The Ku Klux Klan:
America's Terrorist Organization

The original Klan was founded in December 1865 by six Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee. Within two years, it had spread across the South as a coordinated paramilitary organization under the command of former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served as its first "Grand Wizard." Its explicit purpose was to terrorize Black voters and Republican officials into submission and restore Democratic political control of the South.

Klan tactics in this period included nighttime raids on Black homes, whippings, murder, arson of Black schools and churches, and the assassination of Black officeholders and their white allies. The violence was not random — it was strategically targeted to suppress Black political participation in specific counties and districts where Republican electoral margins were slim. When Black voter turnout was suppressed in these targeted areas, Democratic candidates won.

Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, making it a federal crime to deprive citizens of their civil rights, and President Grant used federal troops to suppress the Klan in South Carolina. The original Klan was effectively dismantled by 1872. But the political conditions that created it — white Southern opposition to Black political power — had not changed. The terror would return.

The second Klan was refounded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons on Stone Mountain, Georgia, inspired by D.W. Griffith's film "The Birth of a Nation" — a cinematic glorification of the original Klan that was shown at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson. The film portrayed the Reconstruction-era Klan as heroic defenders of white civilization against Black political power and sexual threat. It is one of the most effective propaganda films in American history, and it relaunched a terror organization.

The second Klan was a national phenomenon, not a Southern one. Indiana had more Klan members than any Southern state. Oregon's Klan helped pass laws restricting Catholic and Asian immigration. Colorado's Klan elected a governor. Eleven U.S. senators were Klan members or active sympathizers. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was a Klan member before his appointment. The second Klan was anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-immigrant — it represented white Protestant nativist backlash against the demographic changes of the early 20th century.

The third Klan surged in response to the Civil Rights Movement, operating as the violent enforcement arm of Southern resistance to desegregation. This wave's tactics included bombing Black churches (the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, September 15, 1963, killed four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair), murdering civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi, 1964), and targeting voting rights workers with beatings and murder.

The third Klan operated with protection from local law enforcement. Birmingham's police commissioner Bull Connor had ties to Klan leadership and warned Klansmen before the Freedom Riders' arrival in 1961, giving them fifteen uninterrupted minutes to beat the riders before police arrived. Mississippi's White Citizens' Council — often called the "uptown Klan" — coordinated with law enforcement to suppress Black voter registration drives. The killers of the four girls in Birmingham's church bombing were not prosecuted until 1977, 2001, and 2002 — with one dying before trial.

The Klan's formal membership has been in steady decline since the late 1960s, driven by federal prosecutions and the cultural delegitimization of explicit white supremacist organizations. Current estimates put active Klan membership at 5,000 to 8,000 nationally. But the Klan's significance was never primarily organizational — it was the explicit, visible embodiment of a broader political project that has never required Klan membership to persist.

The political project of the Klan — maintaining white political and economic dominance against Black advancement — has been pursued through legal means whenever illegal means became too costly: through voter suppression legislation, through gerrymandering, through opposition to fair housing enforcement, through support for policies that concentrate policing and incarceration in Black communities. The people pursuing these goals do not wear hoods. They do not need to.

The Klan matters not because its membership numbers are large today, but because it normalized racial terror for generations of Americans — established that organized violence against Black political participation was not only permissible but heroic — and because the political goals it pursued through violence have been continuously pursued through law ever since.