GROUP ORGIN

• Founded in 1866, kkk spread into almost every southern state by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for blacks. Its members waged an underground campaign of intimidation and violence directed at white and black Republican leaders. Though Congress passed legislation designed to curb Klan terrorism, the organization saw its primary goal–the reestablishment of white supremacy–fulfilled through Democratic victories in state legislatures across the South in the 1870s. After a period of decline, white Protestant nativist groups revived the Klan in the early 20th century, burning crosses and staging rallies, parades and marches denouncing immigrants, Catholics, Jews, blacks and organized labor. The civil rights movement of the 1960s also saw a surge of Ku Klux Klan activity, including bombings of black schools and churches and violence against black and white activists in the South.

PURPOSE OF GROUP

CURRENT PURPOSE

• The current manifestation is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.[5] It is estimated to have between 5,000 and 8,000 members as of 2012.[2]

FMOUS MEMBERS

• Harry Truman- Harry S. Truman, the Democratic Missouri politician who became president in 1945, dabbled with the Klan briefly. In 1924, he was a judge in Jackson County, Missouri, which includes Kansas City. Truman was up for reelection, and his friends Edgar Hinde and Spencer Salisbury advised him to join the Klan. The Klan was politically powerful in Jackson County, and two of Truman's opponents in the Democratic primary had Klan support. Truman refused at first, but paid the Klan's $10 membership fee, and a meeting with a Klan officer was arranged.[
• Robert Byrd-was a recruiter for the Klan while in his 20s and 30s, rising to the title of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops of his local chapter. After leaving the group, Byrd spoke in favor of the Klan during his early political career. Though he claimed to have left the organization in 1943, Byrd wrote a letter in 1946 to the group's Imperial Wizard stating "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia." Byrd defended the Klan in his 1958 U.S. Senate campaign when he was 41 years old.
• Edward Douglass White-Wyn Craig Wade has asserted that Edward Douglass White, the Democratic Chief Justice of the United States from 1910 to 1921, told Thomas Dixon "I was a member of the Klan" at the 1915 White House screening of The Birth of a Nation.No evidence has been found that corroborates his alleged admission. Note that his membership would have been in the 19th-century Klan, not the 1920s revived organization.

The triangular Ku Klux Klan symbol consists of what looks like a triangle within a triangle but which actually represents three letter K's aligned in a triangle and facing inwards. This is an old Ku Klux Klan symbol that has been resurrected by modern-day Ku Klux Klan groups. A variation on this symbol has the K's facing outwards instead of inwards.

DID YOU KNOW.......

• That the kkk started to frist show up around the civil war .
• The are most known for burning people
• Each member made their own outfit.