Waco History Podcast

This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson. In Tennessee in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, six Confederate veterans formed an organization called the Ku Klux Klan for amusement. Shortly after, local Klan groups began popping up all over the South and quickly became synonymous with hate and terror. Klan activity began to taper off in the late 1800s, but shortly after World War I began, a new Klan emerged and flourished nationwide, boasting around five million members at its height in the early 1920s. Avery Downing, former superintendent of Waco ISD, recalls the prominence of the Klan in Northeast Texas in the early 1900s: "The Ku Klux Klan problem was an extremely sensitive and explosive issue in my county, very muchly so. And my family was anti-Ku Klux Klan from the word go, absolutely. And you have to understand that that meant considerable criticism from many, many, many others in the community because Ku Klux