By David Chalmers The Ku Klux Klan is a native-born American racist terrorist organization that helped overthrow Republican Reconstruction governments in the South after the Civil War and drive black people out of politics.

 In the summer of 1866, six young ex-Confederate officers organized a social club. Drawing on their college Greek, they adopted the term for circle, "kuklos." They added the alliterative word "klan," and the "Ku Klux Klan" was born. Their nightly rides, in which members disguised themselves in masks and flowing robes, soon became a political successor to the prewar slave patrols in controlling newly freed blacks. Particularly across the upper South,

 Klansmen sought to overturn the new Republican state governments, drive black men out of politics, control black labor, and restore black subordination. Led by elites and drawing on a cross-section of white male society, the Klan's assaults and murders numbered in the thousands.

In an organizing meeting at the Maxwell House* in Nashville, ex-Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest became grand wizard, and other generals served as state grand dragons. But in fact, the Klan was decentralized and local; each state and community had its own violent story. By 1869, the Klan had helped terrorize black voters and overturn elected Republican governments in the Deep South.

 In 1870 and 1871, the Radical Republicans struck back in Congress, passing the Enforcement and Ku Klux Klan Acts aimed at protecting the rights of blacks, and a Joint Select Committee issued a 12-volume report on its hearings on Klan violence. President Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, and convictions in South Carolina and Mississippi helped bring a decline in violence.

 But Reconstruction was in retreat; when the Supreme Court ruled in 1883 that Congress lacked the authority to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals and organizations, the national government effectively abandoned its efforts to protect Negro rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Having helped restore white Democratic political power in the South, the Klan had finished its work. In white Southern legend, the Klan was enshrined as the savior of a downtrodden white people from what they saw as the fearful disorder of black equality. David Chalmers is an emeritus Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Florida and the author of Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Duke University Press, 1981) and Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

 Becomes a coffee company in 1892  Slogan “Good to the Last Drop” advertised as a quote from Teddy Roosevelt in 1907  Same Hotel as Klan meeting in April of 1867 where Nathan Forrest Bedford became the first “Grand Wizard”