Vigilante violence was critical in upholding the White supremacist order in the 20th century US. This research agenda aims to illuminate the relationship between racial progress and White supremacist terrorism, a dynamic with historical origins and modern consequences.Â
Why do White supremacists mobilize in some places and not others? I consider this question in the context of the Civil-Rights era South, wherein the Ku Klux Klan re-surged after decades of dormancy. Curiously, however, the KKK did not re-emerge everywhere in the South, but chiefly in North Carolina. In order to elucidate this particular puzzle and the broader forces driving White supremacist terrorism in the U.S., I leverage under-utilized data on North Carolina klan rallies from 1963-1967 and data on the number of klaverns per county in the 1960s. I implement a finite mixture model to evaluate three competing explanations of KKK activity: racial threat, generational klan legacies, and school desegregation. Previous research has focused primarily on racial threat as the explanation for klan activity, but I find that racial threat is only consistent with 36% of the data, while klan legacies and school desegregation are together consistent with almost two-thirds of the data. The results encourage scholars to reassess the historical and political correlates of White supremacist activity.