KKK's founding in late 1865 or early 1866 by a handful of Confederate veterans, reputedly as a social club, the story of the organization had been one of cyclical resurgences and protracted periods of dormancy" (Stanton 83).
At the turn of the century, the story of the Klan was popularized in Thomas B. Dixon's novel The Clansman (1905) and D.W. Griffith's powerful movie The Birth of a Nation (1915). This led to the establishment of a new Ku Klux Klan, which spread throughout the nation. The new Klan preached anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-black, antisocialist, and anti-labor union "Americanism." Often taking the law into their own hands, mobs of white-robed, white-hooded men punished "immorality" and terrorized "un-American" elements. At the height of its popularity in the early 1920s, the Klan had more tha two million adherents and exercised great political power in many Southern, Western, and Midwestern states: "Hundreds of local politicians all across the country owed their elections to their Klan supporters" (Stanton 84).
In the post-World War I years, the Klan began to wane as Americans adjusted to the great changes that were taking place in American society. By the 1930s, the Klan had lost nearly all of its power, although some remnants of the Klan continued to exist. Later, Klan membership surged in the South in response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s: "Membership crested in the mid-1960s at the highest level at any time since the flush times of the 1920s" (Stanton 84).
Mainstream white supremacists sought to crush the racial dissent of the civil rights movement and the Klan was instrumental in carrying out this objective. In some Southern states, most notably Mississippi, racism was so pervasive that a virtual police state existed: "Civil rights advocates were hounded throughout the South, but only in Mississippi did the state government maintain a network of surveillance, coercion and control...