The 1920s Klan operated openly in public life, not covertly.

Evidence

Some American elites embraced the newcomers under a burgeoning notion of religious pluralism, as evinced in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. But most politicians, clergy, and citizens feared that America’s Protestant, Anglo-Saxon purity was under threat. The Ku Klux Klan, established in the 1860s to terrorize newly freed black slaves, reemerged in the 1920s to proclaim Catholics and Jews a threat to America. In contrast to the covert Klan of the 1860s and 1870s, the Klan in the early 1900s reemerged in mass public events, recruiting advertisements in newspapers, and electing members to political office. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 229

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the arc of the book on how racialized religious outsiders get constructed as threats; also links to Know-Nothing nativism and later anti-Muslim panic.