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The first Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24,
1865,[87] by six former officers of the Confederate army:[88] Frank
McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones, and
James Crowe.[89] It started as a fraternal social club inspired at least
in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta. It borrowed parts of
the initiation ceremony from that group, with the same purpose: "ludicrous initiations, the baffling of public curiosity, and the amusement for
members were the only objects of the Klan", according to Albert Stevens in 1907.[90] The manual of rituals was printed by Laps D. McCord of
Pulaski.[91] The origins of the hood are uncertain; it may have been appropriated from the Spanish capirote hood,[92] or it may be traced to
the uniform of Southern Mardi Gras celebrations.[93]

According to The Cyclopædia of Fraternities (1907), "Beginning in April,
1867, there was a gradual transformation. ... The members had conjured up
a veritable Frankenstein. They had played with an engine of power and
mystery, though organized on entirely innocent lines, and found themselves overcome by a belief that something must lie behind it all—that there was, after all, a serious purpose, a work for the Klan to do."[90]

The KKK had no organizational structure above the chapter level. However,
there were similar groups across the South that adopted similar goals.[94]
Klan chapters promoted white supremacy and spread throughout the South as
an insurgent movement in resistance to Reconstruction. Confederate veteran
John W. Morton founded a KKK chapter in Nashville, Tennessee.[95] As a
secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it
sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including
murder. "They targeted white Northern leaders, Southern sympathizers and politically active Blacks."[96] In 1870 and 1871, the federal government
passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to prosecute and suppress
Klan crimes.[97]

The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives. It seriously weakened the Black political leadership through its use of assassinations and threats of violence, and it drove some people out of politics. On the other hand, it caused a sharp backlash, with passage of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of "restoring order, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling Blacks to exercise their rights as citizens".[98] Historian
George C. Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore
was discarded by the Democratic Party leaders of the South. He says:

The 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. More fundamentally, it declined
because it failed to achieve its central objective – the overthrow of
Republican state governments in the South.[99]

After the Klan was suppressed, similar insurgent paramilitary groups arose
that were explicitly directed at suppressing Republican voting and turning Republicans out of office: the White League, which started in Louisiana in 1874; and the Red Shirts, which started in Mississippi and developed
chapters in the Carolinas. For instance, the Red Shirts are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina. They were
described as acting as the military arm of the Democratic Party and are attributed with helping white Democrats regain control of state
legislatures throughout the South.[100] Second Klan
See also: Ku Klux Klan in Canada and Indiana Klan
KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s

In 1915, the second Klan was founded atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, by
William Joseph Simmons. While Simmons relied on documents from the
original Klan and memories of some surviving elders, the revived Klan was
based significantly on the wildly popular film The Birth of a Nation. The earlier Klan had not worn the white costumes and had not burned crosses;
these aspects were introduced in Thomas Dixon's book The Clansman: A
Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, on which the film was based. When
the film was shown in Atlanta in December of that year, Simmons and his
new klansmen paraded to the theater in robes and pointed hoods – many on
robed horses – just like in the film. These mass parades became another hallmark of the new Klan that had not existed in the original Reconstruction-era organization.[101]

Beginning in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of using full-time,
paid recruiters and it appealed to new members as a fraternal
organization, of which many examples were flourishing at the time. The
national headquarters made its profit through a monopoly on costume sales, while the organizers were paid through initiation fees. It grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions pitting urban versus rural America, it spread to every state and was prominent in
many cities.

Writer W. J. Cash, in his 1941 book The Mind of the South characterized
the second Klan as "anti-Negro, anti-Alien, anti-Red, anti-Catholic,
anti-Jew, anti-Darwin, anti-Modern, anti-Liberal, Fundamentalist, vastly
Moral, [and] militantly Protestant. And summing up these fears, it brought
them into focus with the tradition of the past, and above all with the
ancient Southern pattern of high romantic histrionics, violence and mass coercion of the scapegoat and the heretic."[102] It preached "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and demanded the purification of politics, calling
for strict morality and better enforcement of Prohibition. Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using
anti-Catholicism and nativism.[8] Its appeal was directed exclusively
toward white Protestants; it opposed Jews, Black people, Catholics, and
newly arriving Southern and Eastern European immigrants such as Italians, Russians, and Lithuanians, many of whom were Jewish or Catholic.[103]

Some local groups threatened violence against rum runners and those they
deemed "notorious sinners"; the violent episodes generally took place in
the South.[104] The Red Knights were a militant group organized in
opposition to the Klan and responded violently to Klan provocations on
several occasions.[105] The "Ku Klux Number" of Judge, August 16, 1924

The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and
state structure. During the resurgence of the second Klan in the 1920s,
its publicity was handled by the Southern Publicity Association. Within
the first six months of the Association's national recruitment campaign,
Klan membership had increased by 85,000.[106] At its peak in the
mid-1920s, the organization's membership ranged from three to eight
million members.[107]

In 1923, Simmons was ousted as leader of the KKK by Hiram Wesley Evans.
From September 1923 there were two Ku Klux Klan organizations: the one
founded by Simmons and led by Evans with its strength primarily in the
southern United States, and a breakaway group led by Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson based in Evansville, Indiana with its membership primarily in
the midwestern United States.[108]

Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders – especially Stephenson's conviction for the abduction, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer – and external opposition brought about a collapse in the membership of both
groups. The main group's membership had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930.
It finally faded away in the 1940s.[109] Klan organizers also operated in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan in 1926–1928, where Klansmen denounced immigrants from Eastern Europe as a threat to Canada's "Anglo-Saxon" heritage.[110][111] Third Klan

The "Ku Klux Klan" name was used by numerous independent local groups
opposing the civil rights movement and desegregation, especially in the
1950s and 1960s. During this period, they often forged alliances with
Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama.[112] Several members of 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.

The United States government still considers the Klan to be a "subversive terrorist organization".[113][114][115][116] In April 1997, FBI agents
arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas
for conspiracy to commit robbery and for conspiring to blow up a natural
gas processing plant.[117] In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina, passed a resolution declaring the Klan a terrorist
organization.[118]

The existence of modern 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 Klan as outdated and unfashionable. The
Southern Poverty Law Center reported that between 2016 and 2019, the
number of Klan groups in America dropped from 130 to just 51.[119] A 2016 report by the Anti-Defamation League claims an estimate of just over 30
active Klan groups existing in the United States.[120] Estimates of total collective membership range from about 3,000[120] to 8,000.[121] In
addition to its active membership, the Klan has an "unknown number of associates and supporters"

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