Literary Notes6/3/10The Ku Klux Klan was first created after the Civil War, in Pulaski, Tennessee, in an attempt to impede the civil rights movement to grant rights to African-Americans and free them from slavery. The Klan experienced its greatest growth “in the 1920s, [when] the Klan spread far beyond the South” (O'Malley). Three million members soon joined from the South, allowing the clan to gain political power in non-Southern states. In an attempt to stop the rights of African Americans, they “tortured and killed black Americans and white sympathizers” who supported the civil rights movement, particularly the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (Simkin ). Theodore Bilbo, the governor of Mississippi during this time, was a Klansman who did everything in his political power to stop the civil rights movement and any laws passed to benefit African Americans and freed slaves. gathered at Tommy's barbershop listening to the radio when they heard that Emmett Till, "a young Negro boy had been found trampled to death in Su...