As the Civil Rights Movement grew into a force in the 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan, dormant for decades, reemerged with a vengeance. Born in Tennessee following the Civil War, the KKK had conducted an intense campaign of intimidation throughout the south United States before quickly fading out during Reconstruction. It was reborn at Stone Mountain, Georgia in the 1920s, sparked by the release of the epic film The Birth of a Nation. Though its membership grew to four million, the Klan again lost its mass support and political clout within a decade. That the Klan came back for a third time wasn’t surprising—but where that reincarnation took place was. Klansville, U.S.A. is an exploration of why North Carolina, long seen as the most progressive state in the South, became home to the largest Klan organization in the country, with more members than all the other Southern states combined during the 1960s.