Timeline
1867
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Former Confederate General and noted white supremacist Nathan Bedford Forrest, architect of the Fort Pillow Massacre, becomes the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan murders several thousand people in the former Confederate States as an effort to suppress the political participation of black Southerners and their allies.
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1868
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The Ku Klux Klan publishes its Organization and Principles (Gutenberg). Although early supporters of the Klan claimed that it was philosophically a Christian, patriotic organization rather than a white supremacist group
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1871
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Congress passes the Klan Act, allowing the federal government to intervene and arrest Klan members on a large scale. Over the next several years, the Klan largely disappears and is replaced by other violent white supremacist groups.
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1882
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The United States Supreme Court declared Ku Klux Klan Act unconstitutional.
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1915
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D.W. Griffith's wildly popular film Birth of a Nation, an adaptation of Dixon's The Clansman, revives national interest in the Klan. A Georgia lynch mob led by William J. Simmons - and including numerous prominent (but anonymous) members of the community, such as former Georgia governor Joe Brown — murders Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, then burns a cross on a hilltop and dubs itself the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
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1920
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The Klan becomes a more public organization, and expands its platform to include Prohibition, antisemitism, xenophobia, anti-Communism, and anti-Catholicism. Spurred on by the romanticized white supremacist history portrayed in Birth of a Nation, bitter whites throughout the country begin to form local Klan groups.
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1925
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Indiana Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson is convicted of murder. Members subsequently begin to realize that they may actually face criminal charges for their behavior, and the Klan largely disappears - except in the South, where local groups continue to operate.
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1951
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Members of the Ku Klux Klan firebomb the home of NAACP Florida executive director Harry Tyson Moore and his wife, Harriet, on Christmas Eve. Both are killed in the blast. The murders are the first high-profile Southern Klan killings among many during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - most of which either go unprosecuted, or result in acquittals by all-white juries.
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Head, Tom. "Timeline History of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)." About News. N.p., 2015. Web. 17 Feb. 2015.
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United States. National Park Service. "Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)." National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, 04 Feb. 2015. Web. 11 Feb. 2015.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center. PDF. Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011.
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