Atlanta Through the Archives

Birth of a Nation & KKK

Summary

William Joesph Simmons revived the KKK, which had been dormant since the Civil War, with a small group at Stone Mountain before the November 1915 debut of Birth of a Nation. By 1921, the group had expanded to at least hundreds of members in Georgia and was responsible for at least sixty-five hate crimes of violence that summer.

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SOURCES:

Moseley, Clement Charlton. “The Political Influence of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, 1915-1925.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 57, no. 2 (1973): 235–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40579519.