FBI and Ku Klux Klan: the main factors and features of countering extremism in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

The period of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States of America was saturated with rallies, murders and terror on racial grounds. The Ku Klux Klan, a national terrorist organization that has been reborn in the United States more than once, is most responsible for this. The national security of the United States was under threat, the FBI, the CIA and the government, interacting with each other, tried their best to stop such incidents. The paper examines the activities of the FBI, its director John Edgar Hoover, in the United States to counter the Ku Klux Klan from the moment of their third revival in 1960 to the end of the 1970s, when the activities of the Klan had already been discontinued: thanks to FBI agents who infiltrated the headquarters of the key figures of the Klan, which, in particular subsequently, for years were introduced into large groups of the Klan, it was possible to eliminate one of the largest problems that violated the security of citizens of the United States of America in this period of time. The paper also examines specifics of the interaction between the FBI and the government, which largely affected the activities of the former in the fight against the Ku Klux Klan, where the shift in emphasis of domestic policy and the confrontation between the cabinets untied the hands of the Klan members.