U.S. History Collection
Northern Jim Crow and Housing Segregation in the 1920s

The Klan Comes to the North

1924 photograph of an article in the Lansing State Journal describing a KKK rally in Lansing, Michigan. Click to enlarge.

A newspaper clipping with the headline "Panorama View of First Klonvocation of State Ku Klux Klan to be Held in Lansing." A black and white panoramic photo shows a fairgrounds location with a large white tent with American flags flying atop each end. A massive gathering of men, women, and children walk around the area. Quite a few people, especially on the rights side of the photo, are wearing the white Ku Klux Klan robe.

In 1915, America’s first feature-length motion picture, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, offered a biased account of the Civil War and Reconstruction from the point of view of the Confederacy. It included a romanticized glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Over 50 million people saw the film in the five years after its release.

Although the Klan had been founded in 1865 during Reconstruction, it had declined in the late 1870s following federal attempts to suppress it. In 1915, the Klan was reorganized in Georgia, and new membership surged after the debut of the film. Unlike during Reconstruction, new Klan membership was not confined to the South but emerged across the North and Midwest. Membership was driven by resentment against Eastern European and Asian immigration, the effects of urbanization and industrialization, and the Great Migration. The growth of the Klan also coincided with the Red Summer of 1919, when dozens of race riots erupted across the country in popular Great Migration destinations, such as Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and New York.

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