ABSTRACT
Objective
Why do White supremacists mobilize in some places and not others? I answer this question within the case of the Civil Rights era South, where the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) resurged after decades of dormancy. Curiously, however, the KKK did not re-emerge everywhere in the South, but chiefly in North Carolina.
Method
In order to elucidate this particular puzzle and the broader forces driving White supremacist terrorism in the United States, I analyze data on North Carolina Klan rallies from 1963 to 1967 and the number of klaverns per county in the 1960s. I implement a finite mixture model to evaluate three possible explanations of KKK activity: racial threat, school desegregation, and generational Klan legacies.
Results
Previous research has focused primarily on racial threat as the explanation for Klan activity, but I find that desegregation and Klan legacies outperform racial threat in explaining a majority of county-year observations. The results encourage scholars to reassess the historical and political correlates of White supremacist activity.