Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights–Era Ku Klux Klan by David Cunningham (review)

The Ku Klux Klan, often characterized as a fringe vigilante group, embodied many of the social and political norms of the U.S. South. Sociologist David Cunningham’s book, Klansville, U.S.A: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights–Era Klan, details how the United Klans of America (UKA) became an ephemeral, but dominant, force during the 1960s in North Carolina. Much of the previous historiography on the Klan focuses on generational waves of activism during the Civil War era and the 1920s, but Cunningham views the radicalism of Klan iterations as interconnected and continuous rather than separate, unrelated instances. Within this historical interpretation, Cunningham argues that the proliferation of the UKA in “progressive” North Carolina is critical to broadly understanding how many Southerners sought extrajudicial means to fight desegregation and the civil rights movement.

Cunningham’s overarching argument illustrates that the UKA flourished through a combination of white anxiety brought on by civil rights reform and the North Carolina government’s ambivalence toward desegregation. In short, the UKA provided a mainstream organization for North Carolinians looking to openly contest the civil rights movement. Focusing on North Carolina allows Cunningham to compare the experience of the UKA to the “massive resistance” of other Southern states like Florida and Mississippi. Cunningham argues that state governments in the Deep South, Mississippi in particular, provided a mainstream avenue for opposing civil rights by openly embraced segregationist rhetoric. As a result the Klan’s militancy was relegated to the fringes in much of Southern society. In North Carolina, however, the UKA represented the sole organization promoting overt segregationist ideologies, causing its financial coffers and membership rolls to swell. For a brief period in the mid-1960s, the UKA in North Carolina formed the vanguard of segregationist rhetoric even as agitators in other Southern states moved toward less aggressive forms of resistance.

The book is divided into seven main chapters detailing the rise and fall of the UKA and the Klan in general. The first chapter traces the long history of Klan activism in the United States. Cunningham argues that the Klan ideologies in the 1920s, like “100 percent Americanism,” served as important precursors to the 1960s Klan by increasing civic populism and cooperation between white-collar and blue-collar whites. The second chapter details the rise of the UKA in North Carolina through conventions, street walks, and cross burnings under the leadership of Grand Dragon Bob Jones. Violence played an ambiguous role for the UKA because the Klan leadership implicitly supported extrajudicial action while simultaneously moderating their public speeches to insulate themselves from potential repercussions. North Carolina’s history of Southern progressivism, the subject of the third chapter, allowed the UKA to emerge as “the central outlet willing to resist the fall of Jim Crow segregation” (11). Chapter 4 examines how the UKA appealed to whites who “felt their social, economic, and political standing [was] acutely threatened by civil rights reform” (101). Cunningham asserts that economic competition was a greater catalyst for UKA membership than traditional Klan talking points like antimiscegenation rhetoric. The fifth chapter focuses on how the UKA and its membership adopted anticommunism to broaden its appeal, which connected the UKA to other radical political groups like the John Birch Society. Cunningham analyzes the ground-level activism in cities like Greensboro and Charlotte in the sixth chapter, ultimately determining that the fears of economic competition and racial proximity galvanized UKA activity. The final chapter details the decline of the UKA in North Carolina through a combination of federal and state policing efforts and the emergence of new conservative political activism.

The book’s epilogue concludes the ephemeral life of the UKA and offers additional avenues for future scholars to explore. Regarding the demise of the UKA, shifts in...