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Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of a number of past and present fraternal organizations in the United States that have advocated white supremacy, anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Catholicism, and nativism. These organizations have often promoted the use of terrorism, violence and acts of intimidation such as cross burning to oppress African Americans and others. The Klan's first incarnation was in 1866. Founded by veterans of the Confederate Army, its main purpose was to resist Reconstruction, and it focused as much on intimidating "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on putting down the freed slaves. It quickly adopted violent methods. A rapid reaction set in, with the Klan's leadership disowning it, and Southern elites seeing the Klan as an excuse for federal troops to continue their activities in the South. The organization was in decline from 1868 to 1870, and was destroyed in the early 1870s by President Ulysses S. Grant's vigorous action under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act).

The founding in 1915 of a second distinct group using the same name was inspired by the newfound power of the modern mass media, via the film The Birth of a Nation and inflammatory anti-Semitic newspaper accounts surrounding the trial and lynching of accused murderer Leo Frank. The second KKK was a formal membership organization, with a national and state structure, that paid thousands of men to organize local chapters all over the country. Millions joined, and at its peak in the 1920s the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population. The second KKK typically preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and anti-Semitism, and some local groups took part in lynchings. Its popularity fell during the Great Depression, and membership fell further during World War II, due to scandals resulting from prominent members' crimes and support of the Nazis.

The name "Ku Klux Klan" has since been used by many different unrelated groups, including many who opposed the Civil Rights Act and desegregation in the 1950s and '60s, with members of these groups eventually being convicted of murder and manslaughter in the deaths of Civil Rights workers and children (such as in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama). Today, dozens of organizations with chapters across the United States and other countries use all or part of the name in their titles, but their total membership is estimated to be only a few thousand. These groups, with operations in separated small local units, are considered extreme hate groups. The modern KKK has been repudiated by all mainstream media and political and religious leaders.

The first Ku Klux Klan

Creation

The original Ku Klux Klan was created after the end of the American Civil War on December 24 1865, by six educated, middle-class Confederate veterans who were bored with postwar Pulaski, Tennessee. The name was constructed by combining the Greek "kyklos" (circle) with "clan." The founders spelled Clan with a K to give the name of the organization more flair through alliteration. It was at first a humorous social club centering on practical jokes and hazing rituals. The Ku Klux Klan was, in its inception, a social club for young men seeking amusement and entertainment. Members would make midnight raids on the town of Pulaski dressed in elaborate costumes consisting of bedsheets or masks pretending to be ghosts or demons in order to frighten or amuse townspeople. The members soon found a target for their pranks. They used their costumes and raids to frighten recently freed slaves into believing that they were the ghosts of killed Confederate soldiers. The KKK soon spread into nearly every Southern state, launching a "reign of terror" against Republican leaders both black and white. Those assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who had served in constitutional conventions."

From 1866 to 1867, the Klan began breaking up black prayer meetings and invading black homes at night to steal firearms. Some of these activities may have been modeled on previous Tennessee vigilante groups such as the Yellow Jackets and Redcaps.

In an 1867 meeting in Nashville an effort was made to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters reporting to county leaders, counties reporting to districts, districts reporting to states, and states reporting to a national headquarters. The proposals, in a document called the "Prescript," were written by George Gordon, a former Confederate brigadier general. The Prescript included inspirational language about the goals of the Klan along with a list of questions to be asked of applicants for membership, which confirmed the focus on resisting Reconstruction and the Republican Party. The applicant was to be asked whether he was a Republican, a Union Army veteran, or a member of the Loyal League; whether he was "opposed to Negro equality both social and political;" and whether he was in favor of "a white man's government," "maintaining the constitutional rights of the South," "the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights," and "the inalienable right of self-preservation of the people against the exercise of arbitrary and unlicensed power."

Despite the work that came out of the 1867 meeting, the Prescript was never accepted by any of the local units. They continued to operate autonomously, and there never were county, district or state headquarters.

According to one oral report, Gordon went to former slave trader and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis and told him about the new organization, to which Forrest replied, "That's a good thing; that's a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the niggers in their place." A few weeks later, Forrest was selected as Grand Wizard, the Klan's national leader. In later interviews, however, Forrest denied the leadership role and stated that he never had any effective control over the Klan cells.

Decline and suppression

The first Klan was never well organized. As a secret or "invisible" group, it had no membership rosters, no dues, no newspapers, no spokesmen, no chapters, no local officers, no state or national officials. Its popularity came from its reputation, which was greatly enhanced by its outlandish costumes and its wild and threatening theatrics. As historian Elaine Frantz Parsons discovered :

"Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, bored young men, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen."

As has been previously stated, Forrest's national organization had little control over the local Klans, which were highly autonomous. One Klan official complained that his own "so-called 'Chief'-ship was purely nominal, I having not the least authority over the reckless young country boys who were most active in 'night-riding,' whipping, etc., all of which was outside of the intent and constitution of the Klan..." Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating that it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace." Due to the national organization's lack of control, this proclamation was more a symptom of the Klan's decline than a cause of it. Historian Stanley Horn writes that "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment." A reporter in Georgia wrote in January 1870 that "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux."

Although the Klan was being used more and more often as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted against it. In lynching cases, whites were almost never indicted by all-white coroner's juries, and even when there was an indictment, all-white trial juries were extremely unlikely to vote for conviction. In many states, there were fears that the use of black militiamen would ignite a race war. When Republican Governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870 in Alamance County and Caswell County, the result was the so-called Kirk-Holden War and a backlash that lost Holden the upcoming election.. Note that in Caswell County the event that triggered Holden's intervention was the murder of white North Carolina State Senator John W. Stephens.

Despite this power, there was resistance to Klan terror. "Occasionally, organized groups successfully confronted the Klan. White Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized 'the anti-Ku Klux,' which put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks patrolled the streets of Bennettsville, South Carolina, to prevent Klan assaults."

There was also a national movement to crack down on the Klan. Even though many Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan even existed, or was a creation of nervous Republican governors in the South. in January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican senator John Scott convened a committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. Many Southern states had already passed anti-Klan legislation, and in February congressman (and former Union general) Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts (who was widely reviled by Southern whites) introduced federal legislation modeled on it. The tide was turned in favor of the bill by the governor of South Carolina's appeal for federal troops, and by reports of a riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi courthouse, which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.

In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation, the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was used along with the 1870 Force Act to enforce the civil rights provisions of the constitution. Under the Klan Act, federal troops were used rather than state militias, and Klansmen were prosecuted in federal court, where juries were often predominantly black. Hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned, and habeas corpus was suspended in nine counties in South Carolina. These efforts were so effective that the Klan was destroyed in South Carolina and decimated throughout the rest of the country, where it had already been in decline for several years. Prosecutions were led by Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman. The tapering off of the federal government's actions under the Klan Act, ca. 1871–74, went along with the final extinction of the Klan, although in some areas similar activities, including intimidation and murder of black voters, continued under the auspices of local organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs. Even though the Klan no longer existed, it had achieved many of its goals, such as denying voting rights to Southern blacks.

The 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871  (in full text of) – via Wikisource.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)

However, it took several more years for all Klan elements to be destroyed. On Easter Sunday, 1873, the bloodiest single instance of racial violence in the Reconstruction era happened during the Colfax massacre. The Massacre began when black citizens fought back against the Klan and its allies in the White league. As Louisiana black teacher and legislator John G. Lewis later remarked. "They attempted (armed self-defense) in Colfax. The result was that on Easter Sunday of 1873, when the sun went down that night, it went down on the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes."

In 1882, long after the end of the first Klan, the Supreme Court ruled in United States vs. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional, saying that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend to private conspiracies. However, the Force Act and the Klan Act have been invoked in later civil rights conflicts, including the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo; and Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic in 1991.

Later Ku Klux Klans

After the breakup of the second Klan, the name "Ku Klux Klan" began to be used by a number of independent groups. The following table shows the change in the Klan's estimated membership over time. (The years given in the table represent approximate time periods.)

Beginning in the 1950s, a large number of the individual Klan groups began to resist the civil rights movement. This resistance involved numerous acts of violence and intimidation. Among the more notorious events of this time period were:

• The assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In 1994, former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of Evers' murder.
• The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, also in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers was convicted of Dahmer's murder. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the other's indictment was dismissed.
• The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, which killed four children. Four Klansmen were named as suspects in they were not prosecuted until years later. The Klan members were Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted of murder in 2001 and 2002. The fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died before he was indicted.
• The murder of Willie Edwards, Jr., in 1957. Edwards was forced by Klansmen to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.
• The 1964 murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. In June 2005, Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter in the murders.
• The 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo, a Southern-raised white mother of five who was visiting the South from her home in Detroit to attend a civil rights march. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights Marchers.

In addition to these murders, Klan groups also killed a number of others during this time period, with many of these acts going unreported. For example, in 1951 Harry T. Moore, a school-teacher and state director of the NAACP, died with his wife, Harriette, when their house was bombed. Even though an FBI investigation at the time turned up several suspects, no one was prosecuted in the case. "Forty years later, a former marine and Ku Klux Klansman told NAACP officials that he and other Klansmen had conspired with law enforcement officials to plan and carry out the murder.... According to a subsequent report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some, like Harry Moore, were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who had refused to bow to racist convention, or were simply innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random white terrorism."

However, while the post-war Klan groups were extremely violent, this was also the period that saw a successful push back against the KKK. For example, in a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans who had associated with white people, and then held a nighttime rally nearby, only to find themselves surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed.

In 1964, the FBI's COINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Klan. COINTELPRO occupied a curiously ambiguous position in the civil rights movement, since it used its tactics of infiltration, disinformation, and violence against violent far-left and far-right groups such as the Klan and the Weathermen, but simultaneously against peaceful organizations such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This ambivalence was shown dramatically in the case of the murder of Liuzzo, who was shot on the road by four Klansmen in a car, of whom one was an FBI informant. After she was murdered, the FBI spread false rumors that she was a communist, and that she had abandoned her children in order to have sex with black civil rights workers. Regardless of the FBI's ambivalence, Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the Klan in 1979, reported that COINTELPRO's efforts had been highly successful in disrupting the Klan. Rival Klan factions both accused each other's leaders of being FBI informants, and one leader, Bill Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was in fact later revealed to have been working for the FBI.

Once the century-long struggle over black voting rights in the South had ended, the Klans shifted their focus to other issues, including affirmative action, immigration, and especially busing ordered by the courts in order to desegregate schools. In 1971, Klansmen used bombs to destroy ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, and charismatic Klansman David Duke was active in South Boston during the school busing crisis of 1974. Duke also made efforts to update its image, urging Klansmen to "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." Duke was leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from 1974 until he resigned from the Klan in 1978. In 1980, he formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a white nationalist political organization. He was elected to the Louisiana State House of Representatives in 1989 as a Republican, even though the party threw its support to a different Republican candidate.

In this period, resistance to the Klan became more common. Thompson reported that in his brief membership in the Klan, his truck was shot at, he was yelled at by black children, and a Klan rally that he attended turned into a riot when black soldiers on an adjacent military base taunted the Klansmen. Attempts by the Klan to march were often met with counterprotests, and violence sometimes ensued.

Vulnerability to lawsuits has encouraged the trend away from central organization, as when, for example, the lynching of Michael Donald in 1981 led to a civil suit that bankrupted one Klan group, the United Klans of America. Thompson related how many Klan leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series of multimillion-dollar lawsuits brought against them as individuals by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a result of a shootout between Klansmen and a group of African Americans, and curtailed their activities in order to conserve money for defense against the suits. Lawsuits were also used as tools by the Klan, however, and the paperback publication of Thompson's book was cancelled because of a libel suit brought by the Klan.

Klan activity has also been diverted into other groups and movements, such as Christian Identity, neo-Nazi groups, and racist skinheads.

Ku Klux Klan vocabulary

Membership in the Klan is secret, and the Klan, like many fraternal organizations, has signs members can use to recognize one another. A member may use the acronym AYAK (Are you a Klansman?) in conversation to surreptitiously identify himself to another potential member. The response AKIA (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.

Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words beginning with "KL" including:

• Klabee: treasurers
• Kleagle: recruiter
• Klecktoken: initiation fee
• Kligrapp: secretary
• Klonvocation: gathering
• Kloran: ritual book
• Kloreroe: delegate
• Kludd: chaplain

All of the above terminology was created by William Simmons, as part of his 1915 "revival" of the Klan. The Reconstruction-era Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were "Wizard" (or Imperial Wizard) for the overall leader of the Klan, "Night Hawk" for the official in charge of security, and a few others, mostly for regional officers of the organization.

See also

• American Protective Association
• History of the United States (1865–1918)
• Jim Crow laws
• Knights of the Golden Circle
• Ku Klux Klan regalia and insignia
• Silent Brotherhood
• Terrorism
• Westboro Baptist Church
• Wide Awakes
• Cross burning

Notes

1. According to the 1920 census, the population of white males 18 years and older was about 31 million, but many of these men would have been ineligible for membership because they were immigrants, Jews, or Roman Catholics. Klan membership peaked at about 4-5 million: http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2207/The_Ku_Klux_Klan_a_brief__biography, retrieved August 26, 2005.
2. Horn, 1939, p. 9. The founders were John C. Lester, John B. Kennedy, James R. Crowe, Frank O. McCord, Richard R. Reed, and J. Calvin Jones.
3. Horn, 1939, p. 11, states that Reed proposed "κύκλος" ("kyklos") and Kennedy added "clan." Wade, 1987, p. 33 says Kennedy came up with both words, but Crowe suggested transforming "κύκλος" into "kuklux."
4. Wade, 1987.
5. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 by Eric Foner, Perennial (HarperCollins), March 1989, p. 342.
6. Ku Klux Klan, Organization and Principles, 1868 http://www.albany.edu/faculty/gz580/his101/kkk.html
7. Horn, 1939. Horn casts doubt on some other aspects of the story.
8. Parsons, Elaine Frantz, "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan." The Journal of American History 92.3, 2005, page 816
9. quotes from Wade, 1987.
10. Horn, 1939, p. 360.
11. Horn, 1939, p. 362.
12. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html, retrieved August 11, 2005.
13. Wade, 1987, p. 85.
14. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 by Eric Foner, Perennial (HarperCollins), March 1989, p. 435.
15. Wade, 1987.
16. Horn, 1939, p. 373.
17. Wade, 1987, p. 88.
18. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html, retrieved August 11, 2005.
19. Wade, 1987, p. 102.
20. Wade, 1987, p. 109, writes that by ca. 1871-4, "For many, the lapse of the enforcement acts was justified since their reason for being --- the Ku-Klux Klan --- had been effectively smashed as a result of the dramatic showdown in South Carolina." Klan "costumes or regalia" had disappeared by the early 1870's (Wade, p. 109). That the Klan was entirely nonexistent for a period of decades is shown by the fact that in 1915, Simmons's refounding of the Klan was attended by only two aging "former Reconstruction Klansmen" (Wade, p. 144). Horn, a very sympathetic Southern historian of the first Klan, was careful in an oral interview to distinguish it from the later "spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute—and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days." http://www.lib.duke.edu/forest/Research/ohisrch.html, retrieved August 11, 2005. A PBS web page (retrieved August 12, 2005) states that "By 1872, the Klan as an organization was broken."
21. Wade, 1987, pp. 109-110.
22. Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, p. 437, and KKK Hearings, 46th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Report 693, and Joe G. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1974), p. 268-70.
23. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/opeds/historylesson1.pdf (PDF), retrieved August 12, 2005.
24. http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-CivRts2.html, retrieved August 15, 2005.
25. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAliuzzo.htm, retrieved August 15, 2005.
26. http://www.alabamamoments.state.al.us/sec46qs.html http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2207/The_Ku_Klux_Klan_a_brief__biography, http://www.africanamericans.com/KuKluxKlan.htm, http://www.adl.org/hate-patrol/kkk.asp, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2730, all retrieved August 26, 2005.
27. A Primer on Civil Rights. Accessed June 26, 2006.
28. Justice Still Absent in Bridge Death by Major W. Cox. Accessed June 26, 2006.
29. Mississippi verdict greeted by a generation gap by Kris Axtman. The Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 2005.
30. Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South by John Egerton, Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1994, p. 562-563.
31. Ingalls, 1979; http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/jan2005/jan05.html, retrieved June 26, 2005.
32. Thompson, 1982.
33. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAkkk.htm, retrieved June 26, 2005.
34. A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos and Tattoos
35. Axelrod, 1997, p. 160

References

• Axelrod, Alan. The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders, New York: Facts On File, 1997.
• Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House, 2002.
• Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1999.
• Hamby, Alonzo L. Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Horn, Stanley F. Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871, Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation: Montclair, NJ, 1939.

Horn, born in 1889, was a Southern historian who was sympathetic to the first Klan, which, in a 1976 oral interview , he was careful to distinguish from the later "spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute—and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days."

• Ingalls, Robert P. Hoods: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1979.
• Levitt, Stephen D. and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: William Morrow (2005).
• McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
• Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1991.
• Newton, Michael, and Judy Ann Newton. The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1991.
• Parsons, Elaine Frantz, "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan." The Journal of American History 92.3 (2005): 811-36.
• Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. Volume: 7. (1920)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

• Rogers, William; Ward, Robert; Atkins, Leah; and Flynt, Wayne. Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1994.
• Steinberg. Man From Missouri. New York: Van Rees Press, 1962.
• Thompson, Jerry. My Life in the Klan, Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville. Originally published in 1982 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, ISBN 0399126953.
• Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press: 1995).

First published in 1971 and based on massive research in primary sources, this is the most comprehensive treatment of the Klan and its relationship to post-Civil War Reconstruction. Includes narrative research on other night-riding groups. Details close link between Klan and late 19th century and early 20th century Democratic Party.

• Truman, Margaret. Harry S. Truman. New York: William Morrow and Co. (1973).
• Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster (1987).

An unsympathetic account of both Klans, with a dedication to "my Kentucky grandmother ... a fierce and steadfast Radical Republican from the wane of Reconstruction until her death nearly a century later."

Further reading

• Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan, University of California Press, 1992, ISBN 0520078764

External links

• Alabama State overview of the Klan
• The History of the Original Ku Klux Klan - by an anonymous author sympathetic to the original Klan
• The Southern Poverty Law Center Report
• The ADL on the KKK
• Spartacus Education about the KKK
• MIPT Terrorist Knowledge Base for the KKK
• In 1999, South Carolina town defines the KKK as terrorist
• A long interview with Stanley F. Horn, author of Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871.
• Full text of the Klan Act of 1871 (simplified version)
• Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era (New Georgia Encyclopedia)
• Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century (New Georgia Encyclopedia)
• The Protestent "Kluxing" of Cañyon City, Colorado - (Cañyon City Public Library)
• Former KKK member Johnny Lee Clary
• Ku Klux Klan collection at Michigan State University

• Ku Klux Klan
• White supremacist groups in the United States