Ku Klux Klan's Three Waves: Birth of a Nation, Kleagles and an IRS Lien

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The Ku Klux Klan was founded on December 24, 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee, by six Confederate veterans as a fraternal club with theatrical rituals, a name drawn from the Greek kuklos, meaning circle, and titles like Grand Cyclops. During Reconstruction it quickly became a vigilante force that used night rides, arson and assassination against freedmen and their white Republican allies to suppress the Black vote. Efforts by George Gordon and first Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest to impose a military hierarchy failed, as local dens acted on their own. President Ulysses S. Grant answered with the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, suspended habeas corpus in parts of South Carolina and sent federal troops, and Southern Democrats shifted their support to open groups like the Red Shirts and the White League.

The episode shows that the robes and burning crosses came later. In 1915 William Joseph Simmons revived the group on Stone Mountain, Georgia, borrowing the look of D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation and Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman, which added cross burning from Scottish tradition. In 1921 the Southern Publicity Association, run by Edward Young Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler, built a paid recruiting machine that sold 100 percent Americanism and targeted Catholics, Jews and immigrants. Membership reached an estimated three to eight million before the 1925 conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson for the abduction, rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer. A third wave of fragmented cells rose in the 1950s and 1960s to resist desegregation, and today roughly 50 rival groups total a few thousand members.

• Recruiters called Kleagles collected a $10 initiation fee that was split among local, state and national officers.
• The national office in Atlanta held a monopoly on manufacturing and selling the official robes.
• By 1930 membership had fallen to around 30,000, and in 1944 an IRS lien of more than $685,000 forced the national body to disband.
• Third wave violence included the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, which killed four girls.
• Civil suits pioneered by the Southern Poverty Law Center bankrupted modern leaders and seized their headquarters.