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The Klansman costume: when no one is supposed to know you're racist.

"How the hell are we supposed to introduce ourselves?! 'Hello, we're the new death-dealing miltia of white supremacy, we're called the "Ku Klux Klan", affiliated with the "Wip Wap Wop" and the "Bingly Bongly Boo". We're easy to recognize, we're the ones wearing bedsheets and peeking out through the eyeholes of the massive pointy hats we wear over our faces!'"

The Ku Klux Klan (or a facsimile thereof) has appeared a lot in fiction, especially in the Deep South. As one of the most well-known hate groups in history, and with their distinctive white robes, pointed hoods and their Religion of Evil, they are commonly found as Politically Incorrect Villains, The Fundamentalists and sometimes Apocalypse Cults.

They almost always will have drawling accents, be hot-tempered, publicly ranting about how they want to kill anyone who isn't the same appearance as them (often with Cluster F Bombs and other slurs), and be as dumb as bricks (ironic because its earliest members had been classically educated, and "Ku Klux" itself was inspired by the ancient Greek word for "circle").

Related tropes are A Nazi by Any Other Name, Those Wacky Nazis, Ghostapo, The Social Darwinist, White Gangbangers, Malevolent Masked Men, Mystery Cult, Right-Wing Militia Fanatic, and Rebels with Repeaters. Since the real life Ku Klux Klan is a real-life group of Western Terrorists, this trope can also be a sub-trope of Western Terrorists.

Not to be confused with The Clan, despite the shared pronunciation.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • The Klan feature in Blaster Knuckle, and are flesh-eating demons that primarily prey upon black people. Victor Freeman, the protagonist of this manga, has to kill them and keep on the move because of the racism of the period and the fact that every demon he kills reverts back to human form upon death.
  • The KKK costumes were worn by Mooks serving Zaria in Fist of the North Star, although this is more of a case of The Necrocracy.
  • Asclepius from Flip Flappers wear outfits that resemble those worn by the KKK, but this is probably a case of Unfortunate Character Design since the organization has little else in common with the KKK apart from its villainous nature. The outfits are more likely intended to evoke the capirote, a traditional Spanish Catholic costume that represents punishment and penance, and which was originally worn by flagellants during the Inquisition.
  • Ironically, the traditionally Protestant Ku Klux Klan are one of two major inspirations for the Vatican's Papal Knights in Hellsing (the other being The Knights Templar and other Crusades-era knightly orders). Although the pointy hoods and robes actually originated with the Spanish Inquisition.
  • The KKK serve a major role in Enrico Pucci's Start of Darkness in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean. Pucci's sister, Perla Pucci, ends up falling in love with a man named Wes Bluemarine, who, as Pucci soon finds out, is his Switched at Birth twin brother, Domenico Pucci. Because Pucci doesn't want his sister engaging in Surprise Incest, but he is bound by the Catholic seal of confession (since he learned of his relation to Wes when his adoptive mother confessed in church), he hires a private investigator to check up on Wes and Perla. Unbeknownst to Pucci, said private investigator is an undercover Klansman, who believes that Wes, because his adoptive father was black, is a Chocolate Baby. The Klansman then proceeds to call up his peers to lynch Wes, and they hang him. This causes Perla to be Driven to Suicide, and she throws herself in a river and drowns. Wes, in actuality, survived the lynching, but needless to say, he is not happy with Pucci inadvertently getting him abused and causing Perla's death, so he attempts to assassinate Pucci with his newly-awakened Weather Report Stand, with Pucci being forced to remove Wes' memories with his Whitesnake Stand, resulting in Wes becoming a mellow amnesiac known only as Weather Report.
  • My Hero Academia has the Creature Rejection Clan, a minor antagonist group. As if the name wasn't enough of a parallel, they also wear face-concealing uniforms and practice Fantastic Racism towards people whose Quirk gives them a non-human appearance. They're targeted by the League of Villains, whose ranks include Lizard Folk Spinner, making them Asshole Victims who are easily dispatched.

    Comic Books 
  • Real American from All-Star Squadron was appearance-wise an Evil Counterpart to Commander Steel wearing a Klan hood, with one of his victims being Amazing Man, who because of his at-the-time matter-mimicking power survives the assault. As it turned out, Real American was actually a robot.
  • Bamse: The adventure Något luktar — men vad? (Something smells — but what?) has Knocke and Smocke trying to drive out a just moved-in family of skunks. They get help from other characters by dressing up as Klansmen in white sheets, nighttime meetings, and carrying torches.
  • The Batman Elseworlds comic Batman: Dark Allegiances, written and penciled by Howard Chaykan, featured Bruce Wayne as a self-made industrialist in the late 1930s, going up against the White Legion, who wore Klan hoods with swastikas on their foreheads. The Legion was secretly backed by Senator Pewtie (this universe's version of Two-Face) who, along with the Joker and the Penguin, plotted to assassinate both Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, in a bid to install the fascist Pewtie in the White House.
  • Jungle Action (1972) has the Black Panther face off against the KKK in a memorable storyline.
  • The Arctic Nation in the Blacksad album of the same name is a mix between this and the Nazi Party. At the beginning, they wear uniforms resembling Nazi party ones complete with red armbands, and later wear ones resembling those of the KKK. Because this is a World of Funny Animals, they're white fur supremacists.
  • In the Captain Marvel Adventures story "Captain Marvel and Mr. Tawny's New Home", big game hunter and general wealthy malcontent J.Q. Harsch isn't willing to let Tawky Tawny move into his exclusive suburban neighborhood, so he tries to start a smear campaign against the tiger in the hopes that he'll be frightened away. When that fails, he organizes a hooded mob of himself and a few hired goons, aiming to terrorize Tawny with clubs and firebrands. Not only does he get quickly captured and arrested when the fire spreads to nearby homes, but Tawny ends up being appointed honorary mayor of the community for his heroism in saving his neighbors.
    Captain Marvel: As for you, Harsch, you go to jail for arson! You can be very exclusive there — you'll have a cell all to yourself!
  • In Chick Bill, one album named The Black Friend has dealings with the Klan. The deputy of Wood city, Kid Ordinn and a black diplomat tries on infiltrate a city run by the Klan. The diplomat wants to know what happened to his sister when she was shipped to the USA as a slave. The Reveal show that the regional leader of the Klan has actually fallen in love with the black woman and secretly kept her safe inside his quarters. He also been secretly sabotaging all Klan's activities in the region and gave Kid Ordinn a list of all the chapters' leaders in the country. Unfortunately, when hearing this, Bulldog, the sheriff of Wood city freaks out and decides to burn the list out fear of reprisal from the Klan. The narrator comment that this is why the Klan still exists in the next century.
  • Fantastic Four villain, the Hate-Monger, has a purple costume with an "H" on it, but his hood is suspiciously cone-shaped, and he spreads bigotry wherever he goes, using a combination of rhetoric and mind-control rays. Only natural, since he's (a clone of) Adolf Hitler.
  • Klansmen are the main villains of Incognegro.
  • Lucky Luke: The Klan are the main antagonists of "A Cowboy In The Cotton", consisting of Sub-Par Supremacist former Southern aristocracy. Luke encounters them after inheriting a cotton plantation, and planning to give the land to the black employees (that is, former slaves), which naturally enrages the Klan. The Daltons also end up in the conflict, although persistently mistake the Klan for an Indian tribe. At one point they even rescue Luke from the Klan, as well as join the fight against them.
  • Nero: A hooded Klan-esque villain appears in De Linkadoors, though he is not represented as racist. In De Clo Clo Clan and De Wraak Van De Grote Clo, another Klan-esque antagonistic secret society dressed in hoods lives on the North Pole and call themselves The Clan. Once again, not racist.
  • Klansmen show up in Preacher. They're hired by a meat magnate, Odin Quincannon, to kill Jesse to prevent him from interfering in his business, but they prove to be an incompetent bunch of morons who fail to provide much of a threat. Jesse even puts out one of their burning crosses with a stream of urine. Odin himself is not a member, but he panders to the Klan to earn their loyalty by constantly spouting racial tirades to the point that even the Klan get tired of it.
    Jesse: Why is it the greatest champions of the white race always turn out to be the worst examples of it? You! Where the fuck is your chin?
  • Sammy tells the story of two bodyguards for hire, Sammy and Jack, during the prohibition era. In Ku-Klux-Klan, the duo get lost up in rural South of the USA. When arriving in a town, they come across a racist innkeeper and his friends who desperately wants to join the Klan, but are repeatedly rebuffed by the Klan's leader because of their unworthiness. In a bid to prove his undying loyalty to their cause, the innkeeper blow up his inn, a house, another house and... eventually the whole town. The Reveal shows that the regional Klan are actually all black people posing as Klan members to trail off any would-be members. Sammy and jack promise to keep their secret safe.
  • In the EC Comics story "Under Cover!" (Shock SuspenStories #6), a reporter who witnesses a woman captured and flogged to death by the Black Vigilante Society (who are the KKK in all except name and hood color) finds that he is their next target.
  • In Superman Smashes the Klan, the Clan of the Fiery Cross terrorizes the minority population in Metropolis.
  • The klans appear in chapter 4, volume 19 of the Malaysian comic book Profession (Chinese: 职业人气王 Zhíyè rénqì wáng) are different from actual klans. In fact, they believe that the world's destruction is coming and their leader will take the entire klan to a "UFO" to escape to Mars, but they then realize that they've been fooled by their leader thanks to the reporter-provided evidence that proves the leader is a fraud who uses their money for his own spending, and the UFO is just a toy. The leader is then arrested for fraud and the klan is disbanded off-screen later. We're not kidding. (Those were the original Chinese version, the English translation can be seen here, and here.)
  • Watchmen heavily implies that Hooded Justice, the first masked hero, was inspired by, sympathetic to, or even a full-fledged member of the Klan. The connection between the Klan and masked vigilante justice is further underlined by the New Frontiersman editorial "Honor is Like the Hawk: Sometimes It Must Go Hooded".

    Fan Works 
  • In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Polaris' Smurfy New Life", Hefty forms a Klan-like band of Smurfs called the Order of the True Smurfs, whose single target of hatred is Polaris Psyche, who is white compared to the Smurfs, although in this story his skin temporarily turns blue because it was a side effect of taking the Long Life Elixir.

    Film — Live Action 
  • The plot of the 1998 Ernest Dickerson film Ambushed starts off when the leader of a Ku Klux Klan lodge is shot dead and his son is taken into police custody.
  • American History X: As a joke, the black prisoner Lamont holds up a piece of cloth as a Klansman's hood and mocks the Deep South hick stereotype associated with it. Earlier, Derek (a Neo-Nazi) also dismisses them as a bunch of disorganized idiots and claims to have higher standards. In fact, that describes his own gang quite well.
  • Bad Boys II has Mike and Marcus shooting it out with a chapter of the Klan in the movie's first major shootout.
  • The Birth of a Nation was one of the earliest films ever, and portrayed the KKK as heroes. It garnered widespread controversy as well as critical acclaim, and it's credited with helping spark the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 20th century.
  • Blackk Klansman is about a black police officer who infiltrates the local Ku Klux Klan chapter.
  • The Humphrey Bogart movie Black Legion depicts a particularly violent spin-off of the Klan, known as the Black Legion, which was active in Michigan, Ohio and other Midwestern states in the '20s and '30s.
  • In Blanche (set in 17th century France but heavy on Artistic License – History), the leader of Mazarin's death squad is named "Captain KKK", they spread terror and they wear pointy hoods with holes for the eyes.
  • In Blazing Saddles, among the many criminals recruited into the outlaw army of the bad guys are a number of Klansmen. The heroes use their sheets to hide in the crowd, but Bart blows his identity when he reveals his black hands.
  • The main antagonists of Brotherhood of Death are the local KKK chapter, pissed that there are black people standing up to their harassment.
  • Humorously portrayed in the Richard Pryor comedy Bustin' Loose, as they end up helping a busload of schoolchildren get out of a mud hole, only to fall face-first into the mud.
  • A blink and you’ll miss it moment in The Cabin in the Woods has three Klansmen- two in white, one in red- amid the many monsters in the cubes.
  • In Quentin Tarantino's film Django Unchained, there's a scene Played for Laughs in which a prototype of the Klan, the Regulators led by plantation and slave owner "Big Daddy" Bennett, struggle to get ill-fitting hoods on as they attempt to kill the title character and his partner Dr. King Schultz for killing the Brittle Brothers. They are easily tricked by the heroes and get blown up and sent running, with Django putting a bullet through Big Daddy.
  • Klansmen purgers appear as minor antagonists in The First Purge. They are later confronted and killed by Dmitri and his gang.
  • Fletch in the movie Fletch Lives disguises himself as a member of a local Klan group while he is working on a case in Louisiana about his aunt's lawyer's murder.
  • In Forrest Gump, Gump says he was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, although Gump, being Gump, doesn't realize this. (He's also apparently a descendant of Forrest.)
  • Free State of Jones: The KKK is shown during the Reconstruction years, murdering blacks who try to vote or register others such as Moses. Unfortunately, they succeed in largely preventing them from voting.
  • In Grim Prairie Tales, Arthur is recruited in a proto-Klan gang of Southerners to help them murder a black homesteader family. Unbeknownst to him, his daughter sneaks out and sees him participating in the lynching.
  • In Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the titular duo encounters a group of Klansmen engaging in a white power rally. They ambush two of them and steal their robes in an attempt to hide. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the Death Eaters are basically depicted as magical Klansmen; they wear black robes and pointed hoods, whereas the book only describes them as masked and hooded. The later films do away with the pointed hood and match the original description quite closely.
  • Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas features a short gag in which the title character stumbles into a large meeting of Klansmen in a church while trying to find a bathroom; she immediately flees. The Klansmen seem more confused by this than outraged.
  • In The Man Who Came Back, Billy, Amos, the warden and they rest of their posse don white hoods before the ride intro the camp of the former slaves and start shooting them down in their search for Paxton.
  • The 1928 film The Mating Call, made when the Klan was pretty powerful, has as bad guys "The Order", who wear black robes, although they do burn crosses.
  • Featured prominently in Mississippi Burning.
  • In The Mystery of the Hooded Horsemen, the Hooded Riders are a gang seeking to take control of the valley through fear and intimidation. They wear black robes with white crosses, and black pointed hoods.
  • The Klan appears in O Brother, Where Art Thou? as enemies midway through the movie, as Everett, Pete, and Delmar must rescue their friend Tommy from the Klan. They are generally mocked, and their cross lighting ceremony features a humorous reference to the Winkies in The Wizard of Oz.
    • The Klan is also portrayed as not having the support of the local population. After a politician (who has already annoyed the crowd) lets slip that he's a Klansman, he gets literally ridden out on a rail. This isn't entirely accurate for Mississippi in the first half of the century, but the movie is set in the 1930s — by which point the Klan's great popularity of the 1910s and 20s had faded — so it's not entirely impossible, either. Couple that with the immense popularity of the Soggy Bottom Boys, and it's practically reasonable.
  • The raunchy high school boys from the second Porky's film scheme to get even with some corrupt politicians and Klan members.
  • In Posse, when Papa Joe and Obobo are arrested, the Ku Klux Klan plans to storm the jail and lynch them. They are rescued by Jesse and Father Time Dressing as the Enemy.
  • In Shaft (2000), a black man named Trey was dining in a mainly "upper class" restaurant and was racially harassed by a jerkass white diner named Wade. After ignoring the first few public insults, Trey walks over to Wade's table, cuts two holes in his cloth napkin, and puts it on top of Wade's head, where it resembles a KKK hood, to the laughter of some of the onlookers.
  • In Storm Warning (1951), a model goes to a small town to see her recently married sister. Minutes after she gets off the bus, she sees all the lights on the town's main street being suspiciously switched off, and then witnesses the Klan carrying a man out of a local jail and killing him. When she meets her brother-in-law, she recognizes him as a member of the lynch mob.
  • In The Symbol of the Unconquered, Barr and Tugi enlist the Ku Klux Klan to drive Eve off her land.
  • Tales from the Hood 2: In the Alternate Timeline Henry creates in "The Sacrifice", William Cotton leads a group called the Klan Patrol: an updated version of the slave patrols that existed in the antebellum south, who dress in KKK robes and operate with the full sanction of the law. Cotton and his men beat Mama Bradley and attempt to abduct Henry.
  • The Ku Klux Klan plays a pretty big role in A Time to Kill. They support Carl's conviction (he murdered two white rapists who were likely to get a light jail sentence for assaulting and molesting his daughter), and Freddie Lee Cobb (whose grandfather was a Klansmen) enlists their help to sow mayhem. They protest in front of the courthouse, starting a riot with a black crowd, which interupts the court's proceedings. The Grand Wizard is killed, but Freddie and the remaining Klan members continue to intimidate and send death threats to Jake to make him step down as Carl's defense attorney. He doesn't.

    Literature 
  • The Clansman, the 1905 novel by Thomas Dickson, which inspired The Birth of a Nation.
  • A minor enlisted character in Destroyermen: Crusade is described as a "Kard-Karrying Klansman", and is noted to have put on shows in blackface on our Earth. He ends up being lynched by USS Walker's other enlisted men after raping a Lemurian female.
  • The Second Klan are prominent antagonists in The Fire Never Dies, coming to prominence a few years early and clashing with the IWW in 1916 before becoming a powerful faction within the Whites during the Second American Revolution. Several Klan leaders become generals and thousands of Klansmen are recruited into the US Army, resulting in numerous atrocities like the Huffington Massacres. The Klan even overthrows the US government after President Wilson has a stroke and Vice-President Marshall tries to surrender to the Reds. The Klan is destroyed as a result of the Revolution, although a remnant emerges in South Africa, recruiting from Afrikaners as well as American refugees.
  • The father of one of the protagonists in Fool On The Hill was in the (Third) Klan, and brought his son into the children's auxiliary, which is described as not that different from the Cub Scouts... from the perspective of a ten-year-old. Looking back, the college-age protagonist considers it a permanent stain on his character.
  • In Forrest Gump, the title character is named (by his mother) for the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, to whom their family may be related and whom his mother held as a "great man", "cept'n he started up the Ku Klux Klan after the war". A young Forrest Gump apparently encountered a "Grand Exalted Pishposh" setting up a noose in his gun store and scaring him with a tasteless gag; this experience, at least, solidified his agreement with his grandmama that they were "a bunch of no-goods".
    So whatever else ole General Forrest done, startin' up that Klan thing was not a good idea — any idiot could tell you that. Nonetheless, that's how I got my name.
  • They are featured in Gone with the Wind, portrayed as a gentleman's organization needed to protect vulnerable white women from "bad" freed slaves looking to rape, rob and pillage — a major sequence finds them going out to avenge an attack on Scarlett.
  • Interesting Times: The book went through several titles, one of them Imperial Wizard (the plot is kicked off by the Imperial China analogue demanding they be sent a wizard — Rincewind in this case).
    "Rincewind and Cohen are having such fun — that is to say, death and terror attend them at every step — on the Counterweight Continent and the Forbidden City of the Agatean Empire that it might well end up being called: Imperial Wizard ...which ought to sell well in the US. In some States, anyway."
  • The Klansman is a novel by William Bradford Huie, made into a 1974 film starring Lee Marvin. The novel recounts what happens to an African American man in a small town in the South after a young white woman is sexually assaulted and beaten. Events spiral out of control when a sniper shoots a Ku Klux Klan member at a funeral.
  • Langston Hughes' brief and disquieting poem "Ku Klux" is a first person account of being abducted by a group of Klansmen who demand to know "Do you believe in the Great White Race?"
  • Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is about a black family in the 1930s, and they have several encounters with the KKK.
  • The Sherlock Holmes story "The Five Orange Pips" features a client who unwittingly inherited secrets belonging to the KKK. Holmes figures out the Klan's game, but is unable to save his client's life. Quite possibly the only work ever to portray the Klan as scarily competent traceless assassins. Holmes still managed to essentially scare them from returning to land, resulting in them dying at sea, at least, so he got payback.
  • Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War has an unusually positive example for modern fiction, where they appear in a minor role as one of the militias fighting for their local community in a dystopian post-apocalyptic world. What little we see of them paints them as largely sympathetic people merely trying to defend themselves in the midst of chaos, though also as misguided and ultimately largely ineffectual.
  • Theodore R Cogswell's "You Know Willie": Willie McCracken is a Thrice High Warlock of the local chapter of The Knights of the Flaming Sword. In other words, a klansman. He and his fellow klansmen kill the same African-American twice (the second time was Willie after a Karmic Transformation).

    Live-Action TV 
  • In a two-part episode of All in the Family, Archie Bunker joins a Brotherhood of Funny Hats only to be nonplussed on realizing that he's unknowingly joined the KKK, who are planning to burn a cross in "commie" Michael's front yard. Archie may be racist, but Everyone Has Standards, and he withdraws his membership on the grounds that he's black, because he once had a blood transfusion from a black woman.
  • In the pilot movie of Barbary Coast, government undercover agent Jeff Cable recruits wanted man and casino owner Cash Conover to help him take down a Klansman running a massive extortion scheme.
  • On Boardwalk Empire, the Klan are a problem for Nucky Thompson because he gets a lot of his political support from the black community and the black gangster Chalky White is one of Nucky's main associates. In season one, when one of Chalky's people is lynched, Nucky allows him to torture a Klan leader for information. In season two, the Klan has its revenge when they attack Chalky's liquor warehouse and kill four of Chalky's men. When Chalky kills one of the Klansmen in self-defense, Nucky has to pull a lot of strings so Chalky is not tried and executed for murder. However, the Klan has little power in Atlantic City, so they are never too serious a problem for Nucky.
  • Chappelle's Show featured the black white supremacist Clayton Bigsby, a Blind Black Guy who grew up not knowing he was black and became a prominent member of the KKK.
  • An episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman has a Denver banker bringing them to town and enticing the men to join, in response to Grace and Robert E. buying a house in the middle of town. Things escalate to where he's nearly hanged.
  • Reservation Dogs: The Order of the Midstreamers are a group of wealthy white men who believe they are the rightful heirs of Indian Territory and its mineral rights. Instead of white hoods, they wear stuffed catfish heads and purple. Their initiation ritual involves stripping naked, having blood poured over their heads, and fucking a beheaded catfish.
  • The X-Files. In the episode "The Unnatural", set in 1947, the Klan is trying to assassinate a talented black baseball player. Eventually it's revealed that the player in question is a shape-shifting alien who decided to stay on Earth and live his life as a human because he fell in love with the game of baseball, and the leader of the Klan is an alien Bounty Hunter who seeks to kill the "renegade".
  • The Facts of Life; in one episode, Blair's deceased grandfather had willed a generous bequest to Peekskill to build a school library. After learning that her grandfather was in the Klan, Blair tried to stop the bequest, not wanting her school associated with the Klan. Mrs. Garrett suggested that she should instead enjoy the irony; that after a lifetime of promoting intolerance, her granddad's money would be used to educate. Blair was also afraid of how much of her grandfather's racism may have rubbed off on her. Jo tried to assure her, "You're not a racist. You're just a snob."
  • An episode of the History Channel series Gangland featured the Imperial Klans of America.
  • The Klan used to be frequent guests on daytime talk shows, especially Jerry Springer.
  • There's an episode of Mork & Mindy in which the eponymous alien meets the Klan. After discovering what they're about, he uses his alien powers to turn them into people of diverse ethnicities, which they discover when they remove their hoods.
  • On My Name Is Earl, Joy's half-sister Liberty pays her neighbor to be part of her wrestling act. The neighbor plays the role of "The Klanimal."
  • The Professionals has a notorious Banned Episode (never shown on terrestrial TV in the UK, although broadcast overseas and later on UK satellite channels) called "Klansmen", which has apparent Ku Klux Klan members acting as muscle for a violent landlord against his black tenants. The episode was banned because one of the two protagonists, Bodie, repeatedly expressed extremely racist views himself (which were not endorsed by the plot), and also perhaps because, in a final shock twist, the evil landlord behind the Klansmen, and some of the hooded Klansmen themselves, turned out to be black.
  • The Adventures of Superman example cited in "Radio" below was mentioned in QI, in the fourth series episode "Descendants".
  • An episode of Quantum Leap had Sam leap into a white man secretly assisting black voting registration in 1950s Alabama. The man's father-in-law and several of his friends were all Klan members. The episode ended with Sam (with Al's help) foiling a church bombing that would have killed several innocent children. Then, when the Klan is about to lynch one of the local black leaders anyway, Sam manages to shame the Klan into standing down.
  • A hilarious example in the Switch! (1997) parody of Germanys Next Top Model. The models present Ku Klux Klan costumes to the jury. The jury-member Bruce Darnel, an American Negro and Ambiguously Gay Large Ham (actual Hoecker in Black Face) says: This makes me feel so hot, I feel ... fire. Then Heidi Klum (who is married to the (black) rapper Seal) says: I will take this ghost-outfit home, to surprise my husband.
  • That Mitchell and Webb Look features a sketch about how the KKK acquired their distinctive uniforms.
  • GLOW (2017): when planning The Pilot for the Show Within a Show, Welfare Queen and Junkchain are slated to fight the Beat-Down Biddies. The pair worry that two black women beating up a pair of old white ladies won''t go over well, so they get Stacy and Dawn to agree to come out in Klan robes, which provides easy heat to sell the black wrestlers as heroes.

    Music 
  • "KKK Bitch" by Body Count from Body Count features Ice-T describing a sexual encounter with a woman whom he learns is the daughter of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
  • Elvis Costello's "Tokyo Storm Warning" mentions a KKK group "stranded at the bar", but being out of their element they're pretty harmless.
  • Genesis: "Ku Klux Klan serve hot soul food / and the band plays 'In The Mood'."
  • The old folk singer Richie Havens did a haunting and powerful song called "The Klan", about the titular hate group:
    He who rides with the Klan
    He is a devil, not a man
    For underneath his white disguise
    I have looked into his eyes.
  • The Ramones' hit song "The KKK Took My Baby Away".note 
  • The 1996 Social Distortion' album "White Light, White Heat, White Trash" has some depictions of the Ku Klux Klan in their album art and even mention it in their songs. The album itself touches on the subjects of guilt and shame for humanity. Most notably the song "Don't Drag Me Down".
    You're eighteen want to be a man
    Your granddaddy's in the Ku Klux Klan
    Taking two steps forward and four steps back
    Gonna go to the White House
    And paint it black
  • The first verse of Afroman's "Crazy Rap" (also known as "Colt 45 & 2 Zig Zags") describes Afroman picking up a white woman and having passionate sex with her, not realizing that she's the daughter of the Ku Klux Klan's leader. Unfortunately, he gets caught by her dad while leaving her place, and gets beaten nearly to death as a result, though he still considers the encounter to have been Worth It.

    Podcasts 
  • S-Town: Woodstock, Alabama, was once a hotbed for the Klan, and it still shows. Host Brian Reed finds a disturbing amount of KKK graffiti under the local bridge, and residents throughout the area are rather cavalier about racist remarks. The local lumber mill is suspiciously named "K3 Lumber." The owner has three sons, each with a name beginning with K, but when asked if his company is named for the KKK, he neither confirms nor denies.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Ku Klux Klan #1, #2, and #3 of AAA, CMLL, and other Mexican promotions. Officially there are only three, but six men have worn the mask in actuality. Ironically, they wear black. There is also an unmasked wrestler named Ku Klux Klan who is not affiliated with the others.
  • Fishman, Flama Roja and El Legionario also formed their very own Ku Klux Klan. "The Klan" seems oddly (un)popular in Mexico.
  • Rockin Rebel took up a klan gimmick in CZW

    Radio 
  • The Adventures of Superman had a famous story arc where the Man of Steel himself took on the "Clan of the Fiery Cross", a thinly-disguised version of the Ku Klux Klan. It's credited with hamstringing a revival by making them seem rather silly; this was mostly the work of Stetson Kennedy, a human rights activist who infiltrated the Klan and fed the writers of Superman detailed information on actual Klan rituals and code words in order to trivialize them. The Klan tried to retaliate with an ineffectual boycott of Kellogg's (one of the show's biggest sponsors), but the damage was already done; kids were playing games of Cowboys and Indians with the kid in the Superman jammies as the cowboy and the kids with white pillowcases over their heads as the Indians. There's even a legend of a Klan member leaving the organization after seeing his children do that.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Psychotic racist supervillain White Knight in Mutants & Masterminds dresses in something closely resembling a Klan uniform.
  • The Humanis Policlub in Shadowrun is a human-supremacist organization that is very Klan-like in its overall manner, including wearing white robes with pointed hoods. They despise all metahumans, but they hold a particular hatred for orks and trolls. Ironically, their headquarters are in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.
  • The manual for Spirit of the Century lists the Klan as a possible enemy to use in the game's 1920s setting, with the text noting "Next to Nazis, is there anyone more satisfying to beat up?"

    Theatre 
  • In the climax of The Foreigner, by Larry Shue, the Klan attacks Betty's lodge, led by the obviously evil Owen Musser. "This here's the Klan, y'all! Y'all don't fool with the Klan!" Later on, it is revealed that the Reverend David Lee, who was engaged to Betty's guest Catherine, was working with Owen, and only wanted Catherine for her money.
    Charlie: He was...Sheethead?
    Catherine: Yep, he was a shithead.
  • In Clare Boothe's play Kiss The Boys Good Bye, Southern Belle Cindy Lou is asked if her Senator father is a Klan member with "a nice new white shirt laid out in the attic somewhere," and she indignantly replies: "Oh, cos he hasn't got a new one. — He has my Granddaddy's which is seventy-five years old."

    Video Games 
  • The Fraternal Order of the Raven in BioShock Infinite is a Klan-like group that wear blue robes and hoods and revere John Wilkes Booth as a hero and patron saint, referring to Abraham Lincoln as a traitor for freeing America's slaves. What makes them worse is that they're sanctioned by the government of Columbia.
  • The human enemies from Bloodhound somehow includes Klan members, wearing the traditional pointy white masks, and attacks you with automatic weapons.
  • The cult in DUSK takes several cues from the KKK. The members wear robes and pointed hoods, there's an elite mook called the "Grand Wizard", and there are two bosses named the "Duke Brothers" (possibly a reference to David Duke; a real life Klan leader).
  • EarthBound (1994) has the "Happy-Happyists", a cult which wants to paint the world blue. They wear robes similar to the KKK's robes, but in blue. In the English-localized version, large pom-poms were added to the tip of their masks to further differentiate them from KKK outfits.
  • In Liberal Crime Squad, the Ku Klux Klan is referenced in a free speech-related new story (Free speech advocates fight to allow a supremacist rally to take place, complete with ASCII Art representing the KKK), and if one of your activists is judged by a very conservative jury, the game informs you of the mess you are in by saying "Three of the jurors are members of the KKK".
  • Mafia III has an organization called the "Southern Union", which is basically the Klan in all but name. This is even called out in the game.
  • The New Order Last Days Of Europe, the Klan makes up a large part of President Yockey's support base. Yockey returns the favor when he gets elected, by allowing them to get away with hate crimes scot-free.
  • In Red Dead Redemption 2, they appear during random encounters where they make fools of themselves and the player can kill them without repercussion (when they don't do it to themselves first). Their presence is a bit anachronistic considering the group was banned during the time period, though their presence can be justified with them acting clandestinely (and not being too bright about being caught) and the setting itself being Alternate History.
  • In RuneScape, there's a hate group known as Humans Against Monsters, or HAM for short. This group is made up of people who believe that "monsters" (such as ogres and goblins) are inferior to humans. HAM's ultimate goal is to wipe out all monsters from the world. They wear pinkish purple colored robes. They act as the villains for most of the Cave Goblin story arc, where they try to wipe out a tribe of peaceful goblins who have been discovered living in caverns beneath Lumbridge. A member of HAM also turns out to be responsible for a curse causing ogres to rise as zombies from their burial grounds in the "Zogre Flesh Eaters" quest. He gets punished by being turned into an ogre himself.
  • The Klan make a minor but still significant appearance in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, where they are accepted by the Nazis in a post-World War 2 America where the Nazis won. Notably, they aren't treated with any special privileges by the Nazis, and instead are just as scared of them as pretty much everyone else. This is a departure from history; in reality, the Klan and the Nazis hated each other (though these days, some Klan groups and some Neo-Nazi groups get along much better).

    Web Animation 

    Western Animation 
  • CatDog: A thinly-veiled parody occurs with the "Cat Club", where its members plot to destroy all dogs and even wear fish over the heads like masks.
  • The Colbert Report had an animated segment on one episode called Laser Klan, featuring a group of actionized Klansfolk working for the President (Obama) to defend the nation against an alien invasion.
  • Drawn Together: In "Freaks and Greeks", one of the many 'pranks' that Captain Hero plays on his new Greek fratboy neighbors note  includes burning a cross outside their front lawn while he, Wooldoor, and Xander wear Klan robes and yell antisemitic battle cries, with the song "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper playing in the background.
    Captain Hero: Your kind ain't welcome here no more.
  • The KKK is often mocked in Family Guy.
    • One cutaway gag shows how the Bunkers got the Jeffersons to move away from the neighborhood: by dressing up as klansmen and burning a cross on their lawn.
      Edith: Archie, I can't see through my sheet!
      Archie: Edith, would you stifle yourself? We're supposed to be incognitus!
  • Appear several times in South Park, most notably in "Chef Goes Nanners" and Cartman's ghost costume in "Pinkeye" resembles a KKK robe, much to Chef's dismay.
    Chef: What the hell's wrong with you boy?!
    Cartman: I'm trying to get candy!

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