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Ku Klux Klan
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Ku Klux Klan members in white robes and hoods stand in a circle at night around a large burning cross in Tennessee. Ku Klux Klan Ku Klux Klan Black-and-white scene from The Birth of a Nation (1915) showing actors in Ku Klux Klan costumes on horseback charging down a street, with armed men fleeing in the foreground. Ku Klux Klan: meeting A man kneels before a burning cross while a hooded Ku Klux Klan member stands over him holding a chalice, surrounded by Klan members in white robes and hoods at night. Ku Klux Klan: initiation ceremony Ku Klux Klan member in a hooded robe sits in a car, holding a noose out the window
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Ku Klux Klan members in white robes and hoods stand in a circle at night around a large burning cross in Tennessee.
Tennessee cross burning The Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in Tennessee, 1948.

Ku Klux Klan

hate organization, United States
Also known as: KKK
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Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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•History

Ku Klux Klan, either of two distinct U.S. hate organizations that employed terror in pursuit of their white supremacist agenda. One group was founded immediately after the Civil War and lasted until the 1870s. The other began in 1915 and has continued to the present. The 19th-century Klan was originally organized as a social club by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. They apparently derived the name from the Greek word kyklos, from which...

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