Dominic Sandbrook

wooden cabins, shacks and things.

Land has not been redistributed.

They have not been given, the initial promise was something like three acres and a mule or something that they would be given.

They never were given them.

They are still very powerless.

So of course, if there's a conflict, they will always be at a massive disadvantage.

Yes, which it will be, exactly.

Now, as for the kind of people who joined the Klan, probably the majority are very ordinary kind of farmers and labourers, but there are lots of accounts of lawyers and doctors and whatnot, professional people joining.

As Alan Trelease says in his brilliant book on the Klan, the thing is all classes of the White South had been complicit in slavery and they had always, all classes had worked together to defend it and all classes had served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

I think your point about fun, though, is an important one.

So there's a Republican plantation owner called Charles Stearns who lived in Georgia.

He's an anomalous figure.

I said he was a plantation owner, but he's a Republican, and he hated the Klan.

And he said of the clan later on, he said, it was men who are neither better nor worse than the average of the population, but simply young men with plenty of leisure on their hands, with a great love of adventure in their souls and intensely rebel in their proclivities.

To repeat, he didn't like them, but he said they're young men who like fighting, who like adventure, who like dressing up, who like beating people up.

I think that's definitely part of it.

I mean, that element of it being exciting in a world that has been ripped apart by war and which has nothing really much else to do.

I mean, that makes complete sense to me.

And what drives them is the nightmare that's the back of every white southerner's mind, which is the fact that they will be ruled by people they'd once regarded as their property.

So what's it like to be in the clan?