The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is the name of an American white supremacist, far-right terrorist organization and hate group. Various historians, including Fergus Bordewich, have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group. There have been three distinct iterations with various targets relative to time and place, including African Americans, Jews, and Catholics.
David Ernest Duke is an American politician, neo-Nazi, conspiracy theorist, and former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. From 1989 to 1992, he was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for the Republican Party. His politics and writings are largely devoted to promoting conspiracy theories about Jews, such as Holocaust denial and Jewish control of academia, the press, and the financial system. In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League called Duke "perhaps America's most well-known racist and anti-Semite".
Neo-Confederates are groups and individuals who portray the Confederate States of America and its actions during the American Civil War in a positive light. The League of the South, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other neo-Confederate organizations continue to defend the secession of the former Confederate States.
Fuller Warren was an American attorney and politician who served as the 30th governor of Florida.
The grand wizard is the national leader of several different Ku Klux Klan organizations in the United States and abroad.
The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905, the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr.. Chronicling the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from a pro-Confederate perspective, it presents the Ku Klux Klan heroically. The novel was adapted first by the author as a highly successful play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. W. Griffith in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.
This is a partial list of notable historical figures in U.S. national politics who were members of the Ku Klux Klan before taking office. Membership of the Klan is secret. Political opponents sometimes allege that a person was a member of the Klan, or was supported at the polls by Klan members.
The Commission on Interracial Cooperation (1918–1944) was an organization founded in Atlanta, Georgia, December 18, 1918, and officially incorporated in 1929. Will W. Alexander, pastor of a local white Methodist church, was head of the organization. It was formed in the aftermath of violent race riots that occurred in 1917 in several southern cities. In 1944 it merged with the Southern Regional Council.
Kathleen Marie Blee is an American sociologist. She is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of interest include gender, race and racism, social movements, and sociology of space and place. Special interests include how gender influences racist movements, including work on women in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
The Ku Klux Klan has had a history in the U.S. state of New Jersey since the early part of the 1920s. The Klan was active in the areas of Trenton and Camden and it also had a presence in several of the state's northern counties in the 1920s. It had the most members in Monmouth County, and operated a resort in Wall Township.
Camp Nordland was a 204-acre (83 ha) resort facility located in Andover Township, New Jersey. From 1937 to 1941, this site was owned and operated by the German American Bund, which sympathized with and propagandized for Nazi Germany in the United States. This resort camp was opened by the Bund on 18 July 1937.
The Knights of the Flaming Circle was a militant organization founded in 1923 to fight the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan. They were part of an opposition that included politicians, labor leaders and immigrant groups. Membership was open to anyone who opposed the KKK and was "not a Protestant". They had significant support amongst various ethnic groups in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Bryce Bauer has written that, "Instead of only admitting white, native-born Protestants as the Klan did, the organization vowed to accept anyone who was anything other than that."
The Association of Georgia Klans, also known as the Associated Klans of Georgia, was a Klan faction organized by Samuel Green in 1944, and led by him until his death in 1949. At its height the organization had klaverns in each of Georgia's 159 counties, as well as klaverns in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida. It also had connections with klaverns and kleagles in Ohio and Indiana. After Green's death, however, the organization foundered as it split into different factions, was hit with a tax lien and was beset by adverse publicity. It was moribund by the time of the Supreme Court's "Black Monday" ruling in 1954. A second Association of Georgia Klans was formed when Charles Maddox led dissatisfied members out of the U.S. Klans in 1960. This group appears to have folded into James Venable's National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan by 1965. There is also a current Klan group by that name.
The Canadian branch of the Ku Klux Klan was an expansion of the second Ku Klux Klan established in the United States in 1915. It operated as a fraternity, with chapters established in parts of Canada throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The first registered provincial chapter was registered in Toronto in 1925 by two Americans and a Canadian. The organization was most successful in Saskatchewan, where it briefly influenced political activity and whose membership included a member of Parliament, Walter Davy Cowan.
The Fellowship Forum was an anti-Catholic publication that was mostly read by white, Protestant fraternalists. Historian Thomas R. Pegram has described the publication as a "Klan allied masonic journal". The link between Masons and the Klan was first announced in the Fellowship Forum. After the Klan hired the Southern Publicity Association to increase the organization's membership in the 1920s, Fellowship Forum readership increased—from 1,000 readers in 1921 to a circulation of over one million by 1927. The paper has been described as "an integral part of the resurgence of the KKK among white Americans in the 1920s."
Oscar Haywood was an American Baptist preacher, orator, and politician from North Carolina. He was a pastor at Baptist churches in Tennessee, Connecticut, and New York City and then travelled widely giving speeches advocating for the Ku Klux Klan. He was also a book collector and had first editions and correspondence with various influential people in his collection at the Haywood Plantation house.
Robert Alan Goldberg is an American historian. He teaches at the University of Utah and has written several books as well as articles and papers. He has written about social movements, conspiracies, Barry Goldwater, and Jewish farmers in Clarion, Utah and the American West.
Thomas William Templeman Rice, is a British film studies scholar, film historian, educator, author, and researcher. He is a senior lecturer on film studies at the University of St Andrews in St Andrews, Scotland. Rice has written numerous articles and two books, one book is about Ku Klux Klan films, and the other book is about the British Empire's Colonial Film Unit.
Allen William Trelease was an American historian, author, and professor. He served as the head of the history and government department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and as president of the Historical Society of North Carolina.
