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The U.S. Supreme Court ruling, on May 17, 1954, that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, stirred the Klan into new attempts at recruitment and violence but did not bring internal unity or greatly increased membership, power, or respectability in the South. Most opponents of desegregation chose other leaders, such as the White Citizens Council, while the Klan chiefly attracted the fringe elements of society and remained more of a status than a resistance movement.

As the civil rights movement gained force in the late 1950s and as resistance to integration began to diminish throughout the South, the Klan continued to offer hard-core opposition to civil rights programs and was believed to be involved in many incidents of racial violence, intimidation, and reprisal, particularly bombings. After the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 it experienced a marked increase in membership, reaching an estimated 40,000 in 1965.

By the mid-1970s acknowledged Klan leaders ran for public office in the South, amassing sizable numbers of votes. Approximately 15 separate organizations existed, including the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, and the National Klan. A resurgence of Klan violence occurred in the late 1970s, and in 1980 a Klan office was opened in Toronto, Canada. The total membership was estimated at about 5,000 at the end of the 1980s. A former grand wizard of the Klan, David Duke was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1989 and ran unsuccessfully in the state’s gubernatorial election in 1991.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, many Klan members and leaders were held accountable for their racist violence in the 1960s. In 1994 Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1998 Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard Sam Bowers was convicted of the 1966 murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In 2003 another Klan member was convicted of killing black sharecropper Ben Chester White. In 2005 former Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was tried on murder and manslaughter charges in the 1964 murders of three civil rights activists—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen was convicted of the manslaughter charges and sentenced to 60 years in prison. See also Civil Rights Movement; African American History.