide Awakes

References

• Axelrod, Alan. The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders, New York: Facts On File, 1997.
• Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House, 2002.
• Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1999.
• Hamby, Alonzo L. Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Horn, Stanley F. Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871, Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation: Montclair, NJ, 1939.

Horn, born in 1889, was a Southern historian who was sympathetic to the first Klan, which, in a 1976 oral interview [1], he was careful to distinguish from the later "spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute—and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days."

• Ingalls, Robert P. Hoods: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1979.
• Levitt, Stephen D. and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: William Morrow (2005).
• McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
• Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1991.
• Newton, Michael, and Judy Ann Newton. The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1991.

Oates, Stephen B. editor, Rip Fords Texas, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, p. xxx: 1963.

• Parsons, Elaine Frantz, "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan." The Journal of American History 92.3 (2005): 811-36.
• Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. Volume: 7. (1920)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

• Rogers, William; Ward, Robert; Atkins, Leah; and Flynt, Wayne. Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1994.
• Steinberg. Man From Missouri. New York: Van Rees Press, 1962.
• Thompson, Jerry. My Life in the Klan, Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville. Originally published in 1982 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, ISBN 0-399-12695-3.
• Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press: 1995).

First published in 1971 and based on massive research in primary sources, this is the most comprehensive treatment of the Klan and its relationship to post-Civil War Reconstruction. Includes narrative research on other night-riding groups. Details close link between Klan and late 19th century and early 20th century Democratic Party.

• Truman, Margaret. Harry S. Truman. New York: William Morrow and Co. (1973).
• Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster (1987).

An unsympathetic account of both Klans, with a dedication to "my Kentucky grandmother ... a fierce and steadfast Radical Republican from the wane of Reconstruction until her death nearly a century later."

Critical External links

• The History of the Original Ku Klux Klan - by an anonymous author sympathetic to the original Klan
• W. S. Simkins, "Why the Ku Klux," 4 The Alcalde (June 1916): 735-748. online; Simkins (1842-1929) was an organizer of the KKK in Florida in 1868, and a law professor when he wrote this memoir.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center Report
• The ADL on the KKK
• Spartacus Education about the KKK
• MIPT Terrorist Knowledge Base for the KKK
• In 1999, South Carolina town defines the KKK as terrorist
• A long interview with Stanley F. Horn, author of Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871.
• Full text of the Klan Act of 1871 (simplified version)
• Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era (New Georgia Encyclopedia)
• Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century (New Georgia Encyclopedia)
• The Protestent "Kluxing" of Cañyon City, Colorado - (Cañyon City Public Library)
• A series of photos taken in 1998 of the KKK in Mississippi