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I INTRODUCTION. Ku Klux Klan, secret terrorist organization that originated in the Southern states during the period of Reconstruction following the American Civil War (1861-1865) and was reactivated on a wider geographic basis in the 20th century. The original Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, during the winter of 1865 to 1866, by six former Confederate army officers who gave their society a name adapted from the Greek word kuklos ("circle"). Although the Ku Klux Klan began …

…of the 1966 murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In 2003 another Klan member was convicted of killing black sharecropper Ben Chester White. In 2005 former Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was tried on murder and manslaughter charges in the 1964 murders of three civil rights activists--James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner--outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen was convicted of the manslaughter charges and sentenced to 60 years in prison. See also Civil Rights Movement; African American History.