On this day in 1865: Confederate Army veterans form the Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan began on Christmas Eve in 1865.

Months after the fall of the Confederacy and the end of slavery, a half dozen veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK soon became a terrorist organization, brutalizing and killing Black Americans, immigrants, sympathetic whites and others.

While the first wave of the KKK operated in the South through the 1870s, the second wave spread throughout the U.S....