KKK Revived at Stone Mountain Cross Burning: Simmons Coordinates with Birth of a Nation Premiere

William J. Simmons, a preacher and promoter of fraternal orders, led a group up Stone Mountain outside Atlanta and burned a large cross, marking the official rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and beginning a new era of organized white supremacist terrorism. Simmons carefully coordinated the KKK revival with the Atlanta premiere of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” which was scheduled to open on December 6, 1915. The film portrayed the original Reconstruction-era Klan as heroic saviors of white civilization. Just ten days before the film’s Atlanta premiere, Simmons staged the dramatic Stone Mountain cross burning, declaring it would “give the new order a tremendous popular boost.” He took out newspaper advertisements about the KKK’s revival that ran alongside announcements for The Birth of a Nation premiere, creating a coordinated media campaign that merged cinematic propaganda with real-world organizing.

The men who participated in the Stone Mountain ceremony included members of the mob that had lynched Leo Frank just three months earlier in August 1915. Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent, had been kidnapped from prison and murdered by an antisemitic mob calling themselves “The Knights of Mary Phagan” after Georgia’s governor commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. The Leo Frank lynching—widely recognized by historians as a wrongful conviction—demonstrated the virulent antisemitism and mob violence that characterized the period. The revived Klan expanded its targets beyond Black Americans to include Jews, Catholics, and immigrants, reflecting the nativist sentiment sweeping America during the World War I era. Where the original Reconstruction-era Klan had focused on terrorizing freed slaves and preventing Black political participation, Simmons’ new version embraced a broader white supremacist, Protestant nativist agenda.

By the mid-1920s, the revived KKK claimed four million members—more than the entire Jewish population of the United States—and wielded significant political power in multiple states. The organization successfully elected governors, senators, and local officials, particularly in Indiana, Oregon, and Oklahoma, while conducting campaigns of terror against Black Americans, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The Birth of a Nation’s commercial success and cultural legitimacy proved essential to the KKK’s rapid growth, demonstrating how mass media could normalize domestic terrorism and transform racist violence into a mass movement with mainstream political influence. The coordinated launch of the film and the KKK established a template for how extremist movements could exploit popular culture and media coverage to recruit members, raise funds, and gain political legitimacy—a pattern that would be repeated by white supremacist and fascist movements throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. The episode revealed that racism and antisemitism were not just cultural prejudices but organizing principles for political movements that could capture state power when given cultural legitimacy and organizational infrastructure.