May 1866

Ku Klux Klan

Pulaski veterans create the first Ku-Klux club

No scholarly source consulted has heard of the two men this listing names as founders — and the Christmas Eve anniversary may be about six months too early.

Two names that appear nowhere in the literature

The listing credits Jonathan Shank and Barry Ownby with forming the Ku Klux Klan on 24 December 1865. No credible scholarly source consulted identifies either man as a founder, and their appearance here seems to derive from low-quality derivative timelines.

The group actually associated with the founding was six former Confederates in Pulaski, Tennessee: Frank O. McCord, Richard Reed, John C. Lester, Calvin Jones, John Booker Kennedy and James Crowe.

The date is probably half a year off

Elaine Frantz Parsons's reconstruction dates the choice of the Ku-Klux name by that group to May or June 1866. The Christmas Eve date is a traditional anniversary rather than a documented one.

The evidence for their early activities is sparse and leans heavily on later recollections. Because the founding cannot be tied to any particular surviving contemporary record, claims about what was decided on a single night are not supportable.

The charming origin story is a source, not a fact

Later members said the club was made for amusement and recreation, and remembered fiddle and guitar playing and serenading. Those accounts were written years afterwards by men celebrating or defending the Klan.

What the evidence supports is a small, loosely structured local secret club with a mysterious name — not a centralised organisation with a finished political programme.

Parsons traces its development through 1866 and 1867, with sporadic violence afterwards and a dramatic spread in the spring of 1868.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1866-05.

What the sources leave uncertain

December 24, 1865 is a traditional anniversary, not a securely documented date. Historian Elaine Frantz Parsons places the naming in May or June 1866.
The first accounts of an innocent social-club origin were written by former members more than a decade later and for commemorative or justificatory purposes.
Even the familiar six-man roster is reconstructed from scant evidence, although it is far better supported than Jonathan Shank and Barry Ownby.
Because the event cannot be tied to a particular surviving contemporary record, claims about exactly what was decided on a single founding night should be avoided.