81 Facts About Ku Klux Klan

The first Klan used terrorism—both physical assault and murder—against politically active Black people and their allies in the Southern United States in the late 1860s.

The third Ku Klux Klan used murders and bombings from the late 1940s to the early 1960s to achieve its aims.

Griffith's 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, which mythologized the founding of the first Ku Klux Klan, it employed marketing techniques and a popular fraternal organization structure.

Second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent references to a false mythologized perception of America's "Anglo-Saxon" blood, hearkening back to 19th-century nativism.

Ku Klux Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement promoting resistance and white supremacy during the Reconstruction Era.

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Historian George C Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded by the Democratic Party leaders of the South.

Ku Klux Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses; its lack of central organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists.

In 1915, the second Ku Klux Klan was founded atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William Joseph Simmons.

The earlier Ku Klux Klan had not worn the white costumes and had not burned crosses; these aspects were introduced in the book on which the film was based.

The Red Knights were a militant group organized in opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and responded violently to Ku Klux Klan provocations on several occasions.

Second Ku Klux Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure.

Several members of Ku Klux Klan groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and of children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963.

In 2004, a professor at the University of Louisville began a campaign to have the Ku Klux Klan declared a terrorist organization in order to ban it from campus.

Existence of modern Ku Klux Klan groups has been in a state of consistent decline due to a variety of factors from the American public's negative distaste of the group's image, platform, and history, infiltration and prosecution by law enforcement, civil lawsuit forfeitures, and the radical right-wing's perception of the Ku Klux Klan as outdated and unfashionable.

The Ku Klux Klan was one of a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, which included the Southern Cross in New Orleans and the Knights of the White Camelia in Louisiana.

The Ku Klux Klan used public violence against Black people and their allies as intimidation.

At an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Ku Klux Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting to a national headquarters.

Since most of the Ku Klux Klan's members were veterans, they were used to such military hierarchy, but the Ku Klux Klan never operated under this centralized structure.

Ku Klux Klan argued that many Southerners believed that Black people were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues.

Ku Klux Klan members used violence to settle old personal feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore general white dominance in the disrupted postwar society.

The Ku Klux Klan soon spread into nearly every Southern state, launching a reign of terror against Republican leaders both Black and white.

Ku Klux Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks.

Ku Klux Klan attacked Black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated Southern Republicans and Freedmen's Bureau workers.

Ku Klux Klan violence worked to suppress Black voting, and campaign seasons were deadly.

Ku Klux Klan 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.

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Many influential Southern Democrats feared that Ku Klux Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to turn against it.

The Ku Klux Klan Act and the Enforcement Act of 1870 were used by the federal government to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution.

The Ku Klux Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve after the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, so President Grant issued a suspension of habeas corpus and stationed federal troops in nine South Carolina counties by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807.

Hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members were fined or imprisoned during the crackdown.

However, the Ku Klux Klan had no membership rosters, no chapters, and no local officers, so it was difficult for observers to judge its membership.

In 1870, a federal grand jury determined that the Ku Klux Klan was a "terrorist organization" and issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism.

Ku Klux Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina.

Many people not formally inducted into the Ku Klux Klan had used the Ku Klux Klan's costume to hide their identities when carrying out independent acts of violence.

Historian Stanley Horn argues that "generally speaking, the Ku Klux Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment".

Ku Klux Klan operations ended in South Carolina and gradually withered away throughout the rest of the South.

Ku Klux Klan costumes, called "regalia", disappeared from use by the early 1870s, after Grand Wizard Forrest called for their destruction as part of disbanding the Ku Klux Klan.

The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, with fifteen "charter members".

Much of the modern Ku Klux Klan's iconography is derived from it, including the standardized white costume and the burning cross.

The second Ku Klux Klan, in contrast, broadened the scope of the organization to appeal to people in the Midwestern and Western states who considered Catholics, Jews, and foreign-born minorities to be anti-American.

Much of the Ku Klux Klan's energy went into guarding the home, and historian Kathleen Blee says that its members wanted to protect "the interests of white womanhood".

Simmons initially met with little success in either recruiting members or in raising money, and the Ku Klux Klan remained a small operation in the Atlanta area until 1920.

Second Ku Klux Klan grew primarily in response to issues of declining morality typified by divorce, adultery, defiance of Prohibition, and criminal gangs in the news every day.

The Ku Klux Klan had a nationwide reach by the mid-1920s, with its densest per capita membership in Indiana.

Second Ku Klux Klan was less violent than either the first or third Ku Klux Klan were.

Ku Klux Klan leaders tried to infiltrate political parties; as Cummings notes, "it was non-partisan in the sense that it pressed its nativist issues to both parties".

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The Ku Klux Klan's leadership wanted to keep their options open and repeatedly announced that the movement was not aligned with any political party.

The Ku Klux Klan drew its members from Democratic as well as Republican voters.

In 1922, two hundred Ku Klux Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas.

Significant characteristic of the second Ku Klux Klan was that it was an organization based in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in the North, West, and the South.

The Ku Klux Klan grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.

Ku Klux Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long.

Second Ku Klux Klan embraced the burning Latin cross as a dramatic display of symbolism, with a tone of intimidation.

The Women's Ku Klux Klan was active in promoting Prohibition, stressing liquor's negative impact on wives and children.

Second Ku Klux Klan expanded with new chapters in cities in the Midwest and West, and reached both Republicans and Democrats, as well as men without a party affiliation.

Ku Klux Klan had numerous members in every part of the United States, but was particularly strong in the South and Midwest.

The Ku Klux Klan moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it opposed Catholics.

The leading presidential candidates were William Gibbs McAdoo, a Protestant with a base in the South and West where the Ku Klux Klan was strong, and New York governor Al Smith, a Catholic with a base in the large cities.

In 1924, Ku Klux Klan members were elected to the city council in Anaheim, California.

The Ku Klux Klan had about 1,200 members in Orange County, California.

Ku Klux Klan members were Protestants, as were most of their opponents, but the latter included many Catholic Germans.

Individuals who joined the Ku Klux Klan had earlier demonstrated a much higher rate of voting and civic activism than did their opponents.

Ku Klux Klan chapters were closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government.

Ku Klux Klan pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation.

In major Southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Ku Klux Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs and opposed unions.

In terms of the Ku Klux Klan, it developed evidence based on the characteristics, beliefs, and behavior of the typical membership, and downplayed accounts by elite sources.

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The Ku Klux Klan was white Protestant, established Americans who were fearful of change represented by new immigrants and Black migrants to the North.

However, in rural Alabama the Ku Klux Klan continued to operate to enforce Jim Crow laws; its members resorted more often to violence against Black people for infringements of the social order of white supremacy.

The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan formed in 1964 after splitting from the Original Knights.

Shelton's United Ku Klux Klan continued to absorb members from the competing factions and remained the largest Ku Klux Klan group unto the 1970s, peaking with an estimated 30,000 members and another 250,000 non-member supporters during the late 1960s.

In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Ku Klux Klan members forged alliances with governors' administrations.

In 1953, newspaper publishers W Horace Carter, who had campaigned for three years, and Willard Cole shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service citing "their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities".

Gunfire was exchanged, and the Ku Klux Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.

In 1965, the House Un-American Activities Committee started an investigation on the Ku Klux Klan, putting in the public spotlight its front organizations, finances, methods and divisions.

Since the late 1970s, the Ku Klux Klan has increasingly focused its ire on this previously ignored population.

February 14,2019, edition of the Linden, Alabama, weekly newspaper The Democrat-Reporter carried an editorial titled "Ku Klux Klan needs to ride again" written by Goodloe Sutton—the newspaper's owner, publisher and editor—which urged the Ku Klux Klan to return to staging their night rides, because proposals were being made to raise taxes in the state.

Ku Klux Klan specified that he was only referring to hanging "socialist-communists", and compared the Klan to the NAACP.

Klan was present in Cuba, under the name of Ku Klux Klan Kubano, directed against both West Indian migrant workers and Afro-Cuban and using the fear of the 1912 Negro Rebellion.

Ku Klux Klan group was established in Fiji in 1874 by white American and British settlers wanting to enact White supremacy, although its operations were quickly put to an end by the British who, although not officially yet established as the major authority of Fiji, had played a leading role in establishing a new constitutional monarchy, the Kingdom of Fiji, that was being threatened by the activities of the Fijian Klan, which owned fortresses and artillery.

The Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were "Wizard" for the overall leader of the Ku Klux Klan and "Night Hawk" for the official in charge of security.

Ku Klux Klan has utilized a variety of symbols over its history.

Triangular Ku Klux Klan symbol is made of what looks like a triangle inside a triangle, similar to a Sierpinski triangle, but in fact represents three letter Ks interlocked and facing inward, referencing the name of the group.