Klan activity had subsided in the 1970s, largely because of federal action against the organization. By the start of the 1980s, however, organized white supremacy had returned in force. Recovering from a low of 1,500 in 1974, the Klan’s membership ballooned to between ten and twelve thousand by 1981.
This membership jump was a drop-off from a couple decades earlier, when the Klan had roughly forty thousand core members, and a small fraction of the millions of members it boasted at the height of its popularity in the 1920s.
But Klan activity was inarguably on the uptick. It set up paramilitary training camps (“All defensive,” the head of the Carolina Knights of the KKK maintained, even as he explained that they were “building a white Christian army”). Its members and allies won major party nominations in states like California and Michigan. It offered to assist the Immigration and Naturalization Service in patrolling the US-Mexico border. And it held rallies in cities around the country, from Chicago and Washington DC to Hannibal, Missouri and Meriden, Connecticut.
The Klan’s revival emboldened white supremacists across the country.
“In the past I felt that racism was not to be brought up into polite company, but with this resurgence of (KKK) activity, people are much more willing to express the racism they buried,” said one Fairfax County education official at the time.
A wave of cross burnings broke out across the country. Attacks on synagogues multiplied. The House Judiciary Committee convened a hearing to discuss near-daily reports of anti-black violence. Twenty-four African Americans and two white women who were with black men were murdered at random in seven cities over the course of fifteen months. A white sniper shot down four African Americans in thirty-six hours in Buffalo, just two weeks before two black taxi drivers in the city were killed and had their hearts cut out. Over the span of sixteen months, eleven black children were murdered in Atlanta.
This was just a small, early sample of the racial violence that would plague the country through the decade. Arthur Kinoy of Rutgers University Law School warned that the United States “was on the edge of a national crisis of untold dimensions if this spreading pattern is not halted.”
The Klan, meanwhile, had embarked on a public rebranding effort. Leaders attempted to portray the organization as a “new” Klan, one that had renounced the terrorism of its past. “It’s not like the old Klan. We don’t do any nightriding or burn churches. We’re into politics now,” one Klansman told the Atlanta Constitution in 1978. “You can’t get anywhere with violence anymore.” Rather than burn crosses, they handed out pro-Klan literature at schools and set up the Klan Youth Corps, envisioned as as an alternative to the Boy Scouts.