Looking eastward on a chilly Thanksgiving night in 1915, residents of Atlanta were met with an unfamiliar sight. Fifteen miles away the barren summit of Stone Mountain was illuminated by flames rising high into the blackness. The city, still reeling from a summer of anti-Semitic angst over the murder conviction and subsequent lynching of Jewish industrialist Leo Frank, would have been excused for thinking the giant burning cross was a work of Jewish retribution. In fact, it was the same violently anti-immigrant men who had committed the recent act of mob justice, and were now inaugurating the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan. It was the first time a burning cross had been used as a hate symbol in America. But the formerly innocuous act would soon become one of the hallmarks of the Klan—enduringly equated with intimidation, fear, and violence in the South and beyond.

On the mountaintop that night were fifteen men led by William Joseph Simmons, a failed medical student and army veteran who had been inspired by the popular new movie, The Birth of a Nation. D.W. Griffith’s silent film, based on the 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, includes scenes depicting Klan members burning crosses before lynching a black man accused of murder. Simmons and company, fresh from committing their own act of extrajudicial justice, adopted the flaming cross symbol. But the origins of the practice were a far cry from the racist rabble rousing espoused by the Klan’s second coming.