Ku Klux Klan - Anti-civil Rights Involvement

The KKK experienced another, less successful resurgence during the 1960s as African

Ku Klux Klan members parade in Washington, D.C., during the 1920s, a decade in which Klan membership grew into the millions and the group exerted significant political influence.
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Americans won civil rights gains in the South. Opposed to the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT and its attempt to end racial SEGREGATION and discrimination, the Klan capitalized on the fears of whites, to grow to a membership of about 20,000. It portrayed the civil rights movement as a Communist, Jewish conspiracy, and it engaged in terrorist acts designed to frustrate and intimidate the movement's members. KKK adherents were responsible for acts such as the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four young African–American girls were killed and many others injured, and the 1964 murder of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, in Mississippi. The Klan was also responsible for many other beatings, murders, and bombings, including attacks on the Freedom Riders, who sought to integrate interstate buses.

In many instances, the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI), then under the control of J. EDGAR HOOVER, had intelligence that would have led to the prevention of Klan violence or conviction of its perpetrators. However, the FBI did little to oppose the Klan during the height of the civil rights movement.

By the 1990s, the Klan had shrunk to under ten thousand members and had splintered into several organizations, including the Imperial Klans of America, the Knights of the White Kamelia, and the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. These factions also sought alliances with a proliferating number of other white supremacist groups, including the Order and Aryan Nations. Like these groups, the KKK put new emphasis on whites as an "oppressed majority," victimized by AFFIRMATIVE ACTION and other civil rights measures.

The Klan's campaign of hatred has spurred opposition from many fronts, including Klanwatch, an organization started by lawyer and civil rights activist Morris Dees in 1980. The group is affiliated with Dees's SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER, in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million civil suit against the Alabama-based United Klans of America for the 1981 murder of a 19-year-old man. The suit drove that Klan organization into BANKRUPTCY. In 1998, Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center won a civil suit against the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who were accused of burning down the Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville, South Carolina. The center won an unprecedented $37.8 million in damages.

The KKK suffered other setbacks. For example, in 1990 the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that state's Anti-Mask Act (Ga. Code Ann. § 16-11-38) by a vote of 6–1 (State v. Miller, 260 Ga. 669, 398 S.E. 2d 547). The case involved a Klan member who had been arrested for wearing full Klan regalia, including mask, in public and had claimed a FIRST AMENDMENT right to wear such clothing. The court ruled that the law, first passed in 1951, protected a STATE INTEREST in safeguarding the right of people to exercise their civil rights and to be free from violence and intimidation. It held that the law did not interfere with the defendant's FREEDOM OF SPEECH.