A century ago, in 1925, the Ku Klux Klan came to Washington, D.C. The Klansmen had arrived in early August: the Kleagles and Dragons and Exalted Cyclopes, regalia folded and packed, families in tow. Loyal men came from the South, as expected, but that was not where the group’s true strength lay. The Invisible Empire sent agents from all four corners, from New Jersey and Ohio and California and pretty much everywhere else.

An all-woman Klan band arrived from Cumberland, Maryland. A marching troupe paraded in from Fort Worth, Texas. Caravans of cars choked the highways heading into Washington, D.C., and specially chartered trains full of Klansmen spat out wave after wave of people into Union Station. Steamboats ferried groups up the Potomac from Virginia. The hordes of loyal Knights camped in Bethesda, Maryland, or at the crossroads of 15th and H Streets Northeast, in D.C., or across the river at the horse-show grounds. They crashed in boardinghouses and in hotels and with friends. In all, the members and their retinue numbered at least 30,000, not counting the horses.

They would march that weekend. There was talk that the New Jersey contingent had hired a plane that would fly a giant illuminated cross over the city, like a sign of some perverse providence. But as it turned out, that was just talk.

The Klan had been preparing for some time. The organization was not very tight-knit, and the planning was fractious. Hiram Wesley Evans—the group’s national leader, known as the Imperial Wizard—had originally discouraged the event, but he’d eventually relented to local members in D.C. He’d lived in Texas, where he’d personally overseen racial terror and violence. He’d been present in 1921 when Klansmen in Dallas abducted Alex Johnson, a Black bellhop, and flogged the man and branded his forehead with acid, after Johnson was allegedly found in a white woman’s hotel room.

But now, with the Klan reaching for a new level of national legitimacy, Evans found it useful for the group to avow a more moderate—or at least less overtly violent—platform. If the Klan was to march through the nation’s capital, it would request the proper permissions and allow police oversight. The D.C. march was supposed to be peaceful: no vulgarity, no fights, no brandings, no lynchings. The Klan wanted to appeal to American patriotism and dazzle onlookers with its showmanship—this was to be a pageant, not a pogrom.

Even so, many residents of D.C. were not so easily sold. The federal bureaucracy had become the beginnings of a multicultural haven, providing jobs that helped build a Black middle class and opening up roles to Jews and Catholics. This was a city whose architecture bore the handprints of slaves, and where cathedrals would soon dot the stunted skyscape. The city’s ethnic and religious minorities understood well that no matter how much the Klan polished its image, its swords still cut. Sales of guns in the District soared, and newspapers reported that “the negroes” were “arming and awaiting eventualities.”

Other groups appealed to President Calvin Coolidge to stop the march, but to no avail. Klan leaders in D.C. planned—perhaps hoped—for confrontation, and the city sent out its entire police force and mobilized Marines from Quantico. But on the day of the event, white reporters said they could barely find any spectators from the supposed lesser race and figured they were hiding. One Black newspaper told a different story, of Black people going about their day as normal, peering at the commotion with “amused contempt.”

The sky was heavy on the afternoon of the demonstration. Storm clouds were gathering. But the Klansmen carried on with confidence; the winds had been blowing in their favor for years. A decade prior, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation had become the country’s first blockbuster. The silent picture had enjoyed screenings right here in Washington, D.C., both for President Woodrow Wilson and for other members of government. The film’s portrayal of the Lost Cause myth and of heroic avenging Klansmen had helped re-create the KKK, which had mostly dissolved in the 1870s.

Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of white Protestant men and women joined this new Klan in the following years, including Evans himself. Much of the country and the world was in a similar mood. The Red Summer of 1919, when anti-Black riots and massacres gripped dozens of cities, had come and gone, and the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, in Tulsa, had recently been burned. The Blackshirts paraded on Rome, and just a month before the Klan’s planned march, the first volume of a book called Mein Kampf began appearing on German bookshelves. The Scopes trial had just concluded; the Klan had been one of the early organizations calling for the inclusion of creationism in curricula.

Still, even up to the last minute, there were factional disputes about whether to go on with the D.C. parade at all. Perhaps, after having gotten there with little opposition, with city officials helping and thick crowds of white spectators appearing, the coming march somehow felt too easy for Klan leaders, for whom membership had always been a thing to hide, if only for appearances’ sake. Maybe there were some in the ranks of the Empire who’d expected to be shut down—a grievance to add to the list. But the weather held, and the road beckoned.

The triumph began at the Peace Monument, a marble complex built to honor men who’d served in the Union Navy during the Civil War. At its peak was an intricate white sculpture of a woman, referred to as Grief, crying on the shoulder of another, representing History. History held a tablet honoring the men who’d given their lives for the Union: “They died that their country might live.” Statues of Peace and Victory flanked the monument’s east and west faces, looking out to spaces where other features had been planned by the sculptors but never finished.

On the morning of the march, men who bore the inheritance of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most notorious Confederates, gathered below the monument to prepare. A color guard of robed men riding atop black horses and carrying “a gorgeous American flag” struck out first, reportedly the first time anybody had ever preceded the police escort in a Pennsylvania Avenue parade, according to The Washington Post. As Evans would later remark, the Klan “always followed the flag.”

They followed the flag up Pennsylvania Avenue, the great road of democracy, in the direction of the White House. Side to side, covering the breadth of the avenue, men, women, and children marched, keeping their bared faces trained ahead. Many wore white hoods and robes, some with fringes and regalia colored brightly to mark various groups, orders, and ranks. Drummers and marshals helped them keep pace, and many Klans and auxiliaries put on special performances for the applauding crowd.

Some participants marched with military precision—some groups had dusted off actual kits from the Great War, and marched with their old comrades in arms. Groups of women and children marched. More than 100 attendees passed out from the sticky August heat, but the mood was otherwise exultant. The Klansmen sang hymns and marching songs. Behind men and banners that proclaimed white superiority, some bands played jazz.

Above all, according to the Post, “there was a profusion of flags.” According to The Baltimore Sun, there 900 or so large flags, “the greatest number, perhaps, which were ever massed in a single spot.” Many marchers carried and waved small American flags, while new Klans and regiments were announced by larger flags, held high. Many units marched with flags that were so comically gigantic that they could not be waved, and had to be carried horizontally by teams of marchers. One group of women carried a flag that could cover the foundation of a good-size house today; spectators threw money on it, netting the flag-bearers some $200. There was to be no mistaking it: These were the most American of Americans. Under Evans, their platform, succinctly, was “Americanism.”

After about four hours, the march reached its end, under the stone obelisk dedicated to George Washington. Speakers held forth. The Grand Kleagle of the District of Columbia promised that the rain from the heavy clouds would not come; God had ordained it so. By the time A. H. Gulledge, an official orator for the Klan, took the stage, the ordination had evidently worn off. “This is the proudest day of my life,” Gulledge told the soaking crowd. “I never dreamed it would come so soon—a day when so many native-born, gentile, white Protestant American citizens might march down Pennsylvania Avenue unharmed and unmolested.” They had all come, Gulledge said, “to renew our pledge of allegiance to the greatest government man ever built,” a government that was finally allowing people like them their birthright freedom of speech.

Gulledge refuted any claims of “malice” or “hate” on the Klan’s part, saying that his group just wanted to put an end to the mixing of races—a phenomenon that had caused only strife and the disinheritance of white Protestants. In this, his words encapsulated part of the brewing philosophy of Evans. “We found our great cities and the control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us,” Evans would write in the North American Review the next year. “Shortly they came to dominate our government.” Evans was skeptical of the assimilability of Jews, Catholics, and recent immigrants, and believed that Black people were simply naturally inferior to their white betters.

Evans blamed Jews and Catholics for constantly criticizing that which was American. “Nothing is immune,” he wrote, “our great men, our historic struggles and sacrifices, our customs and personal traits, our ‘Puritan consciences’—all have been scarified without mercy. Yet the least criticism of these same vitriolic critics or of their people brings howls of ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘anti-Catholic.’” For him, the way forward would be “Americanism”—for real Americans to proudly wear their real Americanness, to claim their dominion, to find their forgotten greatness.

The next evening, the organizers held a “Klan spiritual” and burned a towering cross in Arlington, but most of the visitors had already gone home. The marchers had made their way back to Union Station. Night trains sped home in the darkness. A group of white-robed boys helped direct traffic out of the city. Klansmen went back to their lives as policemen, doctors, teachers, dentists, carpenters, politicians.

When the next editions of newspapers arrived, many breathlessly covered the spectacle, estimating crowd sizes and marveling at the composure of the Klansmen. Black newspapers, however, played a different tune. According to The Washington Tribune, the march was huge but “unimpressive,” with “apathetic” spectators and little city enthusiasm. The Chicago Defender carried a brief blurb about the Klan’s “gala day,” but other events had pushed it below the fold: The front page centered the lynching of Walter Mitchell, a 33-year-old Black man in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, by a white mob. Mitchell had been falsely accused of accosting a young white woman, and the mob had rushed the jail, kidnapped him, paraded him through the streets, and hanged him from a tree. One headline was grim and sardonic: “Missouri Carries Out American Democracy.”

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