Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan is a white supremacist organization founded in the United States after the Civil War and revived in later periods. It has used terror, intimidation, and political organizing to uphold racial hierarchy.

Racial terrorism: Violence intended to enforce racial hierarchy and intimidate targeted communities. The Klan used threats and attacks to suppress Black freedom and political participation.
Pulaski, Tennessee: A city in southern Tennessee where the first Ku Klux Klan formed in 1865. The Klan began there as a postwar secret society before expanding across the South.
Ida B. Wells: An African American journalist and activist who investigated lynching and campaigned against it. Her reporting exposed racial violence that the Klan and its allies used to intimidate Black communities.
Civil Rights Act of 1871: A federal law authorizing action against conspiracies that deprived people of constitutional rights; it included the Ku Klux Klan Act. Congress passed it to empower the federal government against Klan violence and conspiracies.
White Citizens’ Councils: Segregationist organizations that used economic and political pressure to resist school desegregation and civil rights. They defended segregation through public, often economic coercion rather than the Klan’s masked terror.
Lynching: An extrajudicial killing by a mob, often carried out publicly to terrorize a wider community. Klan members participated in lynchings as part of racial intimidation.
Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Confederate cavalry commander who became the first widely recognized Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His leadership is associated with the Klan’s early postwar expansion.
Medgar Evers: A Mississippi civil-rights leader assassinated in 1963 by a white supremacist and Klan member. His murder illustrates the deadly opposition civil-rights organizers faced from Klan-linked racists.
Civil Rights Movement: A broad struggle for racial equality and civil rights in the United States, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Klan attacks sought to obstruct its campaigns against segregation and disenfranchisement.
American Protective Association: A nineteenth-century American anti-Catholic organization that promoted nativist political influence. Like the Klan, it used secrecy and exclusionary politics, but targeted Catholics and immigrants.

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