In eloquent archives and testimonies, David Korn-Brzoza traces the little-known, partly repressed history of the "oldest terrorist group in the United States", which has implemented its racist aims with largely unpunished violence, from 1865 to the present day.

1. Birth of an invisible empire
In 1865, a handful of Southern Civil War veterans founded a secret society in Tennessee and named it the Ku Klux Klan, perhaps in reference to the Greek kuklos, "the circle". For fun, then to terrorise, they dressed up in pseudo-medieval attributes, dresses and bonnets concealing their identity. Out of 9 million inhabitants, 4 million blacks freed from slavery then lived in the former Federated States of the South. In 1868, the election year, the Klan, which grew rapidly to become a paramilitary organisation, multiplied attacks and lynchings to dissuade them from exercising their new rights. Four years later, when Washington dissolved the Klan and sent the army to restore order, its members and allies assumed all the powers. Under the aegis of the so-called "Jim Crow" laws, ruthless segregation succeeded slavery. Images of lynchings, which had become commonplace, appeared on postcards. A few decades later, in a rapidly changing America where millions of immigrants were pouring in, the Ku Klux Klan, popularized by David W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation, which thrilled 50 million viewers, was spectacularly reborn. Under the impetus of its leaders, it extended its hate trade to immigrants, communists, Jews, Catholics... A mass organisation with nearly 4 million members, it helped pass a law in 1924 limiting immigration to Northern Europeans, which remained in force for more than forty years. Weakened by scandals and the Great Depression, then discredited after the Second World War for its fascist and Nazi sympathies, the Klan disappeared only to resurface a decade later with the emergence of the civil rights movement.

2. Resurrections
In 1954 the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The Ku Klux Klan then got its act together and, with the complicity of local authorities in some states, went on a rampage to use terror to counter a movement that had become unstoppable. In September 1963, two weeks after the march on Washington, where hundreds of thousands of people cheered Martin Luther King's "dream", Klan members detonated a bomb in a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. They were quickly identified, but J. Edgar Hoover buried the case. The following year, the assassination of three civil rights activists shocked the public and, under political pressure, the head of the FBI finally took action, while President Johnson officially put an end to segregation. Within a few years, the Klan lost 70% of its membership and merged into the disparate nebula of white supremacists, now revived by the presidency of Donald Trump.

A shadowy side

To retrace in detail the four successive lives of the Ku Klux Klan, David Korn-Brzoza gathered an impressive collection of archives, fed in part by those of the movement itself, and met a dozen or so interlocutors: a repentant member of the organisation, veterans of the civil rights struggle, the pugnacious judge who, fourteen years after the Birmingham bombing, prosecuted and convicted its perpetrators, and various researchers and analysts. By showing how much the movement and its crimes embody a collective history and values, he sheds a harsh light on that part of the shadow that white America still struggles to recognise.

Documentary by David Korn-Brzoza (France, 2020, 2x58mn) - Co-production: ARTE France, Roche Productions, with the participation of France Télévisions