FIFTY THOUSAND KLANSMEN MARCH ON WASHINGTON - LEST WE FORGET

White sheets in Washington, D.C.   Founded in 1915 and inspired by the Reconstruction-era organization of the same name, the second Ku Klux Klan shared with its nineteenth-century namesake a deep racism, a fascination with mystical regalia, and a willingness to use violence to silence its foes. It also professed anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism as strongly as it affirmed racism. The "secret" society had 3 million members during its heyday in the early 1920s; roughly half its members lived in metropolitan areas, and although it enjoyed considerable support in the South, the Klan was strongest in the Midwest and Southwest. In this photograph, forty thousand members of the Klan march down Pennsylvania Avenue on August 8, 1925. Organized to counter reports of faltering enrollment, this "konklave" succeeded in attracting national attention but marked the peak of Klan power in the 1920s. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6689

The KKK Parade in Washington

Fifty Thousand Klansmen March from The Literary Digest, 1925

A news report on the August, 1925 KKK march in Washington, D.C.: "The parade itself marshaled 'from 50,000 to 60,000 white-robed men and women' as the correspondent of the The New York 'Times' estimates, and H.L. Mencken tells us in the New York 'Sun': The Klan put it all over its enemies. The parade was grander and gaudier, by far than anything the wizards had prophesied. It was longer, it was thicker, it was higher in tone. I stood in front of the treasury for two hours watching the legions pass. They marched in lines of eighteen or twenty, solidly shoulder to shoulder. I retired for refreshment and was gone an hour. When I got back Pennsylvania Avenue was still a mass of white from the Treasury down to the foot of Capitol Hill - a full mile of Klansmen...'" http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/KKK_march_on_ Wahington_DC_Pennsylvania_Avenue_1925