Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

In 1915, more than 40 years after President Ulysses S. Grant annihilated the Klu Klux Klan,

a group of white men in white bedsheets paraded down Peachtree Street in Atlanta, firing rifles

into the air.

Their leader, William J. Simmons, made several declarations about purity and honor,

and then he set fire to a cross.

The group was marching to a place that might seem unusual, a movie premiere.

The movie was the birth of a nation, and it was the film that gave rise to Hollywood's

culture of big-budget blockbuster movies. It was also the film that reignited the KKK. The Klan was originally a secret society

created by a few ex-Confederate soldiers in Tennessee. At first, they weren't violent, or even

overtly racist, although they were interested in preserving southern culture. Their leadership titles were intentionally goofy, grand cyclops.

Members were called ghouls.

The name Ku Klux Klan itself came from the Greek word Ku Kllos, which means circle.

They dressed up in sheets, apparently for publicity, and rode it round at night on horses.

But as they added more members from nearby towns, the mission grew more sinister.

The nighttime rides were used to intimidate black families.

The ghouls would visit black homes and threaten occupants. Those threats became violence

against black people who were exercising their newfound freedom. The clan spread quickly,

and by the presidential election of 1868, it was a hot-button issue. President Ulysses S. Grant,

the civil rights hero of the union, won that election,

and he plotted to take out the clan. He signed a law called the Ku Klux Klan Act, which gave

him the authority to use federal troops to arrest and prosecute Klansmen. Several thousand

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