Birth of the Infamous KKK

In 1865, the Ku Klux Klan arose in the South after the end of the Civil War. It was a white supremacist terrorist group that took horrifying and violent steps to undermine the Republican party hoping to maintain black economic and instability and to ensure white racial superiority and dominance. General Nathan Bedford Forest founded the Ku Klux Klan as a “social club” and its name is derived from the Greek word “kyklos”, which means circle. It operated as a network of local violent initiatives, included employing intimidation, engaging in terrorist raids against African Americans and white Republicans, destroying property, and committing assault and murder to achieve its aims and influence in upcoming elections to sway legislators.

They committed these acts primarily undercover wearing long, flowing white robes and a hood, capped by horns. In addition to African Americans being targets of the Ku Klux Klan, white republicans and sympathizers were also targeted and it’s estimated that the KKK performed over 3,500 racially motivated lynching’s in the South between 1865 and 1900. Members of the KKK often killed or threatened competing republican candidates in order to secure Democratic election victories and push their own agenda of maintaining superiority of African Americans.

In 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act that authorized President Ulysses S. Grant to use military force to suppress the KKK and resulted in nine South Carolina counties to be placed under martial law and thousands of arrests were made. In 1882 the Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Klan Act unconstitutional, but by that time reconstruction was over and the KKK had slowly faded away.

I use the phrase “the KKK was” very lightly because even in modern times today people still claim to be apart of the networking organization, such as the participation of KKK members in the “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 that led to a woman being plowed down by a car in a crowd of protesters and being killed.