The Klan is weak. Its name is not. America's hate problem never needed the sheets.

I. A Rumor on the Yard

A few days ago, while I was hanging out in the social media universe, a story came across my X timeline from the Sunrise Movement. In the video, a young woman stated that she was on her way to meet with her provost to demand that Election Day become a federal holiday when she received an alert that the KKK was on campus, and the college went into lockdown (Sunrise Movement, 2026). She connected it to Trump and to what it means for young people, then said something that caught my attention even more: "But we are not going to be scared out of fighting for our future. And we are not going to let anyone take away our right to vote."

Scared. That one word conjures up ghosts from the past, still haunting the Black community in 2026. When people see or hear the three letters, KKK, regardless of their racial background, different emotions begin to arise.

Currently, this story appears unverified. The video does not name her campus, but she is wearing an N.C. A&T sweatshirt, and N.C. A&T is no ordinary campus. It enrolled 15,275 students in fall 2025, making it the nation's largest public HBCU for the 12th year and the largest HBCU the country has produced (Simmons, 2025). There, four freshmen, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, sat at the whites-only lunch counter of Greensboro's F.W. Woolworth store on February 1, 1960. Refused service, they stayed seated, starting what A&T's archives call America's Sit-In Movement (National Museum of American History, n.d.; Love & Stewart, 2026).

University officials told the Greensboro News & Record that social media rumors of white extremists or Klan members visiting N.C. A&T or UNC Greensboro were false, though a white supremacist group demonstrated in the city (Spear, 2026). I found no verified reports of lockdowns at N.C. A&T or UNC Greensboro. Both universities maintain emergency-alert systems and shelter-in-place procedures, but official notices and credible coverage did not substantiate a lockdown at either campus. Yet even a rumor matters. The Klan did not have to show up. Fear showed up instead, on the campus where young Black students once refused to be scared off.

The fact that this is a rumor does not make it any less serious. The young lady is wearing a sweatshirt from an HBCU, and that alone raises alarm for those of us who have been affected by the KKK in some way, shape, or form. A rumor only takes root in soil that history has already plowed.

Two days later, protesters interrupted House Speaker Lisa Demuth at the Minnesota Republican Party's Lincoln Reagan Dinner, displaying a sign reading "RepubliKKKan Party." Demuth, Minnesota's first Black party nominee for governor, was speaking when the disruption occurred (CBS Minnesota, 2026). The Sunrise Movement and Climate Defiance took responsibility for the protest. Minnesota GOP Chair Alex Plechash called it racial intimidation (Fox News, 2026).

Meanwhile, the Klan claims its support is growing ahead of the November 3 midterms. Its leader, Thom Robb, told Al Jazeera exactly that, then admitted the organization is "not strong at all" (Lavelle, 2026). This contradiction is central. My quarrel is less with a fading Klan than with a country plagued by hate, one that long ago traded robes for suits and ties.

II. Born in Reconstruction

Fear defined the Klan's relationship with Black Americans from the start, during Reconstruction, when the formerly enslaved pursued citizenship and autonomy. For much of the 20th century, that era was portrayed as one of corruption and misrule, a view advanced by the Dunning School and amplified in popular culture (Foner, 2013; Masur & Downs, 2025). Historians have since revised it. Reconstruction is now understood as a transformative but incomplete experiment in interracial democracy (Foner, n.d.).

At stake was whether emancipation would lead to meaningful citizenship. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments abolished slavery, established birthright citizenship and equal protection, and barred racial discrimination in voting. Black Americans voted, held office, and built schools and churches (Library of Congress, 1998). Opponents moved quickly to curtail these gains. Southern legislatures enacted Black Codes that forced freed people into annual labor contracts and treated the unemployed as vagrants who could be hired out to white landowners (Foner, n.d.). Convict leasing followed. Fifteen years after the Civil War, Black Georgians were imprisoned at more than 12 times the rate of white Georgians, especially Black men in places where they had escaped dependence on white landowners (Muller, 2018). Behind that ratio stood men who had just tasted independence, now pushed back toward forced labor through the courts.

The Ku Klux Klan was one of the most violent instruments in overturning Reconstruction. Former Confederate soldiers formed it in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865, devoted to white supremacy and to ending Reconstruction (Equal Justice Initiative, n.d.). Historian Sally E. Hadden traces continuities between antebellum slave patrols and the surveillance and coercion of postwar white vigilantism, including the Klan (Hadden, 2001). The Klan targeted Republican leaders for beatings and assassination, along with Black people who asserted their rights with white employers and the teachers and ministers who helped the formerly enslaved (Foner, n.d.). At Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, scores of Black militiamen were killed after surrendering to armed whites intent on seizing local government (Foner, n.d.).

Congress responded with the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered the president to use military force to protect African Americans (U.S. Senate, n.d.). In 1871, the Grant administration launched a legal and military offensive that destroyed the first Klan (Foner, n.d.), but white supremacist violence did not end. After formal Reconstruction ended in 1877, large-scale disenfranchisement returned (U.S. Senate, n.d.), and by the turn of the century the South rested on Black disenfranchisement, segregation, and legal and extralegal violence against anyone who challenged the new order (Foner, n.d.). The night riders went home. The memory of them did not.

III. Why the Name Still Works

A flag is cloth. Three letters are ink. Neither acts alone. Sociologist Herbert Blumer argued that people act toward things according to the meanings those things hold, meanings created and revised through social interaction (Blumer, 1969). Maurice Halbwachs added that memory is shaped within social groups, including families and communities (Halbwachs, 1992). So for many people, "KKK" is more than an abbreviation. It carries inherited and documented histories of racial terror: cross burnings, lynchings, and the fear of a loved one who never came home.

Harrison, Arkansas, shows how a place-name can carry meaning beyond its map coordinates. The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that Thomas Robb's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan used a Harrison mailing address, though the group's compound sat about 15 miles away near Zinc. Then-mayor Jeff Crockett objected that "the Klan isn't even in Harrison" (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.). Yet the town's association with racial terror rests on a documented history. White mobs expelled Harrison's Black residents in 1905 and 1909, devastating its Black community (Froelich & Zimmerman, 1999). The mailing address only tied a present-day Klan to a legacy that had already made Harrison a symbol of exclusion and fear.

IV. A Weak Klan With a Loud Name

Today's Klan is a diminished remnant of its former power. Thomas Robb, a Christian Identity pastor, has led the Knights since 1989 (Al Jazeera, 2026; Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.). Al Jazeera's Phil Lavelle reported that Robb's online audience numbered only in the dozens; Robb offered no membership figures and called his organization "a voice in the wilderness" (Lavelle, 2026). The organization is starving. The name eats every day. The SPLC describes today's Klan as small factions with little influence, even inside the white power movement, and calls the Trinity White Knights, the group behind recent flyer campaigns, small and struggling (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2025).

Flyers are among the Klan's last public tactics. On the night of September 28 and the morning of September 29, 2026, Klan flyers appeared near schools in Columbus's Clintonville neighborhood and in suburban Worthington, Ohio. A Worthington police report said they appeared to have been randomly tossed from a vehicle (Simon, 2026). Citing the SPLC, WOSU reported that Klan groups use flyers as a cheap, low-risk way to provoke fear while looking larger and more organized than they are (Geniusz, 2026). The timing matters too. In August, the SPLC's Rachel Carroll Rivas told WEKU that groups like the Klan may test public boundaries during election cycles, hoping their ideas gain wider acceptance (Snyder, 2026). As the NAACP Columbus Branch put it, "The names on the paper change. The tactic does not" (Simon, 2026).

V. Everyone Carries the Name

What unsettles me most is the pattern itself. In Greensboro, a white supremacist demonstration drew a counterprotest, though local reporting did not identify the masked marchers as Klan members (Spear, 2026; FOX8 WGHP, 2026). In Minnesota, the Klan's name went up on a protest sign while a Black Republican nominee spoke. The name has moved well beyond the organization, becoming a charged symbol through which political conflict is performed. Research finds that hostility toward perceived out-groups drives online engagement, helping divisive content travel further (Rathje et al., 2021).

Ohio offered a different response. Worthington Schools told families it had no reason to believe the people responsible intended to do more than litter, while refusing to minimize the intimidation (Simon, 2026). The NAACP Columbus Branch urged residents to photograph the flyers, not engage, and report them (Simon, 2026), advice that echoes the SPLC's Carroll Rivas: learn what hate symbols look like, document and remove the flyers, and contact community leaders and, where appropriate, law enforcement (Snyder, 2026). Worthington followed that path and denied the intimidation the attention it seeks.

VI. From Sheets to Suits

Some will say the Klan has a right to exist, and the law largely agrees. In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), a case that grew out of a Klan rally in Ohio, the Supreme Court held that advocacy can be punished only when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. In Virginia v. Black (2003), the Court held that states may ban cross burning carried out with intent to intimidate, but rejected the presumption that the act alone proves that intent. The constitutional line runs between protected advocacy and unprotected incitement or true threats. What the Constitution tolerates, a democracy must still reckon with.

It is easy to watch a dying group toss paper from a car window and decide hate is a hoax. The record says otherwise. A 2006 FBI intelligence assessment warned of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, both by organized groups and by personnel sympathetic to their causes (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2006). Former FBI agent Michael German's 2020 report for the Brennan Center for Justice found that only a tiny percentage of officers were likely active members of white supremacist groups, but that overt bias remained far too common and few agencies had policies barring such affiliation (German, 2020). Even a small number matters when no one is screening for it.

Ideas travel further than any badge. A Public Religion Research Institute report, drawing on a fall 2022 national survey of 2,523 adults, found that 30% of Americans completely or mostly agreed that immigrants were invading the country and replacing its cultural and ethnic background, while 64% disagreed (Public Religion Research Institute, 2023). Meanwhile, the contest over political representation that the first Klan waged through terror now plays out in courtrooms. On April 29, 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that Louisiana's congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and that the Voting Rights Act did not require its additional majority-minority district (Louisiana v. Callais, 2026). The Congressional Research Service notes that the ruling significantly narrowed when racial vote dilution claims can be brought under Section 2, and some state legislatures have already moved to redraw maps that eliminate majority-minority districts (Congressional Research Service, 2026). Modern election law is not Klan violence, and I will not pretend it is. Yet the Reconstruction-era question, whether Black citizens can safely and meaningfully exercise the rights guaranteed on paper, remains before the courts. While a rumor of robes rattled a campus in Greensboro, the rules that protect Black voting power were being rewritten in Washington.

VII. The Hate Outlived the Robes

According to officials, reports of white extremists at A&T were unfounded (Spear, 2026). The Ohio faction's leader had already been cited for littering in 2025 after spreading similar flyers near Cincinnati (Geniusz, 2026). Robb himself admits the group is not strong (Lavelle, 2026). Yet none of that resolves the deeper concern. Fear has always been larger than the Klan. It grew from a country that let terror shape political life and never fully secured the protection it promised to those targeted. Hate does not stay contained. When a nation harms one group, or two, or three, the damage spreads until the whole society pays. Heather McGhee makes this case in The Sum of Us, tracing what racism costs everyone (McGhee, 2021). Klan or no Klan, the central question is why America has never fully abandoned the racial hierarchy the Klan was created to enforce.

VIII. The Reckoning

The Klan has repeatedly appropriated Christian symbols and language to legitimize white supremacy. Thomas Robb is a Christian Identity pastor and leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.). When Al Jazeera asked whether a Black person would be welcome at the group's church, the answer was no, because it is "a white nationalist church" (Lavelle, 2026).

Scripture offers a different witness: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28, KJV). The prophet Micah asks what the Lord requires of us "but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah 6:8, KJV). In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, theologian James H. Cone places the Christian cross in direct and unsettling relation to the lynching tree, challenging American Christians to confront that history (Cone, 2011).

The Scriptures also speak of order and humility. "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers" (Romans 13:1, KJV) can be read as a call to respect lawful authority, due process, and the courts, the same courts that draw the line between protected belief and criminal intimidation. Jesus warns against pointing out the mote in a brother's eye while ignoring the beam in one's own (Matthew 7:3, KJV), a caution against treating rumors as facts or rushing to name enemies on either side.

Those are the readings. I've laid them side by side, and I'm not going to referee them. What I will say is this: every one of us who walks in the ways of Christ has to be mindful that hate rarely announces itself in robes. The harder work is to examine what we tolerate, what we benefit from, and whether our outrage is reserved only for injustices committed by others.

So I'll leave you with three questions.

What do you think? Can Christians respect authority and due process while refusing to treat silence as a form of neutrality?

What do you think? When a symbol of terror resurfaces, even as a rumor, what do we owe the people who still feel its weight?

What do you think? Where might hate be wearing a suit and tie in the places we live, work, and worship?

In 1960, four freshmen in Greensboro refused to be scared off. That choice is still ours to make.

Let's keep this conversation going. Share this link on your Instagram, X, or LinkedIn. https://bit.ly/hate-outlived-the-robes​

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Clarity. Advocacy. Power.

IX. References

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Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Prentice-Hall.

Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969).

CBS Minnesota. (2026, October 12). Protesters storm Minnesota GOP event, holding "KKK" sign as Black gubernatorial candidate spoke. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-gop-lincoln-reagan-dinner-protest-lisa-demuth/

Congressional Research Service. (2026, May 14). Congressional redistricting: High Court narrows Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais (LSB11431). https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/HTML/LSB11431.html

Cone, J. H. (2011). The cross and the lynching tree. Orbis Books.

Equal Justice Initiative. (n.d.). Dec 24, 1865: Confederate veterans establish the Ku Klux Klan. A History of Racial Injustice. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/dec/24

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Foner, E. (n.d.). Reconstruction. National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/reconstruction.htm

Foner, E. (2013). Black Reconstruction: An introduction. South Atlantic Quarterly, 112(3), 409–418. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2146368

FOX8 WGHP. (2026). White supremacist demonstration in downtown Greensboro draws counterprotesters; "Racists, go home" [Video].

Fox News. (2026, October). Minnesota GOP chair blasts progressive group over KKK-themed sign shown during Black House speaker's remarks. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/minnesota-gop-chair-blasts-progressive-group-kkk-themed-sign-shown-during-black-house-speakers-remarks

Froelich, J., & Zimmerman, D. (1999). Total eclipse: The destruction of the African American community of Harrison, Arkansas, in 1905 and 1909. Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 58(2), 131–159.

Geniusz, K. (2026, September 29). Ku Klux Klan flyers found near schools in Clintonville and Worthington. WOSU Public Media. https://www.wosu.org/news/2026-09-29/ku-klux-klan-flyers-found-in-clintonville-and-worthington

German, M. (2020, August 27). Hidden in plain sight: Racism, white supremacy, and far-right militancy in law enforcement. Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law

Hadden, S. E. (2001). Slave patrols: Law and violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harvard University Press.

Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory (L. A. Coser, Ed. & Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

Lavelle, P. (2026, October 4). Ku Klux Klan leader claims support is rising ahead of US midterm elections [Video]. Al Jazeera English. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3BSlLU6-kg

Library of Congress. (1998, February 9). Reconstruction and its aftermath. The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/reconstruction.html

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Love, E. L., & Stewart, J. (2026). The sit-in movement, 1960: Archives & special collections. North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. https://libguides.library.ncat.edu/c.php?g=778598&p=7217691

Masur, K., & Downs, G. P. (2025, August 7). Collaborating with the Park Service: Academic historians reflect on commemorating Reconstruction. Perspectives on History. https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/collaborating-with-the-park-service/

McGhee, H. (2021). The sum of us: What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together. One World.

Muller, C. (2018). Freedom and convict leasing in the postbellum South. American Journal of Sociology, 124(2), 367–405. https://doi.org/10.1086/698481

National Museum of American History. (n.d.). Greensboro lunch counter. Smithsonian Institution. https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/greensboro-lunch-counter

Public Religion Research Institute. (2023, January). Are immigrants a threat? Most Americans don't think so, but those receptive to the "threat" narrative are predictably more anti-immigrant. https://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/PRRI-Jan-2023-Immigration-C.pdf

Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J. J., & van der Linden, S. (2021). Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(26), Article e2024292118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024292118

Simmons, T. (2025, September 10). N.C. A&T is first HBCU ever to enroll more than 15,000 students. North Carolina A&T State University. https://www.ncat.edu/news/2025/09/2025-fall-enrollment.php

Simon, K. (2026, September 29). NAACP Columbus condemns KKK flyers found in Worthington, Clintonville. 10TV. https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/ku-klux-klan-flyers-worthington-clintonville-columbus/530-0cf065a3-8226-44c7-8ac0-7ff797da53e4

Snyder, S. (2026, August 7). Flyers for KY KKK rally appear on social media. Civil rights group calls them an intimidation tactic. WEKU. https://www.weku.org/the-commonwealth/2026-08-07/flyers-for-ky-kkk-rally-appear-on-social-media-civil-rights-group-calls-them-an-intimidation-tactic

Southern Poverty Law Center. (n.d.-a). Ghosts of Harrison. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/ghosts-harrison/

Southern Poverty Law Center. (n.d.-b). Thomas Robb [Extremist file]. https://edit.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/thomas-robb

Southern Poverty Law Center. (2025, March). Ku Klux Klan flyers are last cries of a dying organization in Kentucky. Hatewatch. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/ku-klux-klan-flyers-kentucky/

Spear, S. (2026, October 2). Officials: No white extremist groups seen at UNCG, N.C. A&T. Greensboro News & Record. https://greensboro.com/news/local/crime-courts/article_2929d763-94c5-4319-897e-1a679a814b11.html

Sunrise Movement [@sunrisemvmt]. (2026, October 7). The KKK is showing up on college campuses. Our voting rights are under attack. The stakes of this election could not be higher [Video]. X.

U.S. Senate. (n.d.). The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/EnforcementActs.htm

Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343 (2003).