December 24 is the 160th Anniversary of the KKK's Founding
The ideals of America's oldest terrorist organization, founded in "Christian" values, are seeing a resurgence—we must stand united and fight back
On December 24, 1865, just eight months after the Civil War ended, former Confederate soldiers founded the KKK. This week the UK Guardian reported that neo-Nazis are seeing a resurgence and revival, especially as the FBI backs off in combatting white supremacy terrorism. To understand why our nation is today on the brink of (if not already in the throes of) full blown fascism, it is critical we understand the history of how we got here. As this regime does its best to whitewash this history, we must double down our efforts to remember it and the lessons it taught—lest we be doomed to repeat them. Let’s Address This.
A Racist Regime Attempts to Erase History
About a decade ago someone asked me, “Why don’t Muslims do more to obliterate ISIS?” i.e. the terrorist organization had sprung up a few years prior as part of the fall out from the Bush-led invasion of and collapse of Iraq. I responded, “We’re doing everything we can, but if you’re upset about a so-called “Islamic” terror organization that’s been around a few years, wait til I tell you about the so-called “Christian” terror organization called the KKK that’s been around for 150 years. By the way, how much more time do Christians need to obliterate them?”
He didn’t have an answer. But I think he got the point.
Today is the 160 year anniversary of the KKK, the nation’s oldest and deadliest terror organization. The Equal Justice Initiative reports:
On December 24, 1865, a group of former Confederate soldiers established what would become the first chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee. Named for the Greek word “kyklos,” which means circle, the Klan was devoted to white supremacy and to ending Reconstruction in the South. The Klan’s first leader, called a Grand Wizard, was former Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest.
To understand where people of color are coming from in the United States, we must first understand American history as people of color have lived it—not as it is often selectively taught. That requires an intentional effort to shed implicit bias and to confront uncomfortable truths. This is not about guilt. It is about clarity. And clarity is essential if we are serious about justice.
That historical journey does not begin with the founding of the United States. It begins more than 500 years ago with the initiation of Indigenous genocide alongside the transatlantic slave trade. For centuries, Indigenous peoples were systematically displaced, massacred, and erased. Meanwhile, millions of Africans were kidnapped, enslaved, and treated as property. Roughly 275 years later, the United States was founded—on land taken through genocide, and with an economy wholly dependent on enslaved labor.
It took nearly a century after the nation’s founding to abolish public slavery—yet it was allowed to thrive in government and private prison systems. That cancer perpetuates to this day. Moreover, public abolition did not bring equality in any meaningful sense. Black Americans received no restitution, no reparations, no education access, no unsegregated public participation in society, and no sustainable voting rights. It took another 100 years—until 1965—for the Civil Rights Act to be signed into law, outlawing explicit racial discrimination in public life. This also finally lifted the ban on Asian immigration, which faced various restrictions post Civil War until outright ban in 1924. That timeline matters. It meant another century of dehumanization for Black Americans, denial of genocide for Indigenous Americans, and an explicitly racist immigration policy for non-European immigrants.
Keep this in mind as you see the Trump regime gut the Department of Education, ban teaching about Black history, ban books by Black scholars, and target Latino Americans based on their ethnicity. None of this is accidental, all of it is a revival of a racist status quo that spanned much of our nation’s history.
Now For the Really Uncomfortable Part
Today, roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population—about 100 million people—are older than the Civil Rights Act itself. Many of them lived through, or vividly remember, a time when “colored” drinking fountains, segregated schools, and whites-only public spaces were not aberrations, but the law of the land. Of those 100 million Americans, approximately 75 million are white—and they represent the wealthiest demographic bloc in the country. That reality is not an accident; it is the cumulative result of generations of policies that allocated opportunity, wealth, and safety along racial lines.
The context becomes even more sobering when we look one generation further back. Americans born in the 1910s and 1920s came of age during the height of the Ku Klux Klan’s power. At that time, to run for office in the South without KKK endorsement was a non-starter. At its peak the KKK had roughly 4 million card carrying members. That means less than a century ago, approximately 1 in every 11 white Americans was a member of the KKK. This political and social strength resulted in the KKK openly marching through Washington, D.C., infiltrating statehouses, school boards, police departments, and courts. White supremacy was not hidden; it was organized, celebrated, and politically influential. And we saw its impact. During the 1930s and 1940s, nearly 70 percent of American college students opposed accepting Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. Too few spoke up when Japanese Americans were rounded up and placed into concentration camps. FHA Redlining denied Black Americans access to housing, furthering an already catastrophic wealth and income divide. These were not isolated moral failures; they were societal ones.
In 2025, if you are white and born before 1965, there is a statistically significant chance—around ten percent—that your parents were members of the KKK. That history is not ancient. It is close enough to touch. And that likely includes Donald Trump (b. 1946) whose father was arrested at a KKK riot in 1927.
This history matters today—especially today. December 24 marks the anniversary of the Ku Klux Klan’s founding in 1865. This date should not pass quietly. It should remind us that white supremacist movements in America were not born in the shadows; they were built openly, with cultural legitimacy and institutional tolerance. They were founded on so-called “Christian” ideals, and to this day the KKK identifies as a Christian organization.
And I must emphasize once more—this is why JD Vance makes asinine statements like, “In America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” No one. Absolutely no one is asking white people to “apologize” for being white. We’re calling on white people to join Black and brown people to dismantle the legacy of systemic racism and build a society committed to true equity and justice for all. That isn’t “anti-white.” It’s pro humanity. What JD Vance is actually saying is that in America, he and Trump are reviving white supremacist policies, and doing so unapologetically. This is why we must stand united across racial lines, and as working class people, to demand the justice our Constitution promises.
The Path Ahead Requires Racial Unity And Class Struggle
While the Klan no longer holds the same formal power, its ideological descendants are once again organizing in public. Neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups are marching, recruiting, and threatening violence. Simultaneously, federal oversight and enforcement of domestic extremism is being scaled back. The Guardian reports that Nazis see Ukraine and the United States as “key centers” for their revival—a revival that is a direct result of the Trump regime allowing their rise:
In the shifting political climate of the second Trump administration, where the FBI has openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists, the [neo-Nazi] Base appears free to organize and prepare for their stated objective of fomenting an armed insurgency against the US government.
This convergence is not coincidental. History shows that when accountability weakens, extremism fills the vacuum. Again, none of this is about assigning blame to individuals for the sins of their ancestors. It is about recognizing continuity. It is about understanding why communities of color carry generational trauma, skepticism, and fear when they see democratic norms erode or when hate is minimized as mere rhetoric. It is about recognizing why we were outraged at the Biden administration funding Netanyahu to commit genocide in Palestine, and how that is connected to the Trump regime doing the same, and additionally bombing and killing more than 100 fisherman with impunity. These injustices are connected and rooted in white supremacy. We cannot be selective in calling out that injustice—we must be united and absolute in the collective struggle for justice.
The modern day manifestation of the Southern Strategy is in full swing. It is working overtime and enacted by wealthy white Americans to convince poor white Americans that their problem is the immigrant, the trans person, or the Black woman—not the billionaires outsourcing their jobs, moving manufacturing plants international, cutting corporate tax rates, gutting healthcare and food stamps, and poisoning their land and water with EPA deregulation. Don’t fall for these culture wars. Our future success rests in recognizing that as working class people our fates are intertwined, so let us stand united for justice and let the rising tide lift all boats.
Conclusion
Every generation faces a choice. Silence or solidarity. Comfort or courage. The 160th anniversary of the Ku Klux Klan’s founding is not a distant historical footnote—it is a reminder that white supremacist terrorism has always been embedded in American political life, reemerging whenever accountability weakens and institutions fail to confront it. From Reconstruction to Jim Crow to today’s neo-Nazi revival, the pattern is consistent: when extremism is tolerated, it grows; when it is normalized, it metastasizes.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is the convergence of rising white supremacist organizing with a federal retreat from enforcing accountability, and a President who openly celebrates racism. History teaches us that fascism does not arrive all at once—it advances when truth is erased, oversight is dismantled, and violence is minimized as rhetoric. We are watching those conditions form in real time.
To my white friends, do not let fascists in power convince you this is about individual guilt for the past. This is about collective responsibility in the present. The story is still being written. Whether it bends toward justice or repeats the darkest chapters of our history depends on what we choose to confront—and what we refuse to excuse—right now. Let us have the courage to move forward together.
Let our collective humanity be our refuge.
I have seen KKKers up close and it’s not pretty…at all. America has a violent history. We are not a nice country.
Thank you, Qasim. I stand with you. I will NEVER support racism or sexism......or any other -ism.