Answer:
The Ku Klux Klan first arose in the South during the Reconstruction Era, but experienced a resurgence in the period immediately following the end of the First World War.
The KKK was a viciously racist organization that employed violence and acts of terror in order to assert white supremacy and maintain a strict racial hierarchy.
Although most of the KKK’s savagery was aimed at African Americans, their hatred extended to immigrants, Catholics, Jews, liberals, and progressives.
The revival of the KKK in the 1920s was demonstrative of a society coping with the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration.
Explanation:
The Ku Klux Klan was a viciously racist white supremacist organization that first arose in the South after the end of the Civil War. Its members opposed the dismantling of slavery and sought to keep African Americans in a permanent state of subjugation to whites. During Reconstruction, the Klan employed violence and terror in the hopes of overthrowing Republican state governments in the South and maintaining the antebellum racial hierarchy.^1
The first Ku Klux Klan declined in the 1870s, partly due to the passage of federal legislation aimed at prosecuting the crimes of Klansmen, though some local cells continued to operate. The institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation in the South, moreover, meant that the KKK’s desire to maintain the antebellum racial hierarchy had been fulfilled.
