Ku Klux Klan

In the year 1866 just after the Civil War, still considered the bloodiest war in American history, an organization was formed by Nathan Bedford Forrest in the heart of the old Confederacy. That organization's name was the Ku Klux Klan (Gladding, 1999; Wright, 1995).

Context of the Problem

The original Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was very prosperous at its start, dominated by white plantation owners, in the occupied Confederacy. The KKK was a way for Southerns to fight the invading "carpet baggers" (northern investors that moved into the south during Reconstruction) even after the war had ended, it was like a "Reconstruction-era terrorist militia" (Weisenburger, 2005, pp. 167-189). The white supremacist members terrorized the newly freed African American slaves, and even sympathizers to their freedom, by wearing white hooded costumes to hide their faces to remain anonymous and add to their terror. The KKK used horrifically violent methods including church bombings (Ku klux klan, 1965, 17 March 2006), cross burning (Gladding, 1999), and most notoriously lynching, which grew over time to incorporate torture, hanging, burning, mutilation, and castration (Williams, 2002). In the last 20 years of the 19th century there were an astonishing 3,000 recorded lynchings (Wright 1995), with a countless amount that were not reported. However, eventually the KKK began to diminish from a prominent place in American Society.