2

KU KLUX KLAN
Vigilantism against blacks, immigrants and other
minorities

Kathleen Blee and Mehr Latif

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK or Klan) is the most enduring form of vigilantism in
United States history, extending from the 1870s through to today. The Klan is not
historically continuous, despite the Klan’s claims to the contrary in an effort to pro-
ject an image of power and constancy (Blee, 2012). In fact, the Klan has appeared
and then disappeared several times throughout U.S. history with different targets for
its vigilante violence. Moreover, although the Klan presents itself as a unitary orga-
nization, in every Klan era there are separate and competing Klan groups and leaders.
All Klan groups, however, are consistent in their efforts to organize vigilante violence
and threats against racial, ethnic, religious, and national minority groups and non-
white immigrants to the United States. Jews and those whose ancestry can be traced
to the nations of Africa and Latin America, whether they are native-born or immi-
grants, are the most historically constant enemies of the Klan. Catholics, Mormons,
Muslims, and those whose ancestry can be traced to the nations of Asia have also
been the victims of Klan vigilantism in most eras, as have, at various times, labor
union organizers, gay men, lesbians, and other sexual minorities, and employees and
supporters of the federal (national) government.
To understand the Klan’s agenda of fomenting vigilantism against particular
groups of people, it is important to view each era of the KKK within the particular
social, political, and economic context in which it arose and mobilized supporters
and, upon occasion, voters. Four distinct eras witnessed significant mobilization by
Ku Klux Klans in the United States: the 1870s, immediately after the Civil War
over slavery; the interwar 1920s, which was characterized by high rates of immi-
gration from Europe; the 1950s–1960s, which witnessed legal and political chal-
lenges to racial segregation or racially exclusive voting practices in the southern
states; and the 1980s–2000s, during which the Klan allied with other far-right racist
groups to forge a Pan-Aryan alliance. We discuss each era of the Klan within its
historical context to explain how it justified and gained popular support for
32 Kathleen Blee and Mehr Latif

vigilante agendas and practices, which we define as actions or serious threats of extra-
legal violence that replace or enhance the legitimated violence of the state such as the
police, courts, and military. We pay attention to the wider context in which the
Klan developed, how it was organized, its principle vigilante activities and strategies,
and its relationship to electoral and government actors. In particular, we focus on
how the Klan’s use of violence was shaped by its relationship with the state.

Data
This paper draws on different sources of data for the different eras of the Klan. For the
first Klan of the 1870s, we use information from the scholarly accounts that have
reconstructed details of this Klan’s wave of vigilante terror through a variety of historical
sources, especially evidence gathered in the national government’s investigation into the
Klan’s violent activities. For the second Klan of the 1920s we rely on data collected by
the first author during the 1980s from unstructured oral histories of former women Klan
members, local newspaper accounts of Klan activity in the state of Indiana where the
Klan was large and politically powerful, documents from local, regional, and national
male and female Ku Klux Klan organizations, and information published by anti-Klan
organizations and newspapers, including details of Klan vigilante activities and the iden-
tities of Klan members (Blee 1991). Information on the third Klan comes from pub-
lished research, largely based on evidence gathered by the police or federal investigators.
For the Klan of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, we draw on studies by
the first author that secured insider information about the Klan’s vigilante activities and
plans through semi-structured interviews with Klan members and former members and
observation of the Klan’s public and private events (Blee, 1991/ 2009, 2002).
We present the best information available about the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilantism,
but it is important to note that data about the Klan is always partial. As a secret
society that is often engaged in illegal actions or plans, the Klan takes care to
obscure its leadership, structure, and locations and to exaggerate its size and influ-
ence. Even evidence about the Klan from law enforcement or government agen-
cies can be suspect, as some state officials have been sympathetic to the Klan’s
violence or reluctant to reveal its ability to pursue vigilante actions with few legal
consequences (Blee, 2017; Cunningham, 2012; McVeigh and Cunningham, 2012;
(Wright, 1985). The sources on which we rely for data on vigilantism in the Ku
Klux Klan thus required extraordinarily complex methods of research to surmount
the Klan’s secrecy, intimidation, and sharp difference between publicly available
statements of plans and ideologies and what happens within its groups (Blee, 2002).

Klan vigilantism across historical periods

1st Klan: 1860s–1870s

The first Klan arose in the wake of the Civil War, which ended with the defeat of
the Confederacy, a secessionist movement of southern states that sought to preserve
 Ku Klux Klan 33

their slavery-based economy and social order. The Klan emerged as a loosely
organized association of white men, largely in the rural areas of the South, who
wielded vigilante terrorism and violence to defend white supremacy and the racial
state. Their name was meant to denote a circle of brothers, suggesting the racial
fraternity that would long be a characteristic of Klan groups. Klan targets were
primarily emancipated blacks and white northerners who had come to the south to
reconstruct the state in the post-Civil War period. Its organization was limited,
with officials holding titles such as Grand Dragon that were more symbolic than
reflective of an actual integrated organization. Indeed, the Klan’s locally based and
largely uncoordinated groups mostly resembled loosely organized gangs.
Due to its loose organizational form, the Klan’s vigilante violence was locally tar-
geted with little overall strategy among groups beyond a shared antipathy toward both
blacks and the northern, federally directed project of reconstructing the southern racial
state. Indeed, it is difficult to identify precisely the acts of violence that are attributable
to Klan groups, as white violence against blacks and their white allies was pervasive
across the post- Civil war era South. Such violence was both vicious and extensive,
taking the form of murders, arsons, lynchings, expulsion from homes and commu-
nities, robbery, and enslavement. In the state of Georgia alone, the Freedman’s Bureau
cited 336 murders or assaults in 1868, a significant proportion of which might have
been related to the Klan, while the Klan was also responsible for burning schools and
churches and numerous acts of political intimidation (Bryant, 2002). In one county in
South Carolina, white vigilante violence, much likely attributable to Klan members,
took the form of whipping, terrorizing, attacking, and even murdering and lynching
former slaves who tried to leave their plantations (as well as those that hired them) or
who showed disrespect to whites, (for men) approached white women, or were
thought to be fomenting insurrection or resistance to white rule (Parsons, 2005;
Tolnay & Beck, 1995). Moreover, the Klan in that county was responsible for two
large scale raids on jails that ended in deaths after a black militia attempted to block the
delivery of illegal liquor to a local hotel (Parsons, 2005).
The first Klan established an agenda that intertwined issues of race, gender, and
region, a pattern that would recur in later Klans. Klan groups insisted that their vig-
ilantism was necessary to protect Southern white women, who they saw as particu-
larly vulnerable with the collapse of the former slavery state to what the Klan
described as the vengeance and sexual depravities of now-freed black men. They
especially highlighted fears about the plight of southern white women who were
living without male protectors (as their husbands/fathers had died in the Confederate
army) on often-isolated plantations across the South, and about the specter of inter-
racial relationships as freed black men could now take advantage of innocent white
southern women. Rejecting the idea that the southern state could be reconstructed
by northern and federal government officials, the first Klan insisted that it was the
only barrier against racial lawlessness and that its violent actions were the only
effective means of controlling an uprising of freed blacks and their allies.
Vigilantism against migrants from the north was a strategy to protect the insti-
tutions of southern white supremacy against reform efforts by political organizers
34 Kathleen Blee and Mehr Latif

and politicians from the northern states that had been triumphant in the Civil War.
These northerners were short-term settlers, arriving in the states of the defeated
Confederacy to establish the institutions of governance that would replace the slave
state and establish federal jurisdiction. To the Klan and its supporters, they were
intruding on the rights of the southern self-determination by their efforts to upset
the long-time social order of the South that had been based on white political and
economic control and black exclusion and subordination.
The northern political agents who attracted the violent attention of the Klan
were generally powerful and intentional travelers who were acting on behalf of the
triumphant federal union, quite distinct from a general image of migrants as pow-
erless and displaced people. In contrast, the Klan’s vigilantism against blacks tar-
geted a powerless group who, although legally free from slavery, rarely had any
means of sustaining their livelihood or any legal claim to a residence. Many blacks
fled to the northern states before, during, and after the Civil War. Those that
remained in the South were swept into a system of debt peonage in which they
were forced to work for very low wages, often on the very plantations on which
they were earlier enslaved.
The Klan operated outside the official law but with the clear acquiescence of the
white controlled law enforcement and judicial operations in the post-Civil War
southern states. In this sense, the Klan’s vigilante violence simply supplemented the
racial violence that had long been a practice of southern slave states. After con-
siderable outcry about its operations as a terroristic force, the first Klan was even-
tually the subject of investigation by the U.S. Congress, which passed an anti-Klan
law that stripped southern states of legal authority over some crimes of violence
and imposed a ban on wearing masks (targeted at Klan masks) in southern states.
The Klan was disbanded in the 1870s, due both to federal pressure and to the
reestablishment of a white political control in the south that made the Klan less
necessary (Chalmers, 1981; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011).

1920s Klan
The KKK re-emerged in late 1910s and grew to be the largest Klan by the mid-
1920s at which point it had enlisted approximately 3–5 million white, native-born
Protestant men and women across the country. Unlike the 1870s Klan, which
operated at the margins of society, the 1920s Klan positioned itself simultaneously
as a vehicle for white supremacism and a mainstream social club for white Protes-
tants. And contrary to its predecessor, this Klan established itself largely in northern
states and cities and towns (Jackson, 1967). The 1920s Klan also was different from
the first Klan in its efforts to recruit women. Women were mobilized into the
1920s Klan for many of the same reason that brought men – a desire to preserve
and extend the dominance of white Protestants over racial and religious minorities,
and fears that immigration and the internal migration of blacks from southern to
northern states portended a dangerous form of heterogeneity in communities that
had long been dominated by white Protestants. Yet, some women joined the Klan
 Ku Klux Klan 35

to use their new voting rights to empower white women relative to black men
who had earlier been formally enfranchised (Blee, 1991, 1996). Women’s Klan
chapters were separate from but allied with the men’s Klans, eventually enlisting
over a half-million women.
The second Klan began more as a sophisticated marketing scheme than an
ideological campaign (Blee, 1991, 1996; Chalmers, 1981). It was designed by a
couple of entrepreneurs who saw the potential for organizing a racist crusade
through which they could make money by taking a share of members’ dues and
purchase of Klan robes, hoods, and other items. Their plan was a nearly-immediate
success, with Klan groups appearing across the country and recruiting vast numbers
of members through a coordinated strategy of modern marketing and public rela-
tions. Three aspects of their strategy were particularly effective in the Klan’s
explosive growth. One was its use of block recruiting. Instead of recruiting mem-
bers by appealing to individuals, the second Klan absorbed groups of people by
appealing to organizational leaders. Members of social clubs and fraternal organi-
zations joined the Klan as a block, while the congregations of local Christian
churches were swallowed into Klan chapters by the approval of their ministers.
Second, the Klan’s public self-presentation as an ordinary group enabled its ability
to recruit large numbers of members. Despite its clear agenda of white suprema-
cism and its calls to rid the country of blacks, Jews, Catholics, and others, the
second Klan was so dominant in some communities that it was treated by white
native-born Protestants as simply another club, with its activities routinely adver-
tised and reported by local papers; it was often listed along with sewing clubs and
fraternal associations in local directories (Blee, 1991). In this way, the Klan repre-
sented a social network, which an informant defined as a “friendly associa-
tion”(Blee, 1991; 2001: 129). Third, the Klan employed sophisticated techniques
to attract recruits, including massive public events, radio programming, and
advertisements in the newspapers (often with the support of local businessmen)
(Gordon, 2017). Its public events were particularly noteworthy for the time,
featuring such crowd-attracting events as stunt airplanes, parachuting, beautiful
(white) baby contests, parent–child sporting contests, and tents in which titillating
tales of the alleged sexual depravities of Catholic priests and Jewish businessmen
were recounted by alleged victims including so-called “escaped nuns” and white
Protestant women whose virtue had been compromised by their Jewish employers.
The Klan of the 1920s also staged enormous rallies and parades intended to bring
new members as well as to terrorize its enemies. Klan members marched in large
numbers down the main streets of many cities and towns and, in a particularly
striking incident, paraded in formation along a main avenue in the nation’s capital,
Washington, D.C. Although clearly massive, the Klan’s size and influence were
often overstated by its leaders and supporters to intimidate mainstream politicians
and those in its enemy groups as well to project an image of strength that would
attract new recruits (Blee, 1991; Gordon, 2017). Moreover, the Klan’s recruiting
style, especially its block recruiting, meant that increases in size were often accom-
panied by increased group instability as many recruits had little commitment to the
36 Kathleen Blee and Mehr Latif

organization or, sometimes, even to its ideology and political agenda. As a result,
their time in the Klan could be very brief.
While the Klan tried to position itself as a mainstream social organization, its
agenda was explicitly that of white, native-born Protestant supremacism. Klan
events combined aspects of a neighborhood block party, with bands, food, drinks,
and a first aid station, with the raw politics of racial hatred, with speakers that
harangued the crowd about the dangers of racial and religious minorities (Blee,
1999, 2001). In many ways, the Klan resembled a fraternal order of the 1920s, with
elaborate rituals of clothing, secret passwords, oaths of commitment, and complex
ceremonies that etched a firm boundary between insiders and outsiders. But the
Klan’s fraternal rituals were not intended solely to create solidarity among mem-
bers; they were also meant to convey a sense of white Protestant power and
strength to broader audiences of potential members, supporters, and victims (Blee
& McDowell, 2012; MacLean, 1995; Parsons, 2005).
One strategy that the 1920s Klan used to increase its influence was a focus on
electoral politics (McVeigh, 2009). Unlike the Klans that preceded and followed it,
this second Klan made a major effort to win local and state political offices and to
change national policies about immigration. The strategy had some success. Klan-
backed candidates were successful in a number of locations, especially in the states of
Indiana and Oklahoma, even at the level of the governor’s seat in Indiana. Although
the Klan did not seek national political office, it did rally its members and supporters
to oppose the presidential candidacy of Al Smith, a Catholic, although they likely
played only a minor role in Smith’s defeat. More successful was the Klan’s national
legislative campaign to impose additional restrictions on immigration into the U.S.,
targeted at immigration of Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe.
Klan writers wrote and spoke about immigration as a moral, social, and economic
menace to U.S. society, shaping a sense of white collective grievance. They also
described outsiders—those not native-born and white and Protestant—as threatening
U.S. interests by secretly championing the interests of outside agents. The most
developed of these outsider threat narratives was the Klan’s stance against Catholics
claiming their loyalty to the Pope would outstrip their loyalty to the U.S. Such
pronouncements, proclaimed without evidence, had a dramatic effect in the 1920s,
shaping anger toward the Klan’s enemy groups and mobilizing public opinion in
favor of a revised policy on immigration with more restrictions and race-based quotas
for immigrants.
Because the second Klan sought to wield its massive size to change public policy
and assume public office, its vigilantism was less extensive and less dramatic,
although still consequential for its enemies. Some members of the Klan were
associated with acts of direct violence, especially lynchings, in the 1920s, but most
of the violence of this second Klan took the form of threats, boycotts, and other
efforts to force non-whites, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews out of their jobs and
communities.
The Women’s Klan was particularly effective in the 1920s Klan’s new form of
vigilante terrorism. Its Indiana chapters organized “poison squads of whispering
 Ku Klux Klan 37

FIGURE 2.1 Ku Klux Klan night rally in Chicago around 1920 (from Library of Con-
gress, unknown photographer).

women” who spread rumors about Jewish merchants and urged women to wield
their power as consumers to boycott Jewish-owned stores, a strategy that collapsed
businesses. In Blee’s (1991: 147) analysis, “Organizing Klanswomen as consumers
had an immediate and phenomenal effect. Businesses with Jewish owners, ranging
from large department stores to small shops and professional services, went bank-
rupt throughout Indiana.” Klanswomen also circulated rumors about Catholic
schoolteachers that caused them to lose their jobs, and unfounded stories about the
sexual crimes of black men that caused them to flee for their lives (Blee, 1991).
Not all the efforts of the Women’s Klan were aimed directly at non-white Pro-
testants. Some also practiced what Linda Gordon (2017: 45) terms “black psywar”
by distributing rumors that they attributed to Jews and Catholics to make their
enemies appear unscrupulous. For example, the Denver Klan forged a document
that suggested that Catholics were targeting 800 local Protestants for economic ruin
(Gordon 2017). As Gordon notes, such stories could become more powerful by
their lack of evidence, a common outcome of conspiratorial messages.
Unlike the first Klan whose vigilantism was exercised outside (but with the
acquiescence of) the formal state because the southern states had become too wea-
kened by the Civil War and its aftermath to ensure the foundations of white supre-
macy, the 1920s Klan tried to capture the state through electoral office and public
pressure and enlist the formal state apparatus as an instrument for white and native-
38 Kathleen Blee and Mehr Latif

born Protestant dominance. The second Klan collapsed in the late 1920s, primarily
because of internal issues that included prominent sexual and financial scandals that
implicated its leaders, as well as because the introduction of national restrictions on
Catholic, Jewish, and non-white immigration removed its central issue. Its collapse
was also hastened by organized anti-Klan activities by Catholics, political pro-
gressives, and others who worked to expose the secret identities of Klan members
and its secret plans for enacting white dominance in anti-Klan newspapers and
publications and who organized mass resistance to some of its public appearances.

1950s–1960s Klan
The third Klan was largely centered in the South, like the first Klan, but it
appeared in cities as well as rural areas. The impetus for its rebirth was the U.S.
Civil Rights movement’s success in dismantling some of the legal structure of racial
segregation in schools and public accommodations in the South, known as Jim
Crow laws. The Klan also built on white fear that the federal government would
strengthen voting oversight and that federal courts would strike down as uncon-
stitutional the set of laws and practices in the southern states that were enacted
prevent black voting, such as literacy tests and poll taxes. Unlike the 1920s Klan,
the Klans that emerged in the mid-twentieth century were largely populated by
men, with women participating in the background, primarily as the wives of
Klansmen (Cunningham, 2012).
The third Klan was neither as loosely organized as the first Klan, nor as
bureaucratically organized as the second Klan. Rather, it existed as a set of local,
state, and regional Klan organizations with rival leaders but a common agenda of
racial exclusion and violence. Some were quite large: the U.S. Klans, Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan formed by Eldon Edwards assembled an estimated 12,000 to
15,000 members by the late 1950s. Others were smaller but also intensely violent:
members of a small Alabama Klan abducted a black man in the state, castrating him
and dousing his wounds with hot turpentine (Southern Poverty Law Center,
2011). The Klan that attracted the most public attention was the highly secretive,
medium-sized White Knights of Mississippi, which, among many acts of violence,
was responsible for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, two of whom
were white (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011)
The Klans of the third era were intensely involved in vigilante violence against
racial minorities, especially African Americans who they feared would dominate
southern politics if they were allowed free access to voting, and those they termed
civil rights “agitators,” which included southern blacks and whites who sought
racial equity and whites from the north who came to the South to register blacks
to vote and encourage black turnout at the polls. The Klan paid less attention to
migrants in this era, as there was little immigration to the southern areas in which
the Klan was established although the Klan was hostile toward the relatively small
number of Latino/a migrants to the South.
 Ku Klux Klan 39

The third Klan’s vigilantism was directly and intensely violent, using techniques
that ranged from arson, murders, bombing campaigns, threats, assaults, and cross
burnings to other forms of racial terror. A 1963 bombing of a church in Birming-
ham Alabama that killed four young black girls was long suspected to be the work
of Klansmen, but only in recent years was a Klansman sentenced for this crime. In
many instances in the 1950s and 1960s, Klan violence was closely coordinated with
local law enforcement and judicial officers (some of whom were openly associated
with the Klan, or later exposed as Klan members) who declined to arrest or pro-
secute Klan members for even very flagrant crimes and violence. David Cunning-
ham (2012) suggests that in the heavily Klan-dominated state of North Carolina,
the localities with larger Klan memberships were those in which the local state
agencies (courts, police) were less involved in white supremacism. This indicates
that the third Klan functioned as an alternative way to ensure white supremacy and
racial segregation in locations in which this was perceived as changing or as less
secure. This Klan thus took deepest root in areas of the South where the law was
regarded by whites as no longer a reliable guarantor of white supremacy.
Although members of the third Klan participated in highly visible crimes and
violence, the Klan was also integrated into and supported by the networks of
mainstream white society. At times, the violence of the Klan and the power of
mainstream white society worked in parallel, as when local pro-segregationist
businesses, including radio shows and printing companies, supported Klan events
and groups. At other times, the Klan and mainstream white society worked in
complementary fashion; as when the Klan’s violence was unable to prevent racial
integration of southern schools, so segregationist whites simply established a parallel
system of “white-flight” schools.
The vigilantism of the third Klan was in defense of a system of white supremacy
that whites in the southern states supported but that was under threat from the fed-
eral government and the civil rights movement. This Klan largely collapsed in the
late 1960s as the resistance of southern states to desegregation waned, in large part
because of the emergence of new forms of school, residential, and political segrega-
tion through private white academies, racialized home mortgage practices by banks,
and electoral districts drawn to dilute potential black electoral strength. The Klan also
was eroded by significant anti-Klan resistance across the country, especially from the
civil rights movement. However, as Rory McVeigh and David Cunningham (2012)
find, the influence of the 1950s–1960s Klan was long enduring. Counties with
strong Klans in the mid-twentieth century had higher homicide rates decades later
than did counties with weak or no Klans, indicating that the Klan so effectively
destroyed community life in southern localities that social disorganization lingered
long after the Klan collapsed.

1970s–2000s
The Klan re-emerged as part of a surge in organized white supremacism in the late
1980s (Aho, 1990). It largely adopted the ideology of preceding Klans with two
40 Kathleen Blee and Mehr Latif

exceptions. One, it rarely espoused anti-Catholicism, and even admitted Catholic

members. Two, it began to incorporate the virulent anti-Semitism associated with
neo-Nazism and especially with the doctrines of Christian Identity, a pseudo-reli-
gious philosophy that argues that Jews are the literal descendants of the devil and that
non-whites are nonhuman (Barkun, 1997). The fourth Klan also reinvoked the
nationalism and nativism of the 1920s Klan to advance its agenda of opposition to
immigrants and refugees from the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin/Central
America. Such opposition was expressed through vigilante violence, as in Klan
attacks on Vietnamese fisherman working on the Gulf Coast, and immigrants from
Mexico and Central America; each group was depicted as threatening the economic
livelihood and future prosperity of white native born American citizens. Klan vio-
lence in the 1970s also targeted political leftists, most dramatically in a 1979 clash
between the Klan and associated neo-Nazis with members of the Communist
Workers Party (CWP) in North Carolina in which five CWP members were killed
(Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011)
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of Klans moved more underground
to facilitate an agenda of terrorist violence. In the process, they made common
cause with a variety of other white supremacist groups, including racist skinheads
and neo-Nazis, the result of which was a modestly successful effort by several racist
leaders to organize a single unified national racist movement. Although skinheads
and neo-Nazis tended to deride the Klan as insufficiently aggressive in the defense
of white supremacy and as an antiquated collection of older, ignorant, Southern
men, a number of people who floated through the Klan and other networks of the
racist right were associated with dramatic acts of racial terrorism. In the late 1980s,
for example, members of the White Patriots were convicted in a plot to purchase
stolen military explosives to blow up the offices of the antiracist organization, the
Southern Poverty Law Center (Blee, 2002; Futrell, Simi, & Tan, 2018; Southern
Poverty Law Center, 2011).
The alliance of the fourth Klan with other racist groups was not unproblematic for
the racist movement. A number of neo-Nazi groups in the late twentieth century
embraced a vision of global “Pan-Aryanism” that collided with the America-first
nationalism of the Klan (Blee, 2003: 171). Yet, despite such differences, the Klan and
other racist activists often appeared together at rallies and gatherings in this era,
especially those held at the Aryan Nations headquarters in Idaho (since closed). Also,
several prominent Klan leaders became Christian identity preachers, further linking
them to other sectors of white supremacism.
The fourth Klan engaged in considerable vigilante violence against racial minorities
and immigrants. This included symbolic violence such as cross-burnings and threats as
well as violence against individuals and institutions such as community centers. Klan
members also were involved in violence against the state itself, largely against the
federal government, which the Klan regarded as an ally of civil rights and progressives
and, for those Klan members influenced by Neo-Nazism and Christian Identity, as so
dominated by Jewish elites such that it constituted a Zionist Occupation Government
(ZOG) (Blee, 2002).
 Ku Klux Klan 41

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the fourth Klan had become small and
marginal even within white supremacism. Its demise is due to the successful efforts
of anti-racist organizers and the legal strategies of anti-racist organizations such as
the Southern Poverty Law Center, which bankrupted Klan chapters and cost them
their property by filing civil suits on behalf of the victims of Klan violence. Its
demise also reflected a general decline in the overall racist movement after the
federal surveillance of the movement in the wake of the cataclysmic 1995 bombing
of the federal office building in Oklahoma, as well as the Klan’s inability to attract a
younger and more geographically diverse membership.

Conclusion
The study of the Klan as a vigilante group provides two insights to the study of
vigilantism more broadly. First, the Klan’s use of rhetorical vigilantism against
Catholics, Jews, and liberal northerners across much of its history suggests that non-
physical violent tactics can be as consequential as physical violence in vigilantism.
Further, the use of more indirect and non-physical forms of vigilantism allows
racist groups to disguise their violent intentions while continuing to practice racial
terrorism. Indeed, even as Klan members today are dwindling and quite incidental
within modern U.S. white supremacism, Klan cross-burnings remain powerful and
iconic forms of racial terrorism that send clear threatening messages to their inten-
ded targets and that inspire white supremacists more broadly (Blee, 2003; Blee,
Simi, DeMichele, & Latif, 2017).
Second, the Klan’s evolving vigilante strategies and targets underscore the
importance of understanding how collective violence is positioned with regard to
the state. With the exception of the 1920s, the Klan has maintained its hostility
against the federal state as a threat to the dominance of the white southerners. In
both the Klan eras of the 1870s and 1950s–1960s, it directly targeted the federal
state or its agents, while perpetuating vigilante violence with the collusion of local
and state-level officials; the 1920s Klan was an exception as it sought to directly
influence federal policies and legislation. Vigilante movement are positioned with
regard to the state in another way, as exemplified by the Klan’s efforts in the 1920s
and 1950s–1960s to support institutions such as schools, churches, and social insti-
tutions that would preserve a white dominant social order. In turn, such organi-
zations further enabled racial vigilantism by channeling funds and resources to the
Klan, providing them with a veneer of respectability and cover and allowing Klan
members to evade state prosecution.

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