Being in a club with friends can be fun. Either it be over a favorite sport, hobby, or just a common interest. One a group of friends did make a club over a common interest. Then it grew into one of America’s largest Hate groups. This is how the Ku Klux Klan started. From the beginning there has been three different itera-tions of the Ku Klux Klan, each of them with their own way of expressing their belief. The “first” Ku Klux Klan, or the “Or-der”, self-described themselves as the “Invisible Empire of the South”, they were an underground resistance movement. They were trying to preserve its old way of life. Then there was the second Ku Klux Klan, or the “Knights of the Ku Klux Klan“. This division had been the most famous of the three Klan’s. …show more content…
The original Ku Klux Klan was founded by a group of 6 veterans of the Confederate Army, on Christmas Eve in 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee. At first they were called Kuklos Clan, after the Greek word Kuklos which means circle. But one of the members thought it would be funny if they changed to the Ku Klux Klan, as a parody of college fraterni-ties.. Some of the activities the Klan would do is that they would ride around at night on horseback and would act as ghost and scare free slaves (Untied 52). These were called “midnight rides”. After first midnight ride, the six found an abandoned house on a hill not far from town. The house had been wrecked several months earlier by a cyclone, and high winds had thrown trees into the walls and windows. For the next couple of weeks this is where the Klan would meet up and dress up for other midnight rides (Terrorist …show more content…
Griffith film “birth of a nation.” In the movie, it shows that the Ku Klux Klan and all its members as “great heroes”. Simon took advantage of and made a living of selling memberships to organizations like “the woodmen of the world“. As Simon even looked to the Klan as a new source of membership sales. His first official act, he had climbed to the top of a local hill top and set a cross on fire, to sym-bolize that the Ku Klux Klan was now reborn. The newly reborn Klan promoted fundamentalism, patriotism and white supremacy (1920s 1). This new Klan blasted bootleggers, motion pictures and espoused a return to “Clean” living. By the middle of the 1920’s, estimated for national membership ranged from three million to as high as eight million Klansman. It wasn't just rural America that was joining the Ku Klux Klan. Mainstream middle class Americans joined the Ku Klux Klan and wore the white robes of the KKK. (1920s