ExtremismLedger
ExtremismLedger is a living public-interest database. Records are continuously reviewed, updated, and expanded as new verified information becomes available.

Ku Klux Klan

Status: Dormant

White nationalism

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) name has been used by three historically distinct white supremacist movements since 1865/66 -- a Reconstruction-era terrorist group suppressed by federal prosecution in the 1870s, a large fraternal revival active from 1915 until its 1944 dissolution, and a civil-rights-era resurgence responsible for well-documented bombings and murders in the 1950s-60s. No single national KKK organization exists today; the name is now used by a number of small, independent, unaffiliated local groups.

Also known as

  • KKK (Acronym)

Documented claims

Editorial classification

ExtremismLedger classifies the Ku Klux Klan's ideology as white nationalist/white supremacist, based on the organization's own historical platform, rituals, and the documented racially-motivated violence described in the Claims above across all three of its historical eras.

  • KKK Series — Federal Bureau of Investigation (05/18/2016) [Primary]
Documented fact

No single national Ku Klux Klan organization exists today; the FBI describes the contemporary use of the Klan name as "a shadow of its brazen, lawless self in the 1950s and 1960s." The Southern Poverty Law Center separately reports that a number of small, independent, unaffiliated groups continue to use Klan-related names, an estimate ExtremismLedger has not independently verified.

  • KKK Series — Federal Bureau of Investigation (05/18/2016) [Primary]
  • Ku Klux Klan — Southern Poverty Law Center [Corroborating]
Documented fact 01/01/2007

The Department of Justice's Civil Rights-era Cold Case Initiative led to the 2007 conviction of Klan member James Ford Seale for the 1964 kidnapping and murder of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in Mississippi; Seale received a life sentence and died in prison in 2011.

Documented fact 04/01/1997

In April 1997, the FBI arrested four members of a Texas-based group calling itself the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for a thwarted plot ("Operation Sour Gas") to bomb a natural-gas processing plant as a diversion for an armored-car robbery intended to fund anti-government activity; all four pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison.

  • KKK Series — Federal Bureau of Investigation (05/18/2016) [Primary]
Documented fact 01/10/1966

On January 10, 1966, Klan members firebombed the home of Black businessman and voting-rights organizer Vernon Dahmer in Forrest County, Mississippi, killing him; Klan leader Sam Bowers, alleged by an FBI informant to have ordered the attack, was convicted of murder in 1998, per the FBI.

  • KKK Series — Federal Bureau of Investigation (05/18/2016) [Primary]
Documented fact 06/21/1964

On June 21, 1964, Klan members murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, Mississippi; seven of eighteen federally indicted defendants were convicted of conspiracy in 1967, and Klan organizer Edgar Ray Killen was later convicted of manslaughter by a Mississippi jury on June 21, 2005, per the FBI.

Documented fact 09/15/1963

On September 15, 1963, a dynamite bomb planted by Klan members killed four Black girls -- Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair -- at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; Robert E. Chambliss was convicted of murder in 1977, and Thomas E. Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted in 2001 and 2002 respectively, per the FBI.

Documented fact 04/01/1944

In April 1944, the Bureau of Internal Revenue filed a lien against the Ku Klux Klan for $685,305 in unpaid federal taxes from the 1920s; a national Klonvocation convened by Imperial Wizard James Colescott voted to dissolve the national organization rather than pay, and Georgia subsequently revoked its corporate charter, according to Loyola University Chicago School of Law's Samuel D. Brunson.

Documented fact 01/01/1922

The 1915 premiere and nationwide release of the film The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Reconstruction-era Klan, revived interest in the KKK name and prompted new local groups to form; William J. Simmons and advertising executive Edward Young Clarke subsequently drove rapid national membership growth, which the FBI reports reached the millions by the middle of the 1920s.

  • KKK Series — Federal Bureau of Investigation (05/18/2016) [Primary]
Documented fact 11/01/1871

Federal prosecutors brought more than 1,188 indictments against Klan members in South Carolina under the Enforcement Act of 1870 and the Ku Klux Klan Act, with roughly 600 arrests by the end of 1871; trials in the November 1871 and following terms produced 49 guilty pleas, 5 convictions from four trials, 18 conspiracy convictions, and 1 murder conviction, per the Federal Judicial Center.

Documented fact 04/20/1871

Congress enacted the Enforcement Act of 1870, a second Enforcement Act (February 1871), and the Ku Klux Klan Act, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871, to combat organized Klan violence against Black Americans and enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Documented fact 06/01/1866

According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, the Ku Klux Klan originated as a social club formed by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, between winter 1865 and spring 1866, with former Confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest serving as its first Grand Wizard.