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Previous page: KKK – Ku Klux Klan — An Overview
- The Ku Klux Klan in history and today PBS TV series American Experience asked sociologist and Ku Klux Klan scholar David Cunningham to provide responses to the five questions he is most frequently asked about the Klan. The author of Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK [Kindle edition], Cunningham is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Brandeis University.
- Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3rd ed. by David M. Chambers
- The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (Social Movements, Protest and Contention) by Rory McVeigh, associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.
In 1915, forty years after the original Ku Klux Klan disbanded, a former farmer, circuit preacher, and university lecturer named Colonel William Joseph Simmons revived the secret society. By the early 1920s the KKK had been transformed into a national movement with millions of dues-paying members and chapters in all of the nation’s forty-eight states. And unlike the Reconstruction-era society, the 1920s-era Klan exerted its influence far beyond the South.
In The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Rory McVeigh provides a revealing analysis of the broad social agenda of 1920s-era KKK, showing that although the organization continued to promote white supremacy, it also addressed a surprisingly wide range of social and economic issues, targeting immigrants and, particularly, Catholics, as well as African Americans, as dangers to American society. In sharp contrast to earlier studies of the KKK, which focus on the local or regional level, McVeigh treats the Klan as it saw itself—as a national organization concerned with national issues.
Drawing on extensive research into the Klan’s national publication, the Imperial Night-Hawk, he traces the ways in which Klan leaders interpreted national issues and how they attempted—and finally failed—to influence national politics.
More broadly, in detailing the Klan’s expansion in the early 1920s and its collapse by the end of the decade, McVeigh ultimately sheds light on the dynamics that fuel contemporary right-wing social movements that similarly blur the line between race, religion, and values.
– Source: Book description at Amazon.com
The Ku Klux Klan – A Secret History A History Channel documentary.
News & News Archive
- Ku Klux Klan Profile by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This profile includes a glossary of KKK-terminology, a list of active KKK groups, and links to associated groups
- Ku Klux Klan Profile at Wikipedia
Ku Klux Klan Brief overview by the Southern Poverty Law Center as part of its Hate Groups Map. Includes a listing of different KKK group names.
Ku Klux Klan Brief overview by the Anti-Defamation League.