Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, either of two distinct U.S. hate organizations that employed terror in pursuit of their white supremacist agenda. One group was founded immediately after the Civil War and lasted until the 1870s. The other began in 1915 and has continued to the present.
Ku Klux Klan: 2016 rallyMembers of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross and a swastika at a rally near Cedartown, Georgia, April 23, 2016.Mike Stewart/AP Images Ku Klux KlanThe Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in Tennessee, 1948.? Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com Ku Klux Klan members parading along Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., Aug. 18, 1925MPI/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The 19th-century Klan was originally organized as a social club by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. They apparently derived the name from the Greek word kyklos, from which comes the English “circle”; “Klan” was added for the sake of alliteration and Ku Klux Klan emerged. The organization quickly became a vehicle for Southern white underground resistance to Radical Reconstruction. Klan members sought the restoration of white supremacy through intimidation and violence aimed at the newly enfranchised Black freedmen. A similar organization, the Knights of the White Camelia, began in Louisiana in 1867.
In the summer of 1867, the Klan was structured into the “Invisible Empire of the South” at a convention in Nashville, Tennessee, attended by delegates from former Confederate states. The group was presided over by a grand wizard (Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest is believed to have been the first grand wizard) and a descending hierarchy of grand dragons, grand titans, and grand cyclopses. Dressed in robes and sheets designed to frighten superstitious Blacks and to prevent identification by the occupying federal troops, Klansmen whipped and killed freedmen and their white supporters in nighttime raids.
The 19th-century Klan reached its peak between 1868 and 1870. A potent force, it was largely responsible for the restoration of white rule in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. But Forrest ordered it disbanded in 1869, largely as a result of the group’s excessive violence. Local branches remained active for a time, however, prompting Congress to pass the Force Act in 1870 and the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871.
The bills authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, suppress disturbances by force, and impose heavy penalties upon terrorist organizations. Pres. Ulysses S. Grant was lax in utilizing this authority, although he did send federal troops to some areas, suspend habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, and appoint commissioners who arrested hundreds of Southerners for conspiracy. In United States v. Harris in 1882, the Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Klan Act unconstitutional, but by that time the Klan had practically disappeared.
It disappeared because its original objective—the restoration of white supremacy throughout the South—had been largely achieved during the 1870s. The need for a secret antiblack organization diminished accordingly.
The 20th-century Klan had its roots more directly in the American nativist tradition. It was organized in 1915 near Atlanta, Georgia, by Col. William J. Simmons, a preacher and promoter of fraternal orders who had been inspired by Thomas Dixon’s book The Clansman (1905) and D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The new organization remained small until Edward Y. Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler brought to it their talents as publicity agents and fund raisers. The revived Klan was fueled partly by patriotism and partly by a romantic nostalgia for the old South, but, more importantly, it expressed the defensive reaction of white Protestants in small-town America who felt threatened by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and by the large-scale immigration of the previous decades that had changed the ethnic character of American society.
This second Klan peaked in the 1920s, when its membership exceeded 4,000,000 nationally, and profits rolled in from the sale of its memberships, regalia, costumes, publications, and rituals. A burning cross became the symbol of the new organization, and white-robed Klansmen participated in marches, parades, and nighttime cross burnings all over the country. To the old Klan’s hostility toward Blacks the new Klan—which was strong in the Midwest as well as in the South—added bias against Roman Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and organized labour. The Klan enjoyed a last spurt of growth in 1928, when Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic, received the Democratic presidential nomination.
Ku Klux Klan: meetingA Ku Klux Klan meeting, 1920s.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. A Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony, 1920s.? Jack Benton—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
During the Great Depression of the 1930s the Klan’s membership dropped drastically, and the last remnants of the organization temporarily disbanded in 1944. For the next 20 years the Klan was quiescent, but it had a resurgence in some Southern states during the 1960s as civil-rights workers attempted to force Southern communities’ compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There were numerous instances of bombings, whippings, and shootings in Southern communities, carried out in secret but apparently the work of Klansmen. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson publicly denounced the organization in a nationwide television address announcing the arrest of four Klansmen in connection with the slaying of a civil-rights worker, a white woman, in Alabama.
Ku Klux Klan: initiation ceremonyKu Klux Klan members holding an initiation ceremony near Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Encyclop?dia Britannica, Inc. Ku Klux Klan: nooseA Ku Klux Klan member dangling a noose from an automobile in an effort to intimidate African American voters in Miami, Florida, May 3, 1939.AP Images
The Klan was unable to stem the growth of a new racial tolerance in the South in the years that followed. Though the organization continued some of its surreptitious activities into the early 21st century, cases of Klan violence became more isolated, and its membership had declined to a few thousand. The Klan became a chronically fragmented mélange made up of several separate and competing groups, some of which occasionally entered into alliances with neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
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United States: The South during Reconstruction…such terrorist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, which sought to punish so-called “uppity Negroes” and to drive their white collaborators from the South. More frequently it was manifested through support of the Democratic Party, which gradually regained its strength in the South and waited for the time when the…
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United States: New social trends…the racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, especially in rural areas. During the early 1920s the Klan achieved a membership of some 5,000,000 and gained control of, or influence over, many city and state governments. Rural areas also provided the base for a Christian fundamentalist movement, as farmers and…
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fascism: National fascismsIn the United States the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization founded at the end of the Civil War and revived in 1915, displayed some fascist characteristics. One of its offshoots, the Black Legion, had some 60,000 members in the early 1930s and committed numerous acts of arson and…
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External Websites
- Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture - Ku Klux Klan
- Texas State Historical Association - Handbook of Texas - Ku Klux Klan
- Kansapedia - Kansas Historical Society - Ku Klux Klan in Kansas
- New Georgia Encyclopedia - History and Archaeology - Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era
- The Oregon Encyclopedia - Ku Klux Klan
- Encyclopedia Virginia - Ku Klux Klan in Virginia
- Oklahoma Historical Society - Ku Klux Klan
- The Canadian Encyclopedia - Ku Klux Klan
- Encyclopedia of Alabama - Ku Klux Klan in Alabama from 1915-1930
- CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas - Ku Klux Klan (after 1900)