On Saturday, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and their supporters will gather at the South Carolina Statehouse grounds in Columbia to rally in support of the Confederate flag, which was recently removed. After being absent from major headlines for many years, the white supremacist group has found its way back into the spotlight in the wake of the June shooting that killed nine black Americans in a historic Charleston church.

Ryan Lenz, editor of Hatewatch.org, said that the group’s strategy to appear “larger and more impactful” was to act after heavily covered, racially charged incidents. “The Klan is largely a shadow of what it once was,” he said. “When there is an instance or a news event that has some racial element to it, the Klan somehow has managed to insert itself.” ...

The KKK – derived from the Greek word for circle, kuklos – has risen and fallen many times since its birth among Confederate fighters in Tennessee after the Civil War. But its heyday remains in the 1950s and 60s, when branches of the group expanded into small towns all over the South, growing their membership numbers exponentially as a response to the Civil Rights Movement and, particularly, public school integration. Working-class whites who felt threatened by the social and political advancements of blacks banded together in bombings, shootings, and rallies against people of color. In years to come, government crackdowns and a larger cultural shift would diminish the presence of the KKK.

And until recently, the Klan had all but disappeared. “The last couple of years have been rife with racially charged stories – racist killings, discussion of immigration policy,” Lenz said. “These issues cut right to the heart of these ideologies on the far right that white supremacists have been fighting for.” The resurgence of white supremacist groups, then, is a white nationalist response to the black community’s response to attacks on black bodies.