The Klan mobilized all white classes while planters kept economic power

Evidence

Klan membership throughout the South resembled that in Tennessee; it was drawn from every rank and class of white society… . The maintenance of white supremacy, and the old order generally, was a cause in which white men of all classes felt an interest. … Leadership within the organization more clearly belonged to the professional and planter class which had governed the region before the Radicals displaced them politically, but their economic and social power was hardly affected. … If by 1890 it had become clear to the American Negro that he could not expect to obtain justice and fair play through the regular political processes of the national and state governments it would soon become equally clear to him that he could not expect much more from the courts of the land and especially the United States Supreme Court. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2169

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the sacrificial/ritual-violence logic in ‘On Sacrifice’ — the Klan’s violence as cross-class white solidarity, though not ritual sacrifice per se, parallels how violence cements a stratified social order.
• XREF: Connects to Robinson’s own early chapters on racial capitalism and to Du Bois’s ‘Black Reconstruction’ on the working-class complicity in white supremacy.