Since the days following the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan has preached a gospel of hate, intolerance and exclusion. But while it has attracted members who number in the millions at times, it has also repeatedly been battered into near-submission by activists, the government and changing public opinion.
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Ku Klux Klan - A Secret History. Video hosted on Youtube. THE 20TH CENTURY(TM) ventures back to the days of the Reconstruction South and through the landmarks in Klan history to tell the complete story of the most famous hate group in America. Discover how the six original Klansmen came together and chose their name. See how the release of America's first blockbuster movie spurred a resurgence in the KKK and how they expanded their target to include Jews, Catholics and immigrants as well as blacks. Examine the tactics of Klan leaders like William Joseph Simmons and David Duke. And, finally, find out how the Klan has repeatedly battled back from the brink of extinction. Filled with rare and often disturbing footage as well as extensive interviews with, Klan experts, past and present members and reporters, THE 20TH CENTURY(TM) presents a comprehensive history of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Ku Klux Klan was a secret terrorist organization that originated in the Southern states during the period of Reconstruction following the American Civil War (1861-1865) and was reactivated on a wider geographic basis in the 20th century. The original Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, during the winter of 1865 to 1866, by six former Confederate army officers who gave their society a name adapted from the Greek word kuklos (“circle”). Although the Ku Klux Klan began as a prankish social organization, its activities soon were directed against the Republican Reconstruction governments and their leaders, both black and white, which came into power in the South in 1867.
The name, rituals, and some of the attitudes of the original Klan were adopted by a new fraternal organization incorporated in Georgia in 1915. The official name of the new society, which was organized by a former preacher, Colonel William Simmons, was Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Membership was open to native-born, white, Protestant males, 16 years of age or older; blacks, Roman Catholics, and Jews were excluded and were increasingly made targets of defamation and persecution by the Klan. Until 1920 the society exercised little influence. Then, in the period of economic dislocation and political and social unrest that followed World War I (1914-1918), the Klan expanded rapidly in urban areas and became active in many states, notably Colorado, Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Although the Klan everywhere fiercely preached white supremacy, it focused its attack on what it considered to be alien outsiders, particularly the Roman Catholic church, which it believed was threatening traditional American ways and values. All non-Protestants, aliens, liberals, trade unionists, and striking workers were denounced as subversives.
The first Klan was founded in 1865 by veterans of the Confederate Army. Its purpose was to restore white supremacy in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The Klan resisted Reconstruction by intimidating freedmen and white Republicans. The KKK quickly adopted violent methods. The increase in murders finally resulted in a backlash among Southern elites who viewed the Klan's excesses as an excuse for federal troops to continue occupation. The organization declined from 1868 to 1870 and was destroyed by President Grant's passage and enforcement of the Force Acts of 1870 and 1871.
In 1915, the second Klan was founded. It grew rapidly in a period of postwar social tensions. After World War I, many Americans coped with booming growth rates in major cities, where numerous waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and the Great Migration of Southern blacks and whites were being absorbed. After World War I, labor tensions rose as veterans tried to reenter the work force. In reaction to these new groups of immigrants and migrants, the second KKK preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and anti-Semitism. Some local groups took part in lynchings, attacks on private houses and public property, and other violent activities. Members used ceremonial cross burning to intimidate victims and demonstrate its power. Murders and violence by the Klan were most numerous in the South, which had a tradition of lawlessness.
The film The Birth of a Nation and the sensationalized newspaper coverage of the trial, conviction and lynching of Leo Frank of Georgia sparked the Klan's revival. The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. The Klan's popularity fell further during the Great Depression and World War II.
The name Ku Klux Klan has since been used by many independent groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, they often acted with impunity by forging alliances with Southern police departments, as during the reign of Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama. Several members of KKK-affiliated groups were convicted of manslaughter and murder in the deaths of civil rights workers and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, and the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. Today, researchers estimate there may be more than 150 Klan chapters with 5,000-8,000 members nationwide. The U.S. government classifies them as hate groups, with operations in separated small local units.
 The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen's Bureau workers. When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with leaders of churches and community groups, because people had many roles. Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks. "Armed guerilla 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 Canby reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault.
Klan violence worked to suppress black voting. As examples, over 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and 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 Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact.
In the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock. By the November presidential election, however, Klan intimidation led to suppression of the Republican vote and only one person voted for Ulysses S. Grant. Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties. Freedmen's Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies by Klansmen. 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 on 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. By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease. Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way to avoid prosecution for free-lance violence. Many influential southern Democrats feared that Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to turn against it. There were outlandish claims made, such as Georgian B. H. Hill stating "that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain.
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