Ku Klux Klan

The Historical Klan

Accounts vary, but many believe that six Confederate soldiers formed the KKK on Christmas Eve 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee. (Other accounts place the founding in May or June 1866.) In its early years, the group was considered to be a social organization; however, the KKK soon began to terrorize local freed slaves. Klansmen would don white flowing robes and pointed hats, sometimes cloaking their horses in white sheets as well to affect the appearance of Confederate soldiers risen from the dead, and would raid the homes of blacks in the middle of the night.

Scholars believe that the Klan formed initially in response to white anxiety over the weak Reconstruction governments in the South and the possibility of insurrection on the part of newly freed slaves. Klansmen attacked black freedmen and their white Republican supporters alike, as well as assailing “carpetbaggers” from the North. Their [Page 334]intimidation was intended to keep black men and Republicans from voting, thus maintaining white political power in the South. In short, the Klan hoped to uphold southern culture and politics as it existed before the Civil War, and it was willing to take violent measures to succeed.

In 1867, the disparate chapters of the Klan, which had taken root throughout Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, held their first national convention in Nashville, and they elected as their national leader, or Grand Wizard, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate cavalry leader. This convention established the elaborately named organizational hierarchy, including Grand Cyclops, Magi, and Night Hawks, who governed over dominions and dens, and the concept of the Klan as an “invisible empire” was born.

As the Klan grew, it was plagued by infighting, which continued to be part of the group's turbulent history. By 1869, Forrest officially “disbanded” the organization. Even the individual KKK chapters had nearly died off by the 1870s, due to a confluence of several factors, including national anti-Klan legislation in 1870 and 1871, “Jim Crow” laws that neatly reestablished segregation in the South, and internal dissension over the use of violence.

The Modern Klan

After lying dormant for more than 40 years, the Klan's “second era” began in 1915, when William J. Simmons, a former minister, resurrected the Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia—an event marked by a cross burning, soon to become the Klan's calling card. Scholars attribute the renewed interest in the Klan to the release and popularity of D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, which was based on a book by Thomas Dixon called The Clansman (1905) and credited the Klan with the preservation of the southern way of life.

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