The Ku Klux Klan was a brutal, suppressive cult organization which fought to deny the basic civil rights and human liberties granted to citizens of the U.S. by the Bill of Rights to African-Americans, immigrants, Roman-Catholics, Jews, socialists, communists, and anyone else who went against its beliefs or interfered in its work. The Klan was first established in Pulaski, Tennessee in May 1866 by Nathan Forrest, just two years after the end of the Civil War. Some white southerners, however, were still fighting the war and felt they would be until their death. Forrest was the Klan's first "Imperial Wizard", and the Klan quickly spread to other southern states. At the time there were other white supremacy organizations such as the White Brotherhood, the Men of Justice, and the Knights of the White Camelia, but the KKK was the most influential and widely recognized of the groups. .
At the beginning, the main goal of the Klan was to keep blacks from voting and establish exclusive white government, in the southern states to keep blacks at the level of servitude they were at during slavery. Black trade organizations, protection groups, black sympathizers, and successful black business men were inhumanly terrorized and brutally murdered in the night. Any attempt for a black person to get ahead in the world was threatening to the Klan and quickly put to an end. "There were numerous large bands of organized marauders called the Ku Klux Klan, who were dressed in fantastic uniforms, and who rode at night and inflicted unnumbered and horrible outrages upon the negro so that he could not dare to come to the polls. Indeed, the men of the South seemed to think themselves excused in these outrages because they wanted to insure a white man's government in their States."1 .
The Klan believed it their duty to ensure that America was kept for the Americans and not overrun by "negroes and the foreign devils.