On Oct. 9, 1920, men dressed in long, white robes and hoods with eyeholes walked or rode on horses in a parade held in Houston during the annual meeting of the United Confederate Veterans.

Riding in a car in the parade was William Joseph Simmons of Atlanta, founder in 1915 of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Their participation was a not-so-subtle message to Houston, San Antonio and the rest of Texas that the KKK, made up of men who considered themselves superpatriots, was back.

Founded by a group of Confederate veterans in 1865, the original Ku Klux Klan was found primarily in the South. Prior to its demise in the early 1870s, the Klan used violence and terror to counter Reconstruction.

For the first five years after Simmons revived it in 1915, the KKK operated only in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi. Texas was a much larger prize for the secret fraternal order whose members had to be native-born, Anglo, Protestant and 18 or older.

Simmons was in Houston to participate in a ceremony welcoming the new klavern, or chapter, Sam Houston Klan No. 1, to the secret organization that reviled Catholics, Jews, Blacks, racial mixing and immorality.

A few weeks after the parade in Houston, the San Antonio Klan received charter No. 31.

San Antonians were not reluctant about joining. At one time, there were as many as 1,500 members in the Alamo City chapter, said Charles C. Alexander, author of “Crusade for Conformity: The Ku Klux Klan in Texas, 1920-1930” and “The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest.”

“Membership rosters are extremely difficult to find but if I had to make a guess, there were 1,500 or so members of the Klan in the 1920s in San Antonio,” Alexander said by phone.

Many were civic leaders, church pastors, elected officials or businessmen who “thought they were serving a good purpose,” Alexander added. “If you were a tradesman, the Klan would help you and if you were a politician, there was a voting bloc behind you.”

Prominent Texans who joined the Klan included Houston Mayor Oscar F. Holcombe, an Alabama native who grew up in San Antonio and held office 11 times.

After attending just one Klan meeting, however, Holcombe left and later became an ardent foe of the KKK.

In San Antonio, members of the KKK included attorney Marvin A. Childers, former county judge of San Patricio County; and C.T. Gilliam, a 1916 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Also a member from San Antonio was Charles K. Diggs, publisher of the weekly Klan paper American Forum, who purchased Colonel Mayfield’s Weekly from Houstonian Billie Mayfield, a veteran of World War I and the Spanish-American War.

Another member was the Rev. L.P. Bloodworth, a Methodist minister who served as pastor of Methodist churches in San Antonio and other states. Bloodworth at one time was grand dragon of the Texas KKK and a Klan chaplain, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Childers, who served as San Patricio County judge from 1914-18 and a judge of that county’s 36th District Court from 1918-22, also was a Texas grand dragon, which was reported in several Texas newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News. He moved to San Antonio in 1922 and practiced law. He died on Christmas Day 1965.

Childers was a past grand master of the Masons; a prominent layman in the Methodist Church — he was a member of the church’s judicial council — and listed in Who’s Who in America.

Texans were drawn to the KKK because they saw it as a way of restoring law and order as well as moral and social reform after World War I, Alexander said.

“These two emotions — a quest for law and order and a desire for reform — account for the preoccupation of Texas Klansmen with vigilante activities and the extremely violent nature of the order’s early history in the state,” Alexander wrote in “Crusade for Conformity.”

Men were tarred and feathered, beaten and attacked. One especially vicious attack occurred in Dallas when an African-American bellhop at the Adolphus Hotel was branded with the initials KKK across his forehead with acid. That attack was widely reported in Texas newspapers of the day, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Reform to the Texas Klansmen meant “strict enforcement of state and national prohibition laws, preservation of stern Victorian moral standards and punishment of anyone who violated these standards,” Alexander wrote in his book.

The San Antonio Klansmen didn’t just skulk around. Alexander describes an initiation ceremony held in September 1923 at the San Antonio Speedway with several other chapters from South Texas.

“Immediately preceding the formal ‘naturalization’ rites, an airplane with an electric cross attached to its underside circled and dived in the night sky,” Alexander wrote.

At 10 p.m., the Klansmen, all in their white robes, joined hands while standing in the middle of a square.

Several dozen men in street clothes knelt in the middle of the square formed by the Klansmen and took the vows and oath of allegiance before a burning cross and altar.

Except for San Antonio and Galveston, the Klan controlled nearly every major city in the state by 1924, numerous scholars have reported. They were a force in the Texas House of Representatives and the Democratic Party in Texas and may have even elected the first Klansman to the U.S. Senate.

Charges that Earle B. Mayfield Jr. was elected to the Senate through intimidation of voters by the KKK were rejected by the Senate after an investigation.

The end for the KKK came after Ma Ferguson was elected governor of Texas in 1924 by defeating a Klan-backed candidate, 443,000 to 345,000 votes.

Alexander said there always will be disaffected, disenchanted people who will be drawn to organizations like the KKK.

Indeed, in 2017, there exist at least 55 hate groups in Texas, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks these organizations.

While there are several variations of the KKK operating in the state, it does not appear any are in San Antonio, which does count Black separatist, anti-Muslim and neo-Nazi groups.