In the wake of the widely criticized interview with Jason Kessler, it's probably worth talking about this again...
In Congressional hearings, Imperial Wizard William Joseph Simmons declared "Our plan or custom - it is not a plan - has been that wherever a Klan has been organized, the first announcement is that they will have a parade."
It very much was a plan. The Grand Dragon of Alabama reiterated this in a speech at a national meeting, declaring that “Klansmen throughout your realm should be encouraged in holding public events as often as possible.”
Why? Because the Klan knew that – especially in the early days of the revival of the 1920s – parading would gain valuable publicity for the organization that it would not otherwise have received.
While it was not the intent of many of the journalists who covered these events, this coverage was a vital factor in the Klan’s rapid growth to an estimated four million members, with chapters in virtually every state.
As Klan officials gleefully crowed, “From the press the Klan has received gratis what a million dollars worth of its own advertisements wouldn’t have done."
"Never in the history have shrewd news writers everywhere so materially misjudged the effect of publicity, overshot their mark, and where they sought to destroy, merely built up, and where they tried to annihilate, create a firmer foundation.”
Even if the parade went wrong and descended into violence (as they often did), the Klan was often able to rely on local press to condemn the “mob violence” of the anti-Klan protestors, further normalizing the bigoted organization.
Klan officials astutely exploited access journalism and the desire for scoops to garner even greater coverage in print and on radio.
The publicity around a parade through Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1926, for example, was leveraged into having WBRC air Klan speakers as one of the city’s first night broadcasts.
Participants in a Klan rally in Boise, Idaho, were directed to speak particularly loudly and clearly “so that press representatives might hear.”
Of course, this was a privilege granted only to journalists who promised favorable – or at least ostensibly neutral – reporting
Those reporters seen as friendly to the organization would be offered invitations, and often allowed closer access, to large Klan initiation ceremonies
For the famous "Konklave at Kokomo," reporters had to apply for "special dispensation" to attend - and if deemed insufficiently "neutral," they were denied access and lost the story to competitiors
This also allowed the Klan to claim vastly inflated attendance figures - figures largely repeated by credulous journalists, not least because a bigger event made for a better story
All of these processes came to a head when some forty thousand men and women of the Klan marched through Washington, DC, in August 1925 - a stunt designed in the hopes of sparking new growth in a declining organization 
While the Klan's decline in membership was not wholly arrested, the march did succeed in garnering valuable national publicity, as newspapers around the country described the parade in pages of detail.
The New York Times, for example, breathlessly described "the greatest demonstration ever staged by the Ku Klux," and claimed that such was "admitted tonight, even by the enemies of the order."
The Imperial Wizard, meanwhile, was a "resplendent figure in royal purple robe." The parade saw "Americanism...emphasized at every moment," and was praised for its peacefulness and for the "absence of drunkenness in the crowd."
Around the march, Klan speakers appeared on radio stations in Virginia and especially the Klan-affiliated WTFF, with a powerful transmitter that could reach listeners around the country.
Following the march, the prestigious North American Review gave the Imperial Wizard thirty pages (!) to expound, unchallenged, on his views of "Klan principles." Shorter criticisms were published in a following issue to allow for a "symposium, pro and contra."
The press repeatedly fell for this nonsense in the 1920s, and in doing so cemented the Ku Klux Klan as a fixture in modern American history. Let's not do it again.
