The Origins of the KKK and its First Death in the 1870s

History Unplugged Podcast · Oct 24, 2023 · 39m

The Ku Klux Klan was arguably America’s first organized terrorist movement. It was a paramilitary unit that arose in the South during the early years of Reconstruction. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the small but growing economic and political power of newly emancipated black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.

To repel the virulent…