What They Never Told You About The KKK’s Murders

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]At its peak, the Ku Klux Klan had more members than the United States Army. 4 to 6 million members hell-bent on the destruction of black Americans. The Ku Klux Klan did not operate in the shadows. It ran the government. Mayors, judges, sheriffs, and governors, sworn members, deciding which crimes got investigated and which ones simply disappeared. Berry Washington is one of the ones who didn't make the record. He was a black farmer. He was hanged without a trial, without a warrant, without a charge filed anywhere in any courthouse. No newspaper sent a reporter. No official record was opened.

[00:00:35]No investigation followed. Berry Washington died on a Tuesday morning while men in ordinary clothes watched from the road. And then those men went home and the world continued and his name disappeared. Not into myth, not into contested history, just gone.

[00:00:53]The Tuskegee Institute spent decades tracking lynchings across the United States. 4,743 documented cases between 1882 and 1968 is the number that appears in textbooks, in congressional testimony, in museum exhibits. It is treated as the authoritative [music] record. What it actually is is the floor. Tuskegee counted what could be confirmed through newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts that managed to reach them.

[00:01:21]Researchers at the Equal Justice Initiative, working a century later through county death records, coroner's logs, and oral histories, found cases that never made any newspaper.

[00:01:32]Cases where no witness account traveled far enough to be recorded. Cases exactly like Berry Washington's.

[00:01:39]Their estimate of the true toll runs significantly higher than Tuskegee's count. By how much? No one can say with certainty.

[00:01:46]That uncertainty is not an accident of incomplete record-keeping. It is the result of a system that was specifically designed to leave no record at all. This is where the standard history of the Ku Klux Klan fails the people it most affected. The organization is taught as a chapter, a dark period with a beginning, a middle, and a legislated end.

[00:02:07]But that's not the whole truth.

[00:02:09]Before the robes became a symbol, before the burning cross became an image reproduced on a thousand book covers, the Ku Klux Klan was a political operation. Its founding purpose was not terror for its own sake. It was the destruction of black political life in the American South.

[00:02:27]Between 1868 and 1871, Klan violence killed an estimated 2,000 [music] people across the South. That number does not come from a civil rights organization or an advocacy group. It comes from the United States Congress. [music] The 1871 Joint Select Committee to inquire into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary states produced thousands of pages of sworn testimony from survivors, witnesses, and federal officials who had seen what was happening first hand. That document exists in the National Archives. It is almost never assigned in American schools.

[00:03:02]The targets were deliberate. Benjamin Randolph was a black minister, a member of the South Carolina Republican Party, a man building the machinery of black civic participation from the ground up.

[00:03:14]In October 1868, he was shot dead on a train platform in Hodges, South Carolina.

[00:03:19]Three men were identified as his killers. None of them were convicted. He was not alone. Local office holders, precinct organizers, school teachers, and ministers across Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas were killed in the same years for the same reason.

[00:03:35]They were not killed because they posed a physical threat. They were killed because they were making democracy function for people the Klan had decided democracy was not for.

[00:03:45]Congress responded. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was passed and signed into law.

[00:03:52]President Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties. Federal prosecutors indicted hundreds of Klan members. For approximately 3 years, it appeared that the federal government might actually dismantle the organization through the force of law.

[00:04:07]Then the political will collapsed.

[00:04:10]Funding for federal enforcement dried up. The cases were quietly dropped. The men who had been indicted returned to their lives.

[00:04:18]The Klan did not survive through secrecy. It survived because the government that was prosecuting it decided to stop.

[00:04:25]That lesson, that exposure without consequence is just documentation, would echo across the next 100 years in ways that are almost unbearable to trace.

[00:04:35]The second Klan is where most Americans locate the organization in their imagination. White robes, burning crosses, the American South. A dark chapter safely confined to a particular region and a particular era. Every part of that picture is wrong. The second Klan was reconstituted in 1915 on the summit of Stone Mountain, Georgia.

[00:04:56]Partly inspired by the release of D.W.

[00:04:58]Griffith's film Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the original Klan as heroic saviors of white civilization and screened to enthusiastic audiences at the White House.

[00:05:09]By the mid-1920s, the organization had an estimated 4 to 6 million members. It controlled the governorships of Colorado, Oregon, and Indiana. It dominated municipal governments in Denver, Dallas, [music] Portland, and Indianapolis.

[00:05:24]It published its own newspaper with national circulation. It was not operating in the shadows. It was a mass political movement conducting its business in public with institutional power at every level of government, including the levels responsible for investigating and prosecuting violence.

[00:05:41]This is why the murders committed during this period are largely absent from popular history.

[00:05:46]Many of them were never classified as murders at all. They were ruled accidents, suicides, deaths of unknown cause. The coroners making those rulings, the sheriffs deciding not to investigate, the judges dismissing the cases that somehow still got filed. In a significant number of instances, these were men who had taken the same Klan oath as the killers. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May and June of 1921, Klan members and Klan-affiliated law enforcement participated directly in the destruction of the Greenwood District, the prosperous black neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.

[00:06:22]Historians estimate between 100 and 300 black residents were killed.

[00:06:27]More than 1,200 homes were burned. The official death toll recorded at the time was a fraction of the actual count, and the city of Tulsa did not formally acknowledge what happened until a state commission [music] report in 2001.

[00:06:41]In Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923, an entire black community was burned to the ground over the course of a week following a false accusation. At least six black residents were killed, and the actual number is believed to be higher.

[00:06:56]The state of Florida did not acknowledge the event or provide reparations to survivors until 1994.

[00:07:03]The geography matters. Oregon, Indiana, Colorado, Ohio.

[00:07:10]This was not a southern problem wearing a southern face. It was a national movement, and most of the country treated it as unremarkable. What follows is not a matter of historical inference.

[00:07:21]It is a matter of federal records.

[00:07:24]The FBI began cultivating informants inside Klan cells during the 1950s and 1960s.

[00:07:30]This is documented. The Bureau knew the names of Klan members in numerous cells across the South. It tracked their meetings, their communications, and in a number of cases, their plans. What those files also document, when read carefully, is what the Bureau chose to do with that information and what it chose not to do. On September 15th, 1963, a bomb planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan destroyed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

[00:07:59]Four girls died in the blast. Addie Mae Collins was 14. Cynthia Wesley was 14.

[00:08:05]Carol Robertson was 14. Carole Denise McNair was 11.

[00:08:10]They had arrived early for Sunday services.

[00:08:13]By the time of the bombing, the FBI had an informant embedded in the Klan cell responsible.

[00:08:19]The bombing was not prevented. The Bureau's subsequent investigation identified the perpetrators relatively quickly.

[00:08:26]That information was not shared with Alabama prosecutors. The full prosecution of all four perpetrators was not completed until 2001 and 2002, between 38 and 39 years after the murders.

[00:08:40]Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder in 1977.

[00:08:44]He died in prison in 1985.

[00:08:47]Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were not convicted until 2001 and 2002, respectively. The fourth perpetrator, Herman Frank Cash, died in 1994 without ever being charged. In June 1964, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, by members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan working in coordination with the local sheriff's department. An FBI informant was present in Neshoba County during the period of the killings. The Bureau's subsequent investigation resulted in federal civil rights convictions for seven men in 1967.

[00:09:26]Edgar Ray Killen, who organized the murders, was not convicted of manslaughter until 2005.

[00:09:32]He was 80 years old. He died in prison in 2018.

[00:09:37]The pattern that emerges across these cases is not bureaucratic failure.

[00:09:41]Failure implies an attempt that fell short. What the records show is something more deliberate, and the next case makes that distinction impossible to ignore.

[00:09:51]Vernon Dahmer was a prosperous black farmer and NAACP chapter leader in Forrest County, Mississippi.

[00:09:59]He ran a grocery store.

[00:10:01]He paid poll taxes for black residents who could not afford to pay their own because in 1966 Mississippi, the poll tax was still one of the instruments being used to keep black citizens off the voter rolls.

[00:10:13]He was known. He was effective and that made him a target.

[00:10:18]On the night of January 10th, 1966, two carloads of clan members pulled up to Dahmer's home and store on the Kelly Settlement Road outside Hattiesburg.

[00:10:27]They threw jugs of gasoline. They fired weapons into the building as it caught fire.

[00:10:32]Dahmer got his wife Ellie and their children moving toward a back door and then returned to the front of the house where he fired back through the flames to hold the attackers off long enough for his family to get clear.

[00:10:42]Ellie Dahmer and the children survived.

[00:10:45]Vernon Dahmer died the following day from burns and smoke inhalation.

[00:10:49]>> [music] >> He was 58 years old.

[00:10:51]State charges were filed. Several low-level clan members were convicted and received sentences, but the man who had ordered the attack, Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, was tried four separate times between 1968 and 1969.

[00:11:08]Four trials, four hung juries.

[00:11:11]He walked out of the courthouse each time and returned to his life in Laurel, Mississippi.

[00:11:16]He remained free for the next 29 years.

[00:11:19]In 1998, the state of Mississippi retried Sam Bowers for the murder of Vernon Dahmer.

[00:11:24]Ellie Dahmer, then in her 70s, testified. The jury convicted. Bowers was sentenced to life in prison. He died incarcerated in 2006.

[00:11:34]Ellie Dahmer was present in that courtroom. She had waited 32 years to be there.

[00:11:40]What she received was not justice returned on any reasonable timeline.

[00:11:44]It was justice delivered so late that the word itself requires examination.

[00:11:49]But for every case that got justice, there are cases that simply ended. No federal investigation. No delayed prosecution.

[00:11:58]No memorial. Just a name that stopped appearing in any document and a family that carried what happened without any external acknowledgement that it had occurred at all.

[00:12:08]Lamar Smith was 63 years old. He was a farmer and voter registration organizer in Brookhaven, Mississippi.

[00:12:15]On August 13th, 1955, Smith was shot dead on the Lincoln County Courthouse lawn in the middle of the morning in front of witnesses.

[00:12:25]A white man was seen leaving the scene with blood on his clothing.

[00:12:28]Three men were arrested. A grand jury declined to indict any of them.

[00:12:33]No one was ever charged with Lamar Smith's murder.

[00:12:37]Willie Edwards Jr. was 25 years old, a truck driver in Montgomery, Alabama.

[00:12:42]In January 1957, four clan members abducted him having mistaken him for someone else.

[00:12:48]They drove him to a bridge over the Alabama River and ordered him to jump telling him the water was shallow.

[00:12:55]His body was recovered downstream 3 months later.

[00:12:58]The case was reopened in 1976 and charges were filed against three men. A judge dismissed them on the grounds that forcing someone off a bridge did not meet the legal definition of a murder weapon under Alabama statute.

[00:13:11]The charges were gone. The men went free.

[00:13:15]Viola Liuzzo was a white mother of five from Detroit who drove to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma to Montgomery marches.

[00:13:24]On March 25th, she was shot and killed on Highway 80 while driving marchers back from Montgomery.

[00:13:31]Within 48 hours of her death, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was personally briefing President Lyndon Johnson with a package of surveillance material framing Liuzzo as a communist sympathizer and neglectful mother.

[00:13:45]An FBI informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, was sitting in the backseat of the car when she was killed. He was never charged.

[00:13:52]The men who fired the weapon were acquitted of murder by a state jury and later convicted on federal civil rights charges.

[00:13:59]Hoover's surveillance package was designed to protect the bureau's reputation by destroying hers.

[00:14:05]It worked for a while.

[00:14:07]Her family spent years fighting the characterization. A Senate committee investigation in 1975 confirmed what Hoover had done.

[00:14:15]These three cases share something beyond the absence of justice. They share the presence of active machinery working to ensure that the full truth would never be the version of record.

[00:14:25]Erasure was not the aftermath of these killings. It was part of the operation.

[00:14:30]The Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964.

[00:14:33]The Voting Rights Act followed in 1965.

[00:14:37]In the version of history most Americans were taught, this is roughly where the story of organized racial terror winds down.

[00:14:44]The legislation passed. The movement won.

[00:14:47]The worst of it was over.

[00:14:49]November 3rd, 1979.

[00:14:52]Greensboro, North Carolina.

[00:14:54]Members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party drove to a public demonstration organized by the Communist Workers Party and opened fire.

[00:15:03]Five people were killed. Ten more were wounded. The attack lasted 88 seconds.

[00:15:09]It was filmed by three separate television news crews who were present at the scene.

[00:15:14]The footage showed the attackers. It showed their faces. It showed them retrieving weapons from the trunks of their cars. It showed them firing into a crowd. It showed them driving away.

[00:15:25]Six months later, an all-white jury in Greensboro acquitted all defendants on state murder charges.

[00:15:32]A second federal civil rights trial in 1984 produced the same result.

[00:15:37]Not a single person served a single day in prison for five murders committed on camera in broad daylight in front of news crews.

[00:15:45]The writer Jim Schlosser, covering the trials for the Greensboro News and Record, described the verdicts as producing a kind of public disorientation.

[00:15:53]A difficulty reconciling what everyone had seen with what the legal system had decided.

[00:15:59]That disorientation is, in its own way, the point. When the machinery of accountability produces outcomes that contradict visible evidence, the message delivered is not about the specific case. It is about who the system considers worth protecting.

[00:16:14]Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented a significant surge in clan membership and clan-linked violence.

[00:16:24]Desegregation orders, bussing programs, and economic anxiety in white working-class communities were driving recruitment.

[00:16:32]Cross burnings, assaults, and bombings increased across a wide geographic range.

[00:16:37]The chapter that was supposed to have ended was still being written.

[00:16:41]And then, in Mobile, Alabama, a local clan chapter decided to make a statement so [music] explicit, so deliberate in its symbolism, that it would hand the legal tools to dismantle them to the one person they had underestimated.

[00:16:54]Michael Donald was 19 years old. On the night of March 20th, 1981, he was walking to a convenience store in Mobile, Alabama when Henry Hayes and James Knowles, members of Unit 900 of the United Clans of America, drove past him, circled the block, and forced him into their car.

[00:17:12]Their motive was specific. A clan-affiliated juror had helped produce a mistrial in a case involving a black defendant accused of killing a white police officer and the local clan leadership had decided that a public act of racial terror would send a message to future juries.

[00:17:29]Michael Donald was chosen because he was there.

[00:17:32]He was beaten, his throat was cut, and his body was hung from a camphor tree on Herndon Avenue in a residential neighborhood.

[00:17:40]His neighbors found him the following morning.

[00:17:42]James Knowles cooperated with investigators and pleaded guilty.

[00:17:46]He testified against Hayes telling the court that after hanging Donald's body, Hayes had said they had shown clan strength in Mobile.

[00:17:54]Henry Hayes was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1997, the first white person executed in Alabama for the murder of a black person since 1913.

[00:18:06]But the more consequential outcome came through a civil lawsuit filed by Michael Donald's mother, Beulah Mae Donald, represented by [music] Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

[00:18:16]The suit did not target only the individual killers. It targeted the United Clans of America as an organization arguing that the national leadership bore responsibility for creating the conditions in which the murder occurred.

[00:18:29]In 1987, an all-white civil jury in Mobile awarded Beulah Mae Donald $7 million in damages.

[00:18:37]The United Clans of America could not satisfy the judgment. They surrendered their national headquarters, a building in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to fulfill it.

[00:18:46]The organization collapsed.

[00:18:48]Beulah Mae Donald died in 1988, 1 year after the verdict.

[00:18:53]She had lived long enough to see it.

[00:18:56]The camphor tree on Herndon Avenue was eventually cut down. The legal model her case established, using civil liability to hold clan organizations institutionally responsible rather than targeting only individual members, became a template that other civil rights attorneys would apply in subsequent cases.

[00:19:13]It did not end the violence. It ended one organization. The distinction matters. The documented count of racial terror lynchings stands at more than 4,000.

[00:19:24]Researchers believe the real number is at least twice that. The difference is not a gap in the historical record. It is the record. Names that were never written down. Deaths that were never investigated. Killers that were never charged because the system responsible for doing those things was, in a significant number of cases, the same system carrying out the violence.

[00:19:46]That is what they never told you about the KKK's murders. Not the names you know, the ones you don't. The ones nobody counted. The ones ruled accidental. The ones where the grand jury declined, where the charges were dismissed, where the informant sat in the car and filed his report and nobody was arrested.

[00:20:06]Berry Washington Wilcox County, Georgia, 1919 No record, no charge, no consequence.

[00:20:14]The men on that road went home. The world continued. And most of what actually happened stayed exactly where they left it. In the dark.

[00:20:23]The count is incomplete. It always will be.