Why Do White Supremacist Groups Re‐Emerge? The Case of the 1960s Ku Klux Klan

Trellace Marie Lawrimore

Social Science Quarterly, 2026, vol. 107, issue 2

Abstract: Objective Why do White supremacists mobilize in some places and not others? I answer this question within the case of the Civil Rights era South, where the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) resurged after decades of dormancy. Curiously, however, the KKK did not re‐emerge everywhere in the South, but chiefly in North Carolina. Method In order to elucidate this particular puzzle and the broader forces driving White supremacist terrorism in the United States, I analyze data on North Carolina Klan rallies from 1963 to 1967 and the number of klaverns per county in the 1960s. I implement a finite mixture model to evaluate three possible explanations of KKK activity: racial threat, school desegregation, and generational Klan legacies. Results Previous research has focused primarily on racial threat as the explanation for Klan activity, but I find that desegregation and Klan legacies outperform racial threat in explaining a majority of county‐year observations. The results encourage scholars to reassess the historical and political correlates of White supremacist activity.

Date: 2026
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