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Ku Klux Klan

Overview

The name "Ku Klux Klan" (KKK) has been used by at least three historically distinct organizations rather than one continuous group: a Reconstruction-era terrorist organization (1865/66-1870s) that was substantially suppressed by federal prosecution; a large, incorporated fraternal revival (1915-1944) that dissolved after a tax dispute; and a civil-rights-era resurgence of independent local groups (1950s-1960s) responsible for well-documented bombings and murders, prosecuted federally under statutes originally enacted against the first Klan. No single national KKK organization exists today; the name is currently used by a number of small, independent, unaffiliated local groups. This page distinguishes these eras rather than describing the KKK as one uninterrupted corporate entity.

Founding and Reconstruction-era violence (1865/66-1870s)

According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, the Ku Klux Klan originated as a social club formed by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, between the winter of 1865 and the spring of 1866. Former Confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest served as the organization's first Grand Wizard. The group quickly became devoted to white supremacy and to violently obstructing Reconstruction, and it conducted a campaign of terror -- including whippings, lynchings, and murder -- targeting Black Americans and Reconstruction-era officials across the former Confederacy.

Congress responded with the Enforcement Act of 1870, a second Enforcement Act (February 1871), and the Ku Klux Klan Act (April 20, 1871), which President Ulysses S. Grant signed to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments against organized political violence, according to the National Park Service. On May 3, 1871, Grant issued a proclamation against the violence, and that October he suspended habeas corpus and declared martial law in nine upstate South Carolina counties where Klan violence was most severe.

According to the Federal Judicial Center, federal prosecutors brought more than 1,188 indictments under the Enforcement Act of 1870 and the Ku Klux Klan Act in South Carolina alone, with roughly 600 men arrested by the end of 1871; the November 1871 term produced 49 guilty pleas and 5 convictions from four trials, and the following term produced 18 conspiracy convictions, 1 murder conviction, and 18 additional guilty pleas. Federal enforcement under these statutes weakened over the following decade, and the Federal Judicial Center reports that such enforcement had effectively ceased by 1885 as the political will for continued intervention receded; this Reconstruction-era Klan itself had already substantially dissipated as an organized force by the mid-to-late 1870s under the combined pressure of these prosecutions.

Second Klan: 1915 revival and 1920s peak (1915-1944)

According to the FBI, 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 that year. William J. Simmons, who led the reconstituted Atlanta Klan, partnered with advertising executive Edward Young Clarke to drive rapid national membership growth in the early 1920s; the FBI reports that Klan membership reached the millions by the middle of that decade. This second Klan incorporated as a Georgia fraternal organization and, according to Loyola University Chicago School of Law's Samuel D. Brunson, operated for federal tax purposes as a tax-exempt fraternal beneficiary society.

The FBI documents that this Klan's activities included hangings, floggings, mutilations, tarring-and-featherings, kidnappings, acid brandings, and cross-burnings as an intimidation tactic. In September 1922, Louisiana Governor John M. Parker asked the federal government for help after the Klan-linked disappearance and killing of two men at Mer Rouge, Louisiana; Bureau of Investigation agents sent to assist were themselves targeted for kidnapping by Klan members before completing their work, per the FBI's own account, though a grand jury ultimately declined to indict the identified ringleader for murder. The Klan of this era also organized large public marches, including a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. on September 13, 1926.

Membership fell sharply later in the decade amid leadership scandals -- Edward Young Clarke among those later imprisoned -- and the organization never recovered its 1920s scale. In April 1944, the Bureau of Internal Revenue (the predecessor to the IRS) filed a lien against the Klan for $685,305 in unpaid federal taxes stemming from the 1920s, according to Brunson's research; 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. Some local klaverns continued operating independently after this formal dissolution.

Civil rights-era resurgence and violence (1950s-1960s)

Independent Klan groups re-emerged across the South in opposition to school desegregation and the civil rights movement, and were responsible for a series of documented bombings and murders during this period.

On September 15, 1963, a dynamite bomb killed four Black girls -- Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair -- at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The FBI identified four Klan members as suspects -- Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas E. Blanton Jr. -- but the case was not prosecuted in the 1960s for lack of admissible evidence and witness cooperation. Chambliss was convicted of murder in 1977 and died in prison in 1985; Cash died in 1994 without being charged; Blanton and Cherry were indicted in 2000 and convicted in 2001 and 2002, respectively, with Cherry dying in prison in 2004.

On June 21, 1964, Klan members in Neshoba County, Mississippi, murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner during the "Freedom Summer" voter-registration campaign, in what the FBI's investigation termed the "Mississippi Burning" case. The bodies were recovered on August 4, 1964; a federal grand jury indicted more than a dozen suspects that December, and on October 20, 1967, seven of eighteen defendants were convicted of federal conspiracy charges, though none was convicted of murder. Baptist preacher and Klan organizer Edgar Ray Killen was not convicted at that time after a single juror declined to convict a preacher; he was later convicted of manslaughter by a Mississippi jury on June 21, 2005 -- the 41st anniversary of the murders.

On January 10, 1966, Klan members firebombed the home of Vernon Dahmer, a Black businessman and voting-rights organizer, in Forrest County, Mississippi; Dahmer died from his injuries. An FBI informant's account attributed the order for the attack to Klan leader Sam Bowers, according to the FBI. In 1998, Bowers was convicted of murder for ordering the attack. Separately, 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.

The FBI opened a field office in Jackson, Mississippi in July 1964 specifically to combat Klan violence, and in September 1964 launched the covert COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE program targeting Klan organizations nationally. The FBI credits sustained investigation, informant infiltration, and these prosecutions with substantially reducing organized Klan violence in the state by the early 1970s.

Modern, decentralized manifestations (1970s-present)

No single national KKK 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," while noting that the underlying threat has not disappeared entirely. 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 -- known to the FBI as Operation Sour Gas -- to bomb a natural-gas processing plant near a school as a diversion for an armored-car robbery intended to fund anti-government activity; all four pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization (cited here only as a supplementary, clearly-attributed estimate, not as the basis for any claim above), a number of small, independent groups using Klan-related names continue to operate in the United States, without a unifying national structure or leadership; SPLC's group counts are its own tracking estimate and have not been independently verified by ExtremismLedger.

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